As Biden grapples with Black men, allies gather at the White House
As President Biden’s allies grow increasingly concerned that his standing among Black men is declining, his aides met with influential Black male Democrats at the White House on Tuesday to discuss how to boost his popularity with a crucial group of voters before the 2024 election. enlarge.
Several attendees said there was general agreement that Mr. Biden had paid more attention to Black female voters than Black male voters during both his 2020 campaign and his first three years as president. These people said they suggested to Mr. Biden’s aides that the president should make a specific speech about how his administration had improved the lives of Black men.
“Clearly there has been a focus on black women and the question becomes: has there been as much attention on black men?” said Cedric Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman and Biden administration official who is now a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee and who was at the meeting.
He added: “There is a mantra that black women are the foundation of the party, and I think it is black families that are the foundation of the party. That has the potential to separate the family unit based on gender, which I think is just a shame.
Attendees at the afternoon meeting included Rep. Steven Horsford of Nevada, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus; Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania, who has publicly warned that Mr. Biden’s standing with black voters has fallen; and Antjuan Seawright and Clay Middleton, South Carolina political operatives closely tied to Rep. James E. Clyburn, a key Biden ally in the state.
The group agreed that Mr. Biden had made many achievements that had helped black men. Democrats, he said, are failing to tell this story.
“We left the room knowing that collectively we need to communicate better,” said Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. “Sometimes it’s good to wake up to a challenge.”
The White House session followed months of nail-biting among Democrats over growing skepticism of Mr. Biden among Black voters, especially Black men. Republicans have sought to drive a wedge between black voters and the Democratic Party in recent cycles, arguing that former President Donald J. Trump’s record on the economy and his passage of a criminal justice bill were more favorable to black communities – arguments that Democrats have dismissed as disinformation.
Polls released last month by The New York Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of black voters in six of the key presidential battleground states said they would support Mr. Trump against Mr. Biden next year, an alarming figure for the Democrats considering the black voters. ‘Decades of loyalty to the party.
At the meeting on Tuesday — led by Steve Benjamin, the director of the White House Public Engagement Office — Mr. Biden’s Black male allies were encouraged to share what people in their communities and home districts had said about his administration and or she would support him for a second term.
“There have been communication gaps,” said Harold Love, a Tennessee state representative and the new president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. He said the government needed to tell people what Mr Biden had done “in plain language so they can understand it”.
The White House declined to comment on the meeting.
In interviews and focus groups, Black men open to supporting Mr. Trump have pointed to the former president’s record on the economy and said their businesses and families fared better during his administration. Black Democrats have refuted this idea, in some cases arguing that black men are the targets of disinformation that, if crystallized in the minds of enough voters, could jeopardize the president’s already shaky standing with them .
Mr. Raoul, the Illinois attorney general, said part of Mr. Biden’s problem was that he had crafted a complex message that often competed with easier-to-digest misinformation.
“When you do a lot, it is sometimes difficult to convey this to people who are used to consuming things in sound clips and who have sometimes received deliberately targeted misinformation,” Raoul said on Tuesday.
Democrats have emphasized that earlier and more frequent outreach to Black communities is important to winning over their voters.
Vice President Kamala Harris has regularly met with small groups of Black men as she traveled around the country and last month hosted a group of ten black men in news media and politics for dinner at her home in Washington. The party has also purchased ads on black radio stations and placed digital ads targeting young black voters.
Mr. Benjamin’s office at the White House has held regular meetings with various constituency groups.
But Tuesday’s rally followed a particularly bad polling trajectory for Biden. CNN polls were released Monday found that Mr. Biden trailed Mr. Trump by 10 percentage points in Michigan and five points in Georgia — both battleground states with large numbers of Black voters.
Although Biden has no serious Democratic presidential candidates, the party’s primaries in South Carolina on February 3 will be an early test of black voters’ enthusiasm. Black voters made up nearly 60 percent of the state’s Democratic electorate in 2020, as Biden’s victory there put him on a path to the White House.
No other Democrats have made a significant investment in the state’s primaries this year, but the South Carolina Democratic Party did launch a statewide voter outreach program on Monday, complete with a 50-person staff and a six-figure investment .
Mr. Middleton, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden’s campaign in South Carolina, said the meeting was ultimately intended to help determine how best to communicate the president’s achievements and his plans for a second term to black men in the entire country, with an emphasis on the battlefield. states.
“If we ignored what black men were saying, we would be in trouble,” Mr Middleton said. “This means: ‘We will not ignore it.’”