Biden’s Black-Voter Problem

President Biden appears to be in serious trouble with black voters ahead of the 2024 election, and black lawmakers and organizers are starting to panic.

“What I’m hearing in my district is how ‘Bidenomics’ hasn’t really hit them in the pocket,” New York representative Jamaal Bowman told National Review earlier this week on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “I need him in the barbershops. I need him on the basketball courts. I need him talking to the hip-hop community. I need him talking to the sports and athletics community to really get at what is troubling black men.”

Polling suggests Bowman is right to be concerned. Just 50 percent of black adults said they approve of Biden in a national AP-NORC poll last month — a 36-point drop from July 2021. An October Siena College/New York Times poll found that 22 percent of black voters surveyed in six competitive presidential battlegrounds say they will vote for Trump over Biden in 2024, a stunning polling shift from a reliably Democratic coalition that helped Biden win the White House in 2020. That same survey found Trump’s numbers were even higher among black men.

In the 40 years he’s spent in political activism, National Black Farmers Association president John Boyd Jr. says the Biden administration has done worse than any other administration in his lifetime in opening its doors to black voters. That lack of outreach, Boyd warns, may come back to bite him in November.

“I’m at the head of this movement here and there hasn’t been a meeting, and I’ve been requesting a meeting for two years,” said Boyd, whose organization has 130,000 members. “In fact, the last time I spoke to him, the president was the one who said we were going to meet to see what he can do. And then, crickets.”

Earlier this month, the White House got a wake-up call from former House whip Jim Clyburn, a black Democrat from South Carolina who is widely credited with helping Biden win his state’s Democratic primary in 2020. “I’m very concerned” about black voters showing up at the polls for Biden in 2024, Clyburn told CNN in early January, adding that he has sat down with the president to lay out his concerns. “This president is keeping his promises,” Clyburn said, but “people keep focusing on the one or two things he did not get accomplished.”

It isn’t just the polling that’s troubling Democrats. For example, turnout data compiled by the Wall Street Journal show vote totals fell in black- and Hispanic-majority precincts of Philadelphia during the 2022 midterms as compared with previous cycles. That’s a major warning sign in one of the most competitive battleground states, which Biden narrowly carried in 2020.

The White House has taken notice. As Vice President Kamala Harris continues to spearhead the campaign’s abortion-rights messaging and outreach to historically black colleges and universities, she and Biden will both continue to prioritize campaigning in South Carolina, Democrats’ new first-in-the-nation primary state thanks to a scheduling shake-up by the Democratic National Committee last year.

And in another sign that the administration is waking up to its struggles with black voters, the Biden administration announced earlier this week its hiring of a former Chuck Schumer staffer to lead the campaign’s black-media operations. Down-ballot Democrats are feeling the heat, too. Earlier this month, House Democrats’ campaign arm pledged to spend $35 million to target minority voters who have started shifting toward Republicans in recent cycles.

New polling conducted in January by the Pew Research Center suggests Americans are starting to feel slightly more optimistic about the state of the economy as inflation continues to cool and unemployment remains at a historic low, though most of that spike comes from Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and Americans are still far less enthusiastic about the state of the economy than they were before the pandemic. That same survey found that black adults are evenly split in their approval and disapproval of Biden.

But his average approval rating still hovers below 40 percent in most surveys as Americans continue to worry about Biden’s age and handling of immigration and the economy, among other policy issues.

“Objectively, he has things that I’m sure he feels he deserves credit for,” says David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama. “But the reality is, you don’t always get credit in the time frame that you want, and particularly when it’s dealing with the economy. Public sentiment often lags the statistics.”

Harris recently suggested that the administration’s polling woes are due to the fact that she and Biden “haven’t taken adequate credit” for some of their legislative accomplishments, which include the infrastructure bill, lowering prescription drug prices, and the Covid relief bill. 

To distract from Biden’s poor approval ratings, the administration has sought to characterize the 2024 election as a referendum not on Biden but on his predecessor and likely 2024 rival Donald Trump, who is now battling four criminal indictments.

Trump’s presence on the ticket will help Biden but perhaps not as much as it did in 2020, predicts Reverend Markel Hutchins, head of MovementForward, a group founded by faith leaders in Atlanta to promote social justice and racial reconciliation.

