“Time is running out to get his message across,” Democrats warned President Joe Biden on Thursday about the important demographic of the black vote.
The warning comes after Biden recently attempted to reset his campaign pitch to black voters with a new plan and more money amid a series of negative polls.
WATCH — Van Jones: Young Black Men Haven’t Seen Crime, Policing Addressed How They Wanted Under Biden:
Prominent black officials are alarmed that black voters “aren’t hearing about” Biden’s alleged policy achievements for the black community and they wonder if Biden “fully grasped the severity of the information gap at hand.”
Under former President Trump’s economy, before the pandemic, black median weekly earnings grew 4.1 percent on average. White median weekly earnings only grew 3.4 percent. Since the last quarter of 2021, under Biden, the median weekly real earnings among black Americans, adjusted for inflation, increased by only $11, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That “is still $13 less than that same group was earning as of the second quarter of 2020, when this figure reached its peak,” Newsweek reported.“I know that there are people freaking out, there always are. This is not news,” Democrat strategist Simon Rosenberg told the Hill on Thursday. “We should win. But we have to go out and win the game. And it’s tied early … but I think we’re much more likely to win this thing than they are.”
Some Democrat members of Congress blame the “freaking out” on the lack of positive messaging about Biden’s policies. “I’m in a battleground state,” Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, told Politico. “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. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) blamed “nontraditional sources of information” for the disconnect between the black vote and the Biden campaign. “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 claimed. “I’m not saying that it’s the last minute, but we are in crunch time.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) in Washington DC, on September 28, 2023. (Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Cornell Belcher, a former focus group guru for BlackPAC and Barack Obama’s pollster, echoed Crockett’s notion and suggested more black voters should watch MSNBC, a network known to push Biden’s talking points.
“It is that distinction between the MSNBC crowd and getting their political information from social media sources,” he told Politico. “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.”
There might be some truth to Belcher’s point. The media landscape is more decentralized than it was several years ago. Many more Americans rely on social media personalities for news commentary instead of tuning into evening news shows on cable. In turn, Democrats worry about black social media influencers who have not outright supported Biden’s 2024 campaign much to the chagrin of loyalists, such as the hosts of The View.
“There’s only one type of outreach people are willing to do. And unfortunately for them, the outreach they’re willing to do is not significant,” W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, explained. “Talking to Black men at Morehouse, talking to Black men who own businesses — you’re not talking to the majority of brothers who are sitting out elections.”
While Biden struggles to win support from the black community, Trump nearly doubled his support among black men and women since 2020, a Wall Street Journal poll found in April. Thirty percent of black men and 11 percent of black women intend to vote for Trump in 2024, while only 12 percent of black men voted for Trump in 2020, voting data shows. There is no compatible 2020 polling for black men. In 2020, six percent of black women said they would vote for Trump, Associated Press polling found, five points less than the Journal’s 2024 polling. In more good news for Trump, 42 percent of black women remain up for grabs in 2024, the Journal survey showed.
It appears the black vote is not slipping away from the Biden campaign for a lack of effort. Biden’s campaign dumped seven figures into contending for the black vote in April. The money went toward radio and TV ads slamming Trump.
“Our campaign believes that Black voters deserve to hear from Team Biden-Harris, and they deserve to have their vote earned, not assumed,” the Biden campaign told Politico.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
