Brynn Anderson/AP Photo
Former President Barack Obama speaks at a rally as he campaigns for Joe Biden, November 2, 2020, at Turner Field in Atlanta.
Barack Obama did not win the most recent presidential election, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so. In the two weeks since Election Day, the former president has been at least as publicly prominent as the president-elect, if not more so, sitting for feature interviews everywhere from 60 Minutes to The Atlantic, weighing in on hot-button political issues, teasing an agenda and giving guidance for the forthcoming legislative year. In fairness, the man’s got a book to sell.
It’s clear that many Democrats think that the former president’s informal return to public life is an asset. In the two yet-to-be-decided Georgia Senate runoffs, the state’s Democratic leadership is openly agitating for an Obama appearance; the prospect of a visit from President-elect Biden, not so much. “More important to us is whether Barack or Michelle comes. We don’t necessarily need Joe to come,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter, told Politico.
After four years of relative silence, Obama has returned as a de facto figurehead of the Democratic Party. That sentiment has been reflected to some degree by Biden-world as well. Not only did Biden bear Obama as a human shield throughout the primaries, to the degree that you’d think his name was “Obama-Biden” for all the times he referenced the 2008 and 2012 Democratic ticket, but the campaign saved up appearances with Biden’s former boss for the climactic final days of the race, in crucial swing states where Hillary Clinton lost.
Obama remains broadly well liked, much more so by registered Democrats than Republicans, of course. But there are plenty of reasons to believe that leading with Obama is actually a losing strategy for Democrats, who are dangerously overestimating the strength of the former president’s brand in the year 2020.
In those Georgia Senate runoffs, Democrats are hoping a little old-fashioned Obamamania can do the trick in delivering imperative victories for the Biden presidency. Both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are running on expanding Obamacare, the flagship accomplishment of the Obama administration—his own name is, after all, on the legislation. But exit polling from the November election shows voters in Georgia are deeply ambivalent about the Affordable Care Act, which actually sports a net negative favorability rating. Fifty-two percent of Georgians who voted two weeks ago would like to repeal parts or all of Obamacare; just 48 percent want to leave it as is or expand it. That’s in a state that voted (narrowly) for Biden! This, while recent reports have shown that Obamacare is currently the most popular it’s ever been in the decade since it became law.
By comparison, that very same exit poll showed that 63 percent of Georgia voters favored overhauling the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run insurance plan, with only 37 percent opposed. Caveats apply, of course: It’s just one exit poll, and they have been found to be not entirely reliable. Furthermore, Georgia’s Republican governor has stymied the expansion of Medicaid, which is arguably the only successful part of the ACA. But the distinction is stark. Even in a Democratic state, Obama’s affiliation with the program is not enough to keep it above water, while voters resoundingly back government-run health care.
And what about those much-anticipated last-leg events for Biden? The campaign deployed Obama at three different stops: Flint, Michigan; Detroit; and Philadelphia. This was before election night, when polling still indicated that Biden held sizable leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and the extent of his weakness with Latino and Black voters was thought to be fairly minimal, or at least localized to Florida. Perhaps the Biden campaign knew more than they were letting on in terms of their strength with Black voters, and thought Obama might be a silver bullet. Maybe they thought he’d help run up the score.
Whatever the reasoning was, it didn’t work. In all three places, Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton. In Detroit, Biden got 1,000 fewer votes than Hillary four years prior, despite 2020 being a hundred-year-turnout election. It’s not like Trump came close to winning the county, but he nearly doubled his vote count. The slight increase in voter turnout was entirely accounted for by new Trump supporters.
In Philadelphia, voter turnout barely budged over 2016. Again, Biden’s margin decreased—Hillary Clinton won the city by 67 points compared to Biden’s 63; Biden had fewer total votes than Clinton four years prior despite record turnout nationwide. As Samir Sonti pointed out in The New Republic, in “areas where African Americans and Latinos account for at least 40 percent of the population, the swing toward Trump was 33,000 [votes] … in the areas with a median household income of below $50,000, which overlap heavily with the ones just mentioned, the Trump swing was 38,000.”
Neither his affiliation with Obama from their time in the White House nor Obama’s presence at campaign events was enough to make up for Biden’s dissonance with minority voters.
And finally, in Genesee County, where Flint is located, Biden posted the same margin of victory as Hillary Clinton four years prior, which doesn’t seem that bad, except when compared to neighboring Saginaw County, which Biden flipped from red to blue, and Oakland County, where he outran Hillary by six points.
The actual efficacy of in-person events in boosting turnout is rightfully debated, and turnout data can be easily bent to support a lot of Election Day stories. To be certain, there are multiple factors at play, and a handful of ballots still trickling in may change the final count. But the trend is profound. In cities across the country, the Black vote proved to be a real soft spot for Biden. Neither his affiliation with Obama from their time in the White House nor Obama’s presence at campaign events was enough to make up for Biden’s dissonance with minority voters. Obama is not the Democratic Party’s Donald Trump when it comes to whipping up enthusiasm and turnout.
That matters if only because it proves that Joe Biden, like the rest of the Democratic Party, will not be able to coast on the reputation of his former boss for long. Making a gesture of returning to the Obama era is better for book sales than it is for governance, and if the Democrats want any hope of holding on to power, they’re going to have to accomplish more than Obama did, with a lot less political capital.
In Georgia, November’s election saw the Black share of the electorate bottom out at its lowest level since 2006. That’s both a real problem and a real opportunity for Democrats; if they can get that fixed, they may well prevail in those Senate races. But as Pennsylvania and Michigan showed, that’s not something that’s going to be fixed by a couple of rallies. If Democrats are going to appeal to voters of color—in Georgia in January, and nationwide in elections to come—they’re going to have to give them something more than Barack Obama.
