As President Biden took the stage in Philadelphia on Wednesday to launch his black voter outreach program, he methodically reviewed more than a dozen accomplishments, executive orders, appointments, investments and economic statistics.
“The bottom line,” Mr. Biden summarized his talk, “is that we have invested more in Black America than any administration before in history.”
It was a compelling catalog that contrasted with the blunt appeal that his rival, former President Donald J. Trump, had made on the economy a week earlier at a rally in the Bronx to highlight his appeal to nonwhite voters.
“Black Americans,” Mr. Trump had said, “are being slaughtered.”
The two events highlighted a fundamental difference in Black outreach that both camps see as crucial to victory in 2024.
Mr. Biden has a list. Mr. Trump has a charisma.
Black voters are the bedrock of the Democratic coalition, crucial electoral building blocks in cities in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and beyond. And while polls consistently show Mr. Biden winning a strong majority of black voters, he falls short of previous Democratic benchmarks, to the growing concern of party loyalists and the delight of GOP officials.
Mr. Trump has tried to brand his four years in the White House as a time of peace and prosperity, hoping that voters – and black voters in particular – will fondly remember those pre-inflation days and the disruptions of a Looking past the pandemic that rocked Americans Life has come to a standstill for much of 2020.
“It’s a feeling,” said Ja’Ron Smith, one of the highest-ranking black officials in the Trump White House, explaining the former president’s appeal to black voters. “They know what it’s like to live in a Trump economy and not a Biden economy.”
Mr. Trump has a long history of inflammatory and racist comments, which were increasingly highlighted in Biden’s campaign and which Mr. Trump hopes black voters will overlook. On Wednesday, Mr. Biden recalled Mr. Trump’s spread of the birtherism conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama as well as his response to the killing of George Floyd four years ago.
“Let us be clear about what happens to you and your family when old ghosts in new robes seize power,” Mr. Biden said this month in a commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta.
The Biden 2024 message for black voters so far has been a mix of shaking off memories of Trump’s divisive record and selling what he has accomplished. The list he laid out Wednesday was extensive: helping narrow the racial wealth gap, investing in historically black colleges and universities, appointing the first black woman to the Supreme Court, expanding high-speed internet access and taking action to push forward to reconnect black neighborhoods that were divided by highways decades ago.
“Promises made and promises kept,” Mr. Biden said again and again.
But in the most recent New York Times, Siena College and Philadelphia Inquirer poll in battleground states, Mr. Biden had just 49 percent support among registered black voters in a race that also included third-party candidates. In a duel with Mr Trump he was at 63 percent.
Ashley Etienne, who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign and later served as an adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, worried that the Biden campaign had not yet implemented how the president’s agenda actually improved the lives of most Black voters.
“What is the message beyond a long list of achievements?” said Ms. Etienne. “If people don’t feel it in your life, you can say it all day long – it won’t get through.”
Ms. Etienne attributed Mr. Biden’s early struggles among Black voters in part to the president’s inability to follow through on two of his signature promises in 2020: comprehensive police reform after the killing of Mr. Floyd and voting rights legislation. Both stalled in Congress, limiting Mr. Biden to presidential orders that could prove temporary and Justice Department actions about which the public knows little.
“They boosted Black voter turnout on both of those issues, and on neither of those two issues did they force Congress to take action,” she said. “That’s a vulnerability that they haven’t identified, and I don’t know if they’re finding solutions to it.”
The core of Mr. Trump’s pitch to black and Latino voters was that they are suffering economically from an influx of migrants who are displacing them from jobs and opportunities – a variation on the theme that helped him rally so many white voters in 2016.
“These millions and millions of people coming into our country are having the greatest impact and the greatest negative impact on our black and Hispanic populations,” Trump said in the Bronx last week.
Roland S. Martin, the former television commentator who hosts his own streaming program and oversees the Black Star Network, which produces and delivers programming for Black consumers, said the Biden team had not packaged its product convincingly.
“You have to make policy issues clear in terms of how they impact the average brother or sister across the country, and they’re still struggling with that,” Mr. Martin said. “Republicans have always used bumper stickers. Democrats use white papers. We now live in a social media age where they don’t read white papers. We need memes.”
The two campaigns pursue different goals. Mr. Biden needs high Black turnout and maximum support among those voters. Mr. Trump can succeed by either reducing the number of black voters overall or incorporating some of them into his column.
Mr. Biden’s latest calendar is evidence of the centrality and urgency of consolidating support in a community that won him the Democratic nomination and the White House in 2020. And his campaign repeatedly emphasized that no other Democratic candidate had ever invested so much time and money so early in mobilizing black voters.
“I need you,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday at Girard College, a boarding school in Philadelphia where desegregation struggles took place decades ago.
In May alone, Mr. Biden gave the inaugural address at Morehouse; he traveled to Detroit to speak at the largest NAACP dinner in the country; he spoke at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education; and he appeared on black radio shows such as “The Big Tigger Show” on V-103 in Atlanta and “The Truth with Sherwin Hughes” on 101.7 in Milwaukee.
In these appearances and also in new commercials, he sharpened the contrast with his predecessor.
“Trump is trying to make the country forget how dark and troubling things were when he was president,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday. At one point, the president crossed himself after incredulously repeating Mr. Trump’s claim that he was the best president for black Americans since Abraham Lincoln.
In one of Mr. Biden’s new ads, the narrator says, “Donald Trump’s disregard for Black people is nothing new” and accuses Mr. Trump of siding with “violent white supremacists.” However, the ad received minimal airplay. As of late Wednesday, the Biden campaign had paid $32,127 in airplays in a single market in Georgia, according to data from advertising tracking firm AdImpact.
Mr. Trump, of course, had some data points of his own when he marketed his presidency as “the greatest economy in history,” a bygone utopia of low inflation and cheap gasoline.
“Everyone was better off under a man named President Donald J. Trump,” he said last week. “Have you ever heard of him?”
He claimed that he had “a record low poverty rate for black Americans.” The rate actually bottomed out in 2022 under Mr. Biden, according to U.S. Census data.
Cornell Belcher, a veteran pollster who worked for both of Mr. Obama’s presidential campaigns, said Mr. Biden has “a fantastic story to tell from a political perspective” to black America.
“In many ways, Biden has a better story to tell than Obama did at the start of 2012,” Mr. Belcher said. “The problem is they haven’t heard it and they have no idea.”
Mr. Trump, he added, faces a very different political calculus. “He doesn’t win by addition,” he said, “but by subtraction.”
Maya King contributed reporting.
Source link
2024-05-30 09:06:08
www.nytimes.com