“I think he’s going to have to be responsive to the particular and specific needs of black and brown communities,” he said. “I think the administration needs to get out and in particular, the president needs to get out and actually hear from people in black communities and black voters. I think too often this administration has relied on the counsel and the advice of black organizational leaders like myself and have not done enough to actually get out and hear from black and brown communities.”

To hold on to black voters, Hutchins suggests the administration must broaden its message to address other issues including tensions between law enforcement and the communities they serve, and student-loan debt. 

And in Boyd’s view, blacks in farming are “not excited about going to the polls and voting for President Biden’s administration that repealed $5 billion in debt relief for black farmers.” Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package included a provision to pay 16,000 farmers of color $4 billion in debt relief that would have cleared 100 percent of debt with the USDA and included another 20 percent to pay off the taxes owed. But white farmers challenged the race-based debt relief in court. 

“The [administration] could have stayed in court and fought it and they chose to abandon it,” he said, adding that the White House has since “ignored” black farmers. 

And the administration’s proposed ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars could be another self-inflicted wound on the campaign, Boyd says, with black community leaders warning that the ban would have unintended consequences for black Americans as nearly 85 percent of black smokers consume menthol products, according to the FDA. The ban’s future is uncertain after the administration, amid the pushback, announced in December that it was delaying it. 

Boyd said he opposes the menthol ban because it will hurt black farmers and black communities. “What do the farmers do that have equipment?” he said. “We have both curing bars that we can’t use for anything else, tobacco harvesters, tobacco planters that you can’t use for anything else. What are we going to do with this equipment and overhead and debt that we have?”

It’s just another thing the administration has not reached out to black farmers about, he said. 

To flip the script ahead of November, the immediate challenge for Biden is to make the case that another Trump administration will make black voters worse off than they are now, says Axelrod, the former Obama adviser.

“There is an accumulated sense of abandonment that is at play here,” Axelrod says. “I think Trump is trying to create a sort of multiethnic, multiracial, working class, populist movement, and it is attractive to some of these particularly younger, black men who don’t feel like they’ve benefited to the degree they thought they would, or they were told they would.”

Around NR

• Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks it’s time to revise the veepstakes expectations:

While I wouldn’t quite yet rule out Nikki Haley as a potential veep for Trump, I think the two figures have started saying things about each other in the past week that are more difficult to walk back. Trump’s mangling of Nikki Haley’s given name is just racist. Haley is now much more specific and dynamic in calling out Trump as too old to serve. Again, it’s still possible to effect a reconciliation here, but it is getting more difficult.

• Trump is forming a club, not a coalition, Judson Berger writes: 

Trump will do his level best to repel voters, as seen in his latest warning that Haley donors “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp” going forward. This is not a political movement, it’s a club. With its own online platforms, cant, and expectations for conduct. Trump, of course, has familiarity with this format. He even has a clubhouse where dues-paying members can hang after Biden wins.

• Audrey Fahlberg analyzes Ron DeSantis’s now-defunct presidential campaign, seeking to answer whether he blew it or never really had a chance:

Countless analyses have already been written about his campaign’s missteps: its series of messaging resets and layoffs over the summer, its decision to outsource the entire ground game to a super PAC it couldn’t control, and its inability to fend off criticisms of the candidate’s lack of charisma. But the overarching problem was that DeSantis never figured out how to break through as the first choice of enough Republican voters. The party is still dominated by an indicted former reality-TV star and quasi-incumbent who refused to participate in debates. And to hear his critics tell it, DeSantis was too arrogant to accept much criticism until it was too late.

• Noah Rothman wonders whether Haley can attack Trump from the right on immigration:

Trump cannot be attacked from his right on immigration issues, and it’s foolish to even try . . . right? That seems to be the assumption inside the Haley camp. Since Tuesday, Haley has savaged Trump over his abysmal electoral record and that of his hand-picked acolytes, the former president’s increasingly frequent senior moments, his propensity for deficit spending, his desire to “ban” Haley supporters from the MAGA movement, and his conspicuous refusal to stand beside her on a debate stage. On immigration, Haley hasn’t shied away from the subject, but her criticisms of Trump have been tepid.

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