‘The Biden campaign needs to turn it around,’ says Reverend Markel Hutchins, ‘and they need to do so quickly.’
Black lawmakers and community leaders aligned with Joe Biden have spent months issuing a not-so-subtle warning to the president’s reelection campaign: The incumbent’s message isn’t getting through to many black voters, particularly men and younger voters, and time is running out for the campaign to change course.
Recent shifts in strategy have some black lawmakers feeling confident that things are looking up ahead of an election that could be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states. “We’ve been working with the campaign on this,” representative Maxwell Frost (D., Fla.) told National Review earlier this month, praising the Biden campaign for ramping up advertising and canvassing in black communities. “Trump has made a play for black men specifically, but I think we’ll be able to get that back as we get closer with the campaign.”
Other Biden-aligned black community leaders remain on edge. “I’m even more convinced than I was six months ago that the campaign has got to do a much better job of speaking directly to the black community,” says Reverend Markel Hutchins, the president and CEO of MovementForward, a group founded by faith leaders in Atlanta to promote social justice and racial reconciliation. “There shouldn’t be a Sunday or Saturday that the president and/or the vice president and their surrogates should not be in an African American congregation or college campus.”
Concerns have lingered for months that the president’s message isn’t resonating with one of the most reliably Democratic voting blocs as some black voters — particularly men and younger voters — continue to sour on Biden in surveys and express some openness to pulling the lever for Trump. One eye-popping Wall Street Journal survey conducted in March found that roughly 30 percent of black men in seven swing states said they were “definitely” or “probably” going to support the presumptive GOP nominee in November. Another recent New York Times/Siena College/Philadelphia Inquirer battleground-state survey found that just 63 percent of black voters said they would vote for Biden in a head-to-head race against Trump.
Like other demographic groups, many black men are extremely frustrated by their choices in November. And surveys suggest that young black voters are also put off by Biden’s age as well as his handling of immigration, inflation, and the war in Gaza, says Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago political-science professor and founder of the university’s GenForward survey, which focuses specifically on young adults.
The Trump team is confident these incremental polling gains will translate to historic turnout among black voters for the presumptive GOP nominee in November. “Joe Biden is a weak, failed, and dishonest president whose disastrous policies have done nothing for our community besides driving up the cost of gas, groceries, and rent while making it nearly impossible to buy a new home, start a new business, or save money for the future,” says Janiyah Thomas, the Trump campaign’s director of black media.
Cohen predicts “some peeling off” to Trump among young black voters. But she says the bigger concern for the Biden campaign is convincing young black voters to turn out for the Democratic incumbent, rather than staying home.
The Biden campaign has spent recent weeks pushing back against this narrative. Earlier today, the Biden campaign announced a new Juneteenth ad that will air on black TV and radio networks in a handful of battleground states over the next week. And campaign surrogates are appearing at a number of Juneteenth-related events in battleground states, including scheduled appearances from Vice President Kamala Harris at a number of block parties in Atlanta.
This morning, the Biden campaign didn’t miss the opportunity to take a Juneteenth-related swipe at the presumptive GOP nominee. “Donald Trump has spent his entire life denigrating Black Americans,” the Biden campaign said in an email to reporters earlier Wednesday. “He spent his entire presidency harming Black communities. And he’s spent his entire campaign this cycle engaged in empty, racist gimmicks instead of meaningful outreach.”
Wednesday’s ad announcement comes after Biden held a Juneteenth concert at the White House last week featuring comedian Roy Wood Jr. as emcee, with attendees including Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, and Kirk Franklin.
But flashy endorsements from black celebrities will do little to sway black voters, says Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project and mayor of Enfield, N.C.
Influence will come from a trusted messenger in voters’ inner circles, he says. “This is why it’s laughable that they are spending this much money on people who are not connected to our community just because they look like us,” he added, faulting both the Biden and Trump campaigns for their reliance on celebrities.
Robinson echoed Hutchins’s concern that the Biden campaign is doing little to meet black voters on their turf. Most black men are “definitely not watching CNN, MSNBC,” he said. “Black men are watching D. L. Hughley, the Breakfast Club. The brothers they need to talk to are getting their media” in a completely different place. (Though it’s worth noting that Biden’s infamous comment telling voters who were undecided ahead of the 2020 election that they “ain’t black” was in fact made during an interview with The Breakfast Club’s Charlamagne tha God.)
