Thursday briefing: Why Biden is losing some Black voters – and how he plans to win them back
In today’s newsletter: With the 2024 election likely to hinge on just thousands of votes in swing states, the president needs every vote he can get
Joe Biden at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME church on Monday.
Good morning. No Republican presidential candidate has received more than 13% of the votes of Black Americans since the civil rights era. In the race against probable nominee Donald Trump, Black voters are again likely to be Democrat president Joe Biden’s most reliable constituency. But in recent months, that support has started to erode.
This week, Joe Biden has tried to do something about it, with a visit to the Black church in South Carolina where a white supremacist killed nine people in 2015. He linked Trump’s 2020 election denialism to the Confederate rebellion over slavery that prompted the civil war, and told his audience: “Once again, there are some in this country trying to turn a loss into a lie.”
But even among his supporters, there are many who fear that Biden’s campaign is not giving Black voters enough to get excited about – and say that if he fails to do so, he could hand Trump the keys to the White House. And last night’s Republican debate between outsiders Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis did little to persuade anyone that Trump will not be Biden’s opponent.
Joe Biden speaks at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
The serious concerns for the Biden campaign began with a New York Times poll in November, which found that 22% of Black voters in six battleground states planned to back Trump in 2024. Other polls brought similarly ominous news: 20% of Black voters nationally backing Trump in an NBC News poll, 23% according to CNN, and just 63% backing Biden according to GenForward/University of Chicago.
Those are still big majorities for Biden, and white voters are far more likely to support Trump. But in a race that will be decided at the margins, it is a significant shift. In 2020, 92% of Black voters supported Biden for president, according to a study by Pew Research Center. Biden has also seen a sharp decline among Latino voters, with 34% supporting him now compared with 65% in 2020.
“It is a relatively small number of people, but it’s a crucial part of the Democratic coalition,” David Smith said. “Presidential elections are so absurdly close, and last time Biden won by 7m in the popular vote, but 40,000 votes in the three states that put him over the top in the electoral college. He thanked Black voters in his victory speech in 2020, which was a sign of how important they were to his victory.”
In that speech, Biden said: “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.” But not everyone is persuaded that he has made good on that bargain.
Why some Black voters are turning away from Biden
When David visited the battleground state of Georgia, where African Americans were crucial to Biden’s narrow 2020 success, he heard from Black voters who feel that Biden has fallen short on a range of campaign promises, from tepid action on voting rights and police reform to failing to decriminalise marijuana possession, an offence for which Black people are far more likely to be arrested.
“No community is a monolith,” David said. “The specific issues naturally depend on who you talk to, and they vary by age, geography, class. Many would cite things not specific to the Black community – a sense of economic malaise, even though the economy does appear very healthy. A lot of people mentioned student loan forgiveness. And then there are the issues that are more specific, like Biden’s promise to deliver racial justice.”
“There’s a lot of broken promises, a lot of a lack of integrity,” philosophy student Dejaun Wright told him. “A lot of the things that he promised he’s offered either with a caveat or he just hasn’t offered at all. It’s a slap in the face.”
There is also a suggestion that some Black voters are weary of being taken for granted by the Democrats and feel they should have more to show for decades of consistent support. Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist, told Politico in November that he heard “less about Trump” and more “an attitude … that, ‘I’ve been voting Democratic for 50 years, my community has been voting Democratic for 50, 60 years, and we don’t have much to show for it.’”
Why men and younger voters are the biggest problem for Biden
Donald Trump waves after speaking during a commit to caucus rally on 6 January 2024.
The drop in Biden’s support is concentrated among Black men and younger voters – a pattern repeated across different ethnic groups. Black voters under 50 were twice as likely to vote Republican in the 2022 midterms than their older peers, Reuters reported, while the New York Times found that 27% of Black men supported Trump against 17% of Black women.
Younger Black voters are much more likely than average to support a ceasefire in Gaza or say that the US should not be involved in the conflict there at all. “Some of these voters aren’t going to turn to Trump,” David said. “But a third party candidate like Cornel West, who is being very clear in a call for a ceasefire, may look attractive to them.”
Cliff Albright, a co-founder and executive director of the Black Lives Matter Fund, told David that even if Biden went further on cancelling student debt, new gun legislation, and climate change – three key issues for young Black voters – “many of these folks that right now are furious about what’s going on in Gaza, none of that would change their minds”.
Celinda Lake, a pollster who recently ran a round of focus groups, told Politico that she heard from Black voters who feel that their communities are missing out because of the spending on foreign wars. In Detroit, a woman told her that while Ukraine got billions, “we’re in Detroit, and we get nothing”.
Among some Black men, a sense that Biden has not made good on his promises has sat alongside a perception that Trump’s racist language matters less than his promise of greater economic opportunities.
Trump is leaning into that theme. Jason Miller, a campaign senior adviser, wrote on X/Twitter this week that Biden “has done more damage to the African American community than any president in modern history … everybody knows we were better off with President Trump”.
What Biden is doing about it
Biden’s speech at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, this week was seen as a direct attempt to persuade Black voters that they are better off with him, David said. “But there was also a sense that he needed to be scrappy, and hit Trump – to energise Democrats who want to see a fighter on the big picture, and to show some genuine passion.”
The most striking parts of his speech – which was interrupted by protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza - were those that drew a link from the South’s support of slavery during the civil war and the Trump campaign. The latter was described as “the old ghost in new garments”. He also made pointed references to the “poison” that devastated the church’s community nine years ago: “What is that poison?” he asked. “White supremacy. Throughout our history, it’s ripped this nation apart. This has no place in America – not today, tomorrow or ever.”
At the same time, the Biden campaign is said to recognise that a central goal has to be to tell Black voters a positive story about its policy record – and Biden pointed to the fact that he had appointed the first Black female supreme court justice, noted record-low levels of Black unemployment, and celebrated legislation that has lowered the cost of prescription drugs.
There are plenty of Democratic strategists who chafe at the idea that Biden has failed Black voters.
Terence Woodbury, a Democratic pollster, told ABC News that “when I sit in focus groups with young Black voters and ask what [Democrats have] done to make their lives better, they’re hard pressed to come up with an answer, despite this administration delivering on much of the Black agenda. That’s the communication challenge that we have a year to overcome.”
“Ordinary voters are mostly not tuning in yet – they are busy living their lives and worrying about their jobs and what’s for dinner,” David said. “It’s certainly true that there is a lot of time, and as we get nearer election day, they may be reminded that Trump is a demagogue and they don’t want that. But it is, as always, going to come down to a handful of voters in swing states.”
