by Mary Lou Masters
Democrats are concerned that black voters won’t turn out for President Joe Biden in 2024 like they did during the 2020 election, according to The Washington Post.
Democrats are increasingly worried after the 2022 midterms saw a 10 percent voting drop among the crucial electorate, despite the party’s victories in the Senate, according to the Post. Party activists are now making it a priority to bolster turnout for black voters, particularly in key battleground states Biden narrowly secured in 2020 — Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
“The Democratic Party has been failing epically at reaching this demographic of black men — and that’s sad to say,” W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, told the Post. “Black men are your second-most stable base overwhelmingly, and yet you can’t reach them in a way that makes your work easier.”
Robinson argued that Democrats should focus on black men, who are “sporadic or non-voters,” rather than suburban “conservative-leaning white women,” he told the Post. Many Democrats told the Post their concerns are largely over black men and not women, who they expect to continue to show out for Biden so long as Vice President Kamala Harris is on the ballot.
Black voters are significantly less enthused about a Biden reelection campaign than they were in 2020, with only 55% saying they’re likely to support him in 2024, according to an early May AP/NORC poll. The same poll suggests that 81% of Democratic voters say they’d definitely or probably would support the president if he’s the nominee.
“We have to meet them where they are and we have to show them why the political process matters and what we have accomplished that benefits them,” Cedric L. Richmond, senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and former Biden adviser, told the Post. “We will not make the mistake that others made of not drawing all the connections.”
New poll finds only 55% of Black voters say they are likely to support Biden in the general election.
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— theGrio.com (@theGrio) May 7, 2023
Terrance Woodbury, co-founder and CEO of HIT Strategies, a polling firm focused on minority voters, told the Post that Democrats need to emphasize how their policies benefit black voters rather than voicing concern over former President Donald Trump.
Sharif Street, a Democratic state senator in Pennsylvania, echoed Woodbury’s sentiment, and told the Post “being better than the Republicans is not always enough to get people motivated to vote.”
Brittany Smith, executive director of the Black Leadership PAC (BLP), told the Post she’s noticed black voters have changed their views about voting, and said they need more convincing to turnout than usual.
“There’s not a night I don’t go to sleep thinking about what turnout will look like in 2024,” Smith said.
Republicans are hoping to benefit from the Democrats’ loss of the key electorate, with some GOP strategists hoping social issues at the forefront of the Party will attract black voters, according to the Post.
“My guess is Democrats for the foreseeable future will continue to do well [with black voters], but I think there’s some cultural issues that don’t typically resonate with the black community as a whole and frankly a lot of minority communities,” Jay Williams, GOP strategist out of Georgia, told the Post. “Republicans will be able to peel some folks off based on that, depending on the area. It could be a real wedge issue for us.”
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Mary Lou Masters is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Joe Biden” by The White House.