More recently, Charlamagne mocked Biden and his allies for their inability to connect with black Americans.
“Those black people on the Hill got y’all doing corny, goofy stuff like that,” the radio host said, commenting on a video of Biden’s cabinet members dancing during a concert on the White House lawn as the president stood still and smiled awkwardly.
“Get off the Hill and get to the hood,” he urged.
Interestingly, a number of high-profile black Democrats who had previously sounded the alarm about Biden’s outreach to black voters remain skeptical of the bleak polling, though they’re cautioning the campaign not to let up on black-voter outreach.
In January, former House whip Jim Clyburn — the South Carolina Democrat who is widely credited with helping Biden capture the nomination in 2020 — told CNN’s State of the Union that he was “very concerned” about the president’s standing among black voters. “My problem is that we have not been able to break through that MAGA wall in order to get to people exactly what this president has done,” he said at the time. But earlier this week, Clyburn told Politico that he believes “something is amiss with the polling. . . . Anybody who believes that Donald Trump will get 30 percent of the black male vote or 12 percent of the black female vote — I got a bridge down there on Johns Island I’ll sell you.”
Congressional Black Caucus chair Steven Horsford (D., Nev.) similarly walked back comments he made to Politico in late May that suggested the Biden campaign was slow to roll out a robust black-voter outreach effort: “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,” he said.
Speaking with National Review on the steps of the U.S. Capitol earlier this month, Horsford said he doesn’t “buy” the polls showing black male voters swinging away from Biden. He told NR he did a barber-shop talk with more than 60 black men in his Nevada district recently, and that Trump didn’t come up once. “They talked about ways in which they can thrive in their businesses, providing for their families, helping to make a greater impact in their communities. They’re not focused on voting for or supporting anyone but themselves and their families,” he said. “The narrative that’s out there is just a false narrative.”
But Hutchins, the MovementForward president, insists Biden is still underperforming.
Trump is “the biggest threat to our way of life, our democracy, our nation broadly that America has ever seen,” he told NR. “And yet I’m hearing too much from black people, black voters in churches that I visit, in cigar shops that I frequent and other places that I speak. I’m hearing too much from everyday, ordinary African Americans that they’re just ‘not feeling Biden’ but they’re ‘feeling Trump.’ And it’s incredibly frightening.”
“The Biden campaign needs to turn it around,” he added, “and they need to do so quickly.”
Around NR
• Democrats cannot continue to “pretend away” Biden’s mental and physical decline, Jeffrey Blehar argues:
Joe Biden remains our president. He may yet be again. We cannot avoid reckoning with that possibility. Yet the Democratic Party insists as it asks for votes that Americans ignore the evidence of their senses and the fears within their hearts about his sharp mental and physical decline.
• The Biden campaign is doubling down on its focus on Trump’s convicted-felon status, if a new ad from the campaign is any indication, Audrey Fahlberg reports:
The ad is part of a $50 million paid media campaign announced Monday that will air in the month of June, and it serves as a clear indication that the incumbent’s campaign believes Trump’s legal troubles will play to the incumbent’s favor at the ballot box as he continues to fare poorly in battleground-state surveys. The president mentioned the verdict at a private fundraiser earlier this month but has largely avoided speaking at length about the verdict at public campaign events.
• Turning Point USA claims it is going to become a voter-turnout operation for the first time ever. But Dan McLaughlin is skeptical:
Many stranger things have happened than activist organizations with big budgets and lots of young volunteers learning how to do turnout. But this is also a message that clearly helps the group raise money, and “We have a great ground game” is a thing that lots of people say, that is far from always true, and that is hard to falsify before it has been tested in an election. I will believe it when I see it.
• Nikki Haley is Trump’s strongest VP option whether he likes it or not, writes Rich Lowry:
By conventional rules, the former South Carolina governor’s getting the nod would be so obvious as to be completely unremarkable — she’s the runner-up in the nomination fight; she represents a different faction of the party; she provides demographic balance; she has executive and foreign-policy experience; and she’s ready, to the extent this can be judged by résumé and experience, to be president.
To sign up for The Horse Race Newsletter, please follow this link.