A ‘laundry list’ or a ‘feel’: Biden and Trump’s clashing appeals to black voters
As President Joe Biden took the stage in Philadelphia on Wednesday to kick off his Black voter outreach program, he methodically ticked through more than a dozen accomplishments, executive orders, appointments, investments and economic statistics.
“The bottom line,” Biden said in summing up his pitch, “is we’ve invested more in Black America than any previous administration in history has.”
It was a compelling catalog that stood in contrast to the blunt appeal that his rival, former President Donald Trump, had made a week earlier about the economy at a rally in New York City designed to highlight his appeal to nonwhite voters.
“African Americans,” Trump had said, “are getting slaughtered.”
The two events captured a fundamental difference between the Black outreach that both camps see as crucial to winning in 2024.
Biden has a list. Trump has a vibe.
Black voters are at the very foundation of the Democratic coalition, pivotal electoral building blocks in cities across the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and beyond. And while polls consistently show Biden winning strong majorities of Black voters, he is underperforming on past Democratic benchmarks to the deepening alarm of party loyalists and to the delight of GOP operatives.
Trump has tried to brand his four years in the White House as a period of peace and prosperity, hoping voters — and Black voters in particular — will recall those preinflationary days fondly and look past the disruptions of a pandemic that ground American life to a halt for much of 2020.
“It’s a feel,” said Ja’Ron Smith, one of the highest-ranking Black officials in the Trump White House, in explaining the former president’s appeal to Black voters. “They know what it’s like to live under a Trump economy rather than a Biden economy.”
Trump has a long history of incendiary and racist remarks that the Biden campaign has increasingly highlighted, and that Trump hopes Black voters look past. On Wednesday, Biden recalled Trump’s spreading of the birtherism conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama, as well as his response to the murder of George Floyd four years ago.
“Let’s be clear what happens to you and your family when old ghosts in new garments seize power,” 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 has so far been a blend of shaking loose memories of Trump’s divisive record and selling them on what he has accomplished. The list he outlined Wednesday was substantial: helping reduce 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 pushing policies to reconnect Black neighborhoods divided decades ago by highways.
“Promises made and promises kept,” Biden said, over and over.
Yet in the most recent poll of battleground states by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Biden had only 49% support among Black registered voters in a race that included third-party candidates. He was at 63% in a one-on-one contest with Trump.
Ashley Etienne, who worked on the 2020 Biden campaign and later served as communications director for to Vice President Kamala Harris, worried that the Biden campaign had yet to translate how the president’s agenda has actually improved the lives of most Black voters.
“What is the message beyond a laundry list of accomplishments?” Etienne said. “If people aren’t feeling it in your lives, you can say it all day — it doesn’t penetrate.”
Etienne attributed Biden’s early struggles among Black voters in part to the president’s inability to advance two signature promises in 2020: sweeping police reform in the wake of the murder of Floyd and voting-rights legislation. Both stalled in Congress, limiting Biden to executive orders that could prove temporary and to Justice Department actions that the public knows little about.
“They galvanized Black turnout based on those two issues, and on neither of those two issues have they compelled Congress to take action,” she said. “That is a vulnerability that they’ve not acknowledged and I don’t know that they’re solving for.”
Core to Trump’s pitch to both Black and Latino voters has been that they are suffering economically from an influx of migrants who are displacing them from jobs and opportunities, a variation on the theme that he used to rally so many white voters behind him in 2016.
“These millions and millions of people that are coming into our country, the biggest impact, and the biggest negative impact, is against our Black population and our Hispanic population,” Trump said in New York last week.
The two campaigns have different goals. Biden needs Black turnout to be high and to maximize his support among those voters. Trump can succeed either by reducing the number of Black voters overall or by flipping some into his column.
Cornell Belcher, a veteran pollster who worked for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, said Biden had “from a policy standpoint a fantastic story to tell” to Black America.
“In many ways, Biden has a better story to tell than Obama did going into 2012,” Belcher said. “The problem is they haven’t heard it, and they have no idea.”
Trump, he added, faces a very different political calculus. “He wins not by addition,” he said, “but by subtraction.”
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