Entering the 2024 campaign season, Joe Biden faces a slew of challenges, including economic uncertainties, foreign policy tensions and healthcare reform. Most notable, however, comes from the critical engine that delivered 2020 key victories in swing states: the African American voting bloc.
Recent polls show a historic low of 37% in Biden’s overall approval ratings, while others highlight underlying factors, such as the alarming decline in Black voter support, from 86% in January 2021 to 60% now, the lowest of his presidency.
Many Black Americans feel the Democratic party has ignored their concerns and reneged on promises. There’s a perception that the party is taking African Americans for granted as well as growing cynicism with the lack of progress on issues such as affordable housing, healthcare costs and student loan debt. More specific policies, like the recent decision to halt the ban on menthol cigarettes, which disproportionately affect Black smokers, have further raised concerns.
But members of Biden’s campaign say definitive conclusions from early polls are premature, adding they have a comprehensive strategy to address growing apprehensions.
“The DNC hasn’t let up on engaging and mobilizing Black voters,” said the Democratic National Committee chair, Jaime Harrison. “This isn’t something I take lightly. I know what it feels like to have our community taken for granted and only have folks show up for us when they need our vote on election day.”
He traced the party’s commitment to investing more heavily in organizing, persuading and activating Black voters ahead of the 2022 midterm election cycle to their plan to double down on those efforts in 2024. Harrison said he’s met with Black voters across the country in the past year, “listened to what matters to them most and shared with them the successes of the administration for Black Americans”, including an investment of more than $7.3bn in HBCUs, lowering prescription drug prices for seniors, the drop in child poverty and executive action on criminal justice reform.
The DNC’s deputy campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, acknowledged that messaging is one of their primary challenges going into 2024, which could be contributing to the disconnect currently reflected in polls.
“For those voters that we know a lot of these policies impact, we have to communicate ways in which they can get these benefits,” he said. “Like all this funding for capital, all the student loan forgiveness – not everybody knows how to tap into that.
“African American voters know that a lot is at stake, and I think, similar to other audiences of color and young voters, it’s our job to communicate to them what’s at stake. And if we do that successfully, and also from a place of respect in our messaging and how we do it, I think that these voters will turn out and vote for Joe Biden.”
The DNC has infused $4.8m on off-year advertising costs, with a total ad buy, to date, of $45.6m, including funding from groups such as the Biden Victory Fund ($4.8m).
Fulks said they will also focus heavily on college campuses, including HBCUs, and traditional media outreach such as online engagement, television appearances, drivetime radio features, tapping influential figures such as Roland Martin, Steve Harvey and DL Hughley.
Sean Foreman, a political scientist at Florida’s Barry University, emphasized the critical role messaging plays and said Democrats need to be forcefully working to retain, or in some cases, restore, traditional support from Black voters, making sure everyday families are aware of the bread-and-butter issues the administration has tackled.
“In 2020, Biden may have been Democrats’ best bet to beat Trump, but 2024 is not a repeat of 2020,” he said. “His administration needs to make a better case to the public about their successes. They should make the Infrastructure Act and the Chips Act, and their role in supporting the unions help tell the story about how they are helping people close to home.”
The civil rights historian Katherine Mellen Charron, who lectures on southern history and democracy at North Carolina State University, sees it as more of an age-related challenge.
“The change between 2020 and now also falls along generational lines,” she said. “Elders from the movement years of the late 20th century went along with [the South Carolina’s congressman Jim] Clyburn’s endorsement [of Biden] and its logic: ‘He knows us.’ Younger people and activists don’t have that same historical relationship with the Democratic party.”
In response to such scrutiny, DNC’s political director, Brencia Berry, said the Biden administration will use a second term to continue their agenda. Berry said the first step to countering the polls is “talking to Black voters well before we ask for their vote and building relationships with folks on the ground”.
This involves setting the stakes for this election by contrasting the Biden-Harris agenda with how far backward Republicans want to take Black Americans if they win – such as how Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump for example plan to replace the Affordable Care Act.
“President Biden and Vice-President Harris made it clear that Black voters are a priority when they made South Carolina the first state on the presidential primary calendar,” Berry added about their critical decision given the state’s significant Black population. “We have an opportunity to spend the earliest part of the election year engaging Black voters in states like South Carolina, Nevada and Michigan.”
Jamil Scott, a political behavior researcher and Georgetown University government professor, called Biden’s re-election bid “complicated … It’s always tough when the president makes legislative promises because these only come to fruition if the legislative branch is on board with his agenda.”
But the political scientist Lakeyta Bonnette-Bailey of Georgia State University plainly said the promises from Biden’s 2020 campaign were not kept for the electorate. She pointed to the administration’s failure to decriminalize marijuana, take significant action on voters’ rights, and not “substantively address police reform. [Biden] continues to speak out on police misconduct but has not done anything to reform the police, including an inability to eliminate cash bail, which disproportionately impacts lower-income people.”
The DNC conceded that such issues need to be clearly addressed on the campaign trail and said they will tackle any misinterpretations in their efforts.
“What you’re going to see from us [is] boots on the ground coming out in the new year,” Fulks said, “being in front of these voters and relaying [our message]. I think that a part of it is that voters of color want to feel like they are deeply involved in a campaign. They don’t want to feel like they’re being told that they’re given handouts. These are hardworking Americans who sent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House.”
Foreman believes that while 2024 isn’t “a make or break moment for African American support for the Democratic party,” a weak showing with critical blocs, including younger voters, could sway the party’s direction.
He also recognized the calls for Biden not to seek re-election from within the party. Last month, David Axelrod, a former Obama advisor, questioned Biden’s candidacy in light of another poll showing Trump leading in five key states. “If he continues to run, he will be the nominee of the Democratic party,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “What he needs to decide is whether that is wise; whether it’s in HIS best interest or the country’s?”
Biden dropping out, Foreman said, could do the party some good because “a different, younger candidate could help mobilize new voters”.
“But when it comes down to it, if Biden is the nominee, then the job will be for all Democrats – African American and otherwise – to get out in the various local communities and work hard to motivate people to vote.”
