President Joe Biden’s poll numbers are swirling around the bottom of the toilet bowl and Democrats are really beginning to worry about his chances of defeating former President Donald Trump this fall. And they have every reason to sweat bullets as Biden is also causing the Democratic Party to lose their grip on former strongholds like black voters, which is becoming an increasing problem for the older-than-dirt leftist commander-in-chief.
Many popular and well known black officials are tossing out warnings left and right to the president’s campaign that what he’s doing to try and keep individuals in this demographic enthused and casting ballots for him isn’t working. And the clock is ticking, meaning he has a limited amount of time left to reach the black community with his message.
via Politico:
The publicly voiced concern from these Black Democrats isn’t that the White House lacks policy achievements — it’s that Black voters aren’t hearing about them. Worse, they fear that the Biden campaign has not fully grasped the severity of the information gap at hand, particularly in key battleground states.
“I’m in a battleground state. I know what has and hasn’t been done. I felt a level of disconnection earlier on the message, on the messengers and on mobilization,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), who serves as the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, went on to say. He then noted he has brought this issue straight to the campaign.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said a balkanized news landscape — where voters are increasingly tuning in to more nontraditional sources of information — has contributed to the problem. “I think that the way that we communicate has changed in such a way that, if you don’t invest earlier, it’s going to be a problem,” she said. “I’m not saying that it’s the last minute, but we are in crunch time.”
But more privately, Democratic operatives express other fears, including that Black influencers and media personalities have soured on Biden and that the president himself has eschewed major interviews and less scripted campaign stops, making him less accessible to voters. Black leaders also see the community as open to the Donald Trump campaign’s targeted entreaties.
Here’s the kicker. Many Black voters are actually big fans of Biden’s policies. They are all about the student debt relief program and getting additional funding for historically Black colleges. So why aren’t they going to vote for the candidate that has the policies they actually want to see made law? One word: inflation.
Inflation is pretty much taking a hammer to the skull of the American dream and every single one of us, regardless of our color, creed, or societal standing are feeling the hurt. And Biden is doing nothing at all to fix the issue. In fact, the policies he’s enacting, economically, are making things significantly worse. Housing costs are going through the roof. Buying basic goods at the grocery store is costing twice as much as they used to.
People who were doing fairly well financially are now living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those who were already doing the week-to-week thing are now being forced onto welfare or worse.
Those concerns could prove especially critical in the battleground states of Georgia, where Black people make up about 32 percent of the eligible voting population, and in North Carolina, where they account for roughly 22 percent. Even a slight dip in support among Black voters in states like Pennsylvania — where roughly 10 percent of eligible voters are Black — could cost Biden the election.
Though Horsford said he believes the campaign has begun to make changes — on Wednesday, it launched “Black Voters for Biden-Harris” at a splashy campaign rally with the president and vice president at a Black college in Philadelphia — he also noted that he wasn’t the only notable Democrat to talk to the Biden reelection team about his fears.
Black Democratic operatives in the field say their research shows that the information gap problem Biden faces is severe, and that it’s causing a dip in enthusiasm. In a recent North Carolina focus group of Black voters conducted by BlackPAC, those who backed Biden in 2020 said they felt the promises he made to their community hadn’t come to fruition.
“When you tell people ‘Here’s what the Biden administration has done,’ particularly related to issues the Black communities care about, people are really surprised,” Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, said during a conversation with POLITICO.
The individuals that are being targeted by BlackPAC are working-class folks who don’t go to institutions like Morehouse College and the like. It’s a class of voters that the organization thinks haven’t been afforded the opportunity of hearing Biden’s message and accomplishments, which they feel could have a significant impact on election results across several critical states.
“It is that distinction between the MSNBC crowd and getting their political information from social media sources,” Cornell Belcher, who has done a number of focus groups for BlackPAC and was President Barack Obama’s pollster, explained. “That’s really the big difference. If they are watching Joy Reid, they know Biden’s accomplishments. If they are spending time in the Shade Room or a dozen other social media news sites, [they] never hear that Biden used an executive order to ban chokeholds in federal office.”
A senior Biden campaign official said the campaign is not blind to the frustration from Black leaders or the importance of bringing back this voting bloc into the fold. The official acknowledged there was a lack of awareness of Biden’s accomplishments among Black voters but argued that the campaign was sanguine in confronting the challenge.
Black voters are waking up to how they have been used and abused by Democrats and are sick and tired of it. Trump appeals to them because he is a straight shooter and has legitimate solutions to the problem of inflation, things he’s done in the past that we all know works. That’s what’s drawing people to him. Biden refuses to admit that.
And that’s why he’s losing.