Stephanie Scarbrough/AP Photo
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at Mother Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, January 8, 2024.
President Joe Biden spoke directly to Black Americans Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston, South Carolina. It was the site where a white supremacist massacred nine worshipers during Bible study, and where President Obama, at the memorial service for those who died, sang “Amazing Grace.” What better place for the president to effectively launch his re-election campaign to win back Black voters, who are so central to the Democrats’ base. And what better place to learn why Biden will likely still be losing ground with Black, Hispanic, and younger voters.
Fortunately, the president added some asides that could become part of a very different message and get heard in the Black community and the Democratic base.
On Monday, the president welded the “poison” of “white supremacy” to the violent MAGA Republicans who threaten our democracy, the “insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress.” He called on voters to reject their “cramped view of America,” and to rally around his vision, where “we [can] all do well.” America is “not perfect,” Biden said, but it is “a nation continuously striving to be a more perfect union.”
And then he laid out his main strategy for re-election. I kept “my commitment to you,” and “I’ve done my best to honor your trust.”
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Biden proceeded to describe about 20 areas, by my count, where the administration has done impressive work as it relates to racial equity—selecting Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, mailing $1,400 checks, implementing mass vaccinations, capping insulin for seniors to $35 per month, fighting against housing discrimination, protecting the freedom to vote, canceling $132 billion in student debt, removing lead pipes, investing in clean energy, increasing the Child Tax Credit that cut child poverty in half, reforming police, committing to take on assault weapons, and appointing “more Black women … to the federal courts.”
The list started with the economy, where “we see … progress for all Americans … the results are clear: over 14 million new jobs, record economic growth, the lowest inflation rate of any major economy in the world.” This economy also produced “the lowest Black unemployment rate recorded in a long, long time.”
Full employment may well contribute to rising Black wages, and Black voters do rate the economy more positively than others. But in my polling, only one-third think the economy is getting better.
The U.S. economy and society have faced a series of global shocks that the Biden administration has managed more effectively than any other government. Biden is right that the U.S. is poised better than any other nation to face the future.
But those shocks have hardly finished, and three-quarters of Americans think we are on the wrong track. It’s not hard to figure out why. Middle America—measured by the middle 40th percentile—lost income (adjusting for inflation) during the first two years of Biden’s term, while gaining each year under Donald Trump.
If you want to be heard, by Black Americans, Hispanics, and white Gen Z and millennials, you have to empathize with what they’ve experienced and express anger with the high prices and profiteering.
At the same time, President Biden has presided over a period of daunting inequality. After the pandemic, the top 10 percent made income gains far larger than any other group. And while prices were spiking, corporate profits surged. The historic levels of stock buybacks made sure the top 0.1 percent would fare best of all.
The half of the country with incomes below the median also lost ground at the outset of Biden’s term. But the introduction of the Child Tax Credit gave them their first real pay rise, though that would be cruelly taken away on the Democrats’ watch. And regardless, the bottom half of income earners never got back to the higher pay increases they saw in Trump’s last year. Lest you think Black voters will see the economy differently, Black median income under Biden still continues to fall below that of Asians, whites, Hispanics, and Native Americans.
Prices are still higher than they were under Trump, and most elevated for food. That is why nearly half of voters believe they will be “financially worse off” if Biden is re-elected, while only a third fear that if Trump wins.
Democracy Corps and PSG Consulting conducted our 2,500-sample battleground poll in November with its over-samples of 633 interviews with Blacks, 574 with Hispanics, and 511 with Asians. When you asked voters what are the most pressing issues, you realize how much huge price increases, spiking inequality, years of growing violent crime, and surging immigration are shaping the current mood. The president telling them in a speech how good a job you’ve done or how good the economy is for Blacks probably won’t get many to rethink their doubts.
If you want to be heard, by Black Americans, Hispanics, and white Gen Z and millennials, you have to empathize with what they’ve experienced and express anger with the high prices and profiteering. You need to put the spotlight on what these voters believe are Biden’s most important accomplishments. For Blacks, it is the expanded Child Tax Credit, full employment pushing up wages, making things in America again, and supporting unions. For the rest of the base, it is getting down health care costs as well as the Child Tax Credit.
Biden should promise in a second term to take on the tax cheats, raise taxes on billionaires, fight profiteering, cut health care and drug costs, and reintroduce the Child Tax Credit as the first measure to be passed into law. He can contrast this with the Republicans’ opposition to helping families with reduced health care prices and the Child Tax Credit, and their determination to make the corporate tax cuts permanent.
Before the president got started on the full draft, he riffed on the recent decision to allow Florida to import drugs from Canada, where prices are so much lower. Then he added, speaking about the drug companies:
Go down every one of these things—it always confused me. They talk about being rational; it’s just about excess profit.
But [at] any rate, I don’t want to get off on that. I’ll get carried away. (Laughter) I don’t quite get these guys.
The president treated the big drug companies, drug costs, and profiteering as off-subject speaking to this Black audience. Of course, it should have been the main topic of the speech. This is an administration that has implemented many policies to tax big corporations and shift power from the big banks and big corporations to workers. And it is an administration that has done even more to help working people deal with high prices.
There is reason to believe that President Biden could have delivered a different speech, if you let Biden be Biden. Stop talking about the litany of accomplishments for each group in the base and start talking again about being the “blue-collar” president battling for them.
