Biden concentrates on Black voters as polls show some support slipping to Trump

Geoff Bennett:

The Biden campaign says it's going all in to shore up support among Black voters. That's with polls showing him underperforming with the key Democratic constituency that helped deliver him the Democratic nomination and the White House in 2020.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a Juneteenth celebration at the White House last night. The president promoted his record to Black voters, while painting a contrast with right-wing Republicans.

Joe Biden, President of the United States: They're all ghosts in new garments trying to take us back. Well, there are — taking away your freedoms, making it hard for Black people to vote or have your vote counted, closing doors of opportunity, attacking the values of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Geoff Bennett:

It's all unfolding as the Trump campaign tries to make inroads with Black men in particular ahead of November.

We're joined now by Emory University Professor Andra Gillespie, whose work covers African American politics.

It's so great to have you here.

Andra Gillespie, Emory University:

Thank you.

Geoff Bennett:

And starting with the caveat that the Black community is no more monolithic than any other community, what's your assessment of the Biden campaign's messaging to Black voters in particular, both in terms of what they're actually saying and the degree to which it's penetrating?

Andra Gillespie:

Well, African Americans have complained for a long time that the Democratic Party takes them for granted.

So, because this group has historically voted for about 90 percent Democratic in the last 60 years, there's sometimes a tendency to ignore Black voters, to have very shallow interactions with them in late October before an election season.

And Black voters have been demanding attention to their issues and actually outreaching their communities that's meaningful. The Biden campaign has tried to do that, so we have seen them engage earlier. There have been questions about the modalities of this type of contact. So is it the right type of contact? And is it reaching all Black communities?

Perhaps, once upon a time, you could make a church visit or you could make certain types of overtures to Black communities that would be wide-reaching. But the diversity of the African American community necessitates that you have a multifaceted approach and that you have multiple messages to reach the very types of Black voters and all of their concerns.

Geoff Bennett:

As we mentioned, there are these polls that show President Biden losing support among Black voters. The Biden campaign says that this narrative of this Black exodus is overblown and that the Biden campaign says that they have an infrastructure in place to keep Black voters on their side, effectively, that would not necessarily lend an opening to Donald Trump.

How worried should the Biden campaign be?

Andra Gillespie:

Well, there are two sides to this.

On the one side, I think the Biden campaign is correct. There's been a lot of national attention on survey subsamples of African American voters where we're talking about 100 to 300 hundred Black voters. So we're talking about huge margins of error and very, very noisy data.

So just because you have a survey where there's a subsample of 200 Black voters who might say that 30 percent of them are voting for Donald Trump doesn't necessarily reflect to the larger African American community. There needs to be more surveys with larger sample sizes that are nationally representative of Blacks to be more accurate.

Pew recently released one. The number was at 18 percent, which is something that Democrats would be concerned about, but they can rebound from that. They can do outreach in these communities. And so I think the question is, do you sit on your laurels?

No Democratic campaign wants to get 77 percent of the African American vote, when they're used to getting 90 percent of the vote. How do you get from 77 percent to 90 percent? Part of that is outreach. Part of that is recognizing that you still have time to invest in these communities. And it's, how are you going to be responsive in terms of crafting a message that is actually going to resonate with these voters?

Geoff Bennett:

Let's talk about Donald Trump because he is also trying to appeal to Black voters. He held a rally in the Bronx, New York, late last month, and he touted his hard-line immigration proposals. Here's a bit of what he had to say.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: African Americans are getting slaughtered. Hispanic Americans are getting slaughtered. And 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, who are losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose.

Geoff Bennett:

More recently, he has talked about his criminal indictments, his felony conviction, and has said that would be in some way appealing to Black voters, which a lot of people saw as offensive on its face.

What do you make of his approach?

Andra Gillespie:

He sometimes pulls on threads that are accurate within African American communities, but then he usually takes them out of context, and so that he's missing an opportunity to actually effectively message to Black communities.

So, on immigration, there are African Americans who have concerns about undocumented immigration. My friend Neon Bicardi (ph), at the University of Maryland wrote a great book about this, right?

But their reasons for opposing immigration are not the same reasons that whites oppose immigration. And so you have to be really sensitive to the message and not paint with a broad brush. The concerns that Trump is trying to raise about criminal justice reform are so personalized to himself that it ignores the larger structural problems that he could address and use his own story to talk about effectively.

But he's not doing that, right? He's not talking about the things that he did do during his term as president in terms of the First Step Act, in terms of trying to sort of dismantle certain types of structural aspects of the criminal justice system.

That would actually be a more effective message that he seems to be incapable of doing. Instead, he plays to tropes, and they end up being offensive and turning off more voters than they will attract.

Geoff Bennett:

What about Black men, in particular, this narrative, this notion that Black men are somehow peeling away from President Biden and sort of turning toward Donald Trump? Is that real? Is there polling to back that up?

Andra Gillespie:

Again, context is important here. There has long been a gender gap in African American communities.

In an article I co-wrote with friend Nadia Brown at Georgetown, we can trace it back. We traced it back to 1972. The only time where you don't really see a gender gap is in the 2008 election with Barack Obama. So while the gender gap kind of ebbs and flows and it gets bigger over time, it's always been there.

Black women have been more Democratic than their Black male counterparts for the last 50 years. So, one, he's already playing the kind of natural tendencies in African American voting behavior. It is true that Republicans have tried to reach out to African American men to try to peel off support.

And there is the possibility that Trump might actually be effective in being able to have some success at the margins. But this does not constitute, as of right now, a sea change or a realignment. It's going to take decades of incremental, consistent erosion in Black support overall for us to say that we're seeing a realignment of Black voters.

Geoff Bennett:

Andra Gillespie, thanks so much for that context. We appreciate it.

Andra Gillespie:

Thank you. Thank you.