The Horse Race: Is the Biden Campaign Sleepwalking into a Black-Voter Catastrophe?

WITH BRITTANY BERNSTEIN & AUDREY FAHLBERG

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Is the Biden Campaign Sleepwalking into a Black-Voter Catastrophe?

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 . . .