He dished out soul food at Dulan’s on Crenshaw, an iconic Los Angeles restaurant, talked youth empowerment in New Orleans and basked in the endorsement of a senior black congresswoman from Texas.
In advance of speeches this week to the NAACP in Detroit and the Urban League in Indianapolis, he released a criminal justice plan that addresses concerns many African Americans have about his past record, including his role on the 1994 crime bill. The campaign then touted the plan in a web ad featuring an African American adviser.
Amid signs that his sizable advantage among black voters is slipping, Joe Biden has embarked on a coast-to-coast blitz to shore up his position.
Biden’s campaign says it always made black-voter outreach a hallmark and the recent focus has nothing to do with Kamala Harris’ recent gains among black voters or last month’s debate, when the African American senator from California put Biden on defense over race. But as Harris rises and fellow African American senator, Cory Booker, has stepped up his criticism of Biden’s record, the former vice president’s support among black voters is being put to the test — with potentially serious consequences.
“If I’m in the Biden camp, I’m concerned that if there’s a significant enough threat posed by any of his opponents — but specifically by Sen. Harris — you could see a collapse of black support if she shows well in some of the early states, Iowa and New Hampshire,” cautioned Andrew Gillum, Florida’s first African American Democratic nominee for governor in 2018.
While Biden still leads among African American voters — many of whom warmly remember him as the loyal No. 2 to the nation’s first black president — polling from POLITICO/Morning Consult showed that his support among them dropped by 7 percentage points since the June 28 debate. Harris, however, rose 6 percentage points. Hill-HarrisX polling after the debate also showed Biden lost 8 points and Harris gained 8.
Gillum offered a personal observation concerning the shifts in sentiment among black voters: his mother supports Biden now, he says, but she backed Hillary Clinton in 2008 and was “all-out for Hillary Clinton up until Barack Obama won Iowa. And then it was an overnight switch to Obama.”
The cautionary tale of Clinton’s collapse with black voters 11 years ago in South Carolina — where black voters cast a majority of the Democratic primary vote — was also mentioned in interviews with POLITICO by black lawmakers and African American grassroots activists from Florida as well as South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana. Many noted that while Biden remains favored, talk of Harris has surged with the grassroots.
In the crowded 2020 primary, the Deep South states have added significance because their large African American populations make up a majority or a large proportion of the Democratic vote. Most of the states have primaries in March, which will be heavily influenced by South Carolina’s primary in late February — the first contest in the South and the first state with a significant black population.
“South Carolina is wide open,” said South Carolina state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, who represents a majority black legislative district and hosted Biden at a town hall July 7. “Things can change quickly. We’re a spirited electorate. This is a bare knuckles fight when it comes to campaigning across our state.”
To win the black vote in his state, Kimpson said the Democratic candidates need to talk about issues like criminal justice. Partly stealing Biden’s thunder with his criminal justice proposal, which includes decriminalizing marijuana use, Harris snagged headlines Tuesday by proposing a similar bill.
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In a mild pushback to Booker’s criticisms of Biden, who sponsored the 1994 crime bill that his new proposal partly unwinds, Kimpson pointed out that Rep. Jim Clyburn, South Carolina’s lone black congressman and a Democratic power broker, voted for it as well — and that the election needs to be about the future. Kimpson is neutral in the race.
Biden first tangled with Booker in June over his remarks about working with segregationists, which Harris highlighted later at the June 28 debate. Nine days later, Biden reversed himself by deciding to apologize for the comments. While rivals said that Biden was apologizing because his campaign was panicked over his bad debate performance and the subsequent polling, Biden later told AP that he chose South Carolina as the right venue for the apology because of its high proportion of black voters.
Cliff Albright, Atlanta-based co-founder of the Black Voters Matter activist group, saw a correlation between Biden’s recent outreach and the “buzz we’ve heard around Sen. Harris and the buzz around Elizabeth Warren.”
Riffing off a celebrated one-liner from Biden during a 2008 debate, Albright said Biden has been riding Obama’s coattails for a little too long: “The person who referred to Rudy Giuliani’s campaign as nothing but a ‘noun, a verb and 9/11’ is arguably now running a campaign that’s just ‘a noun, a verb and Barack Obama.’”
Albright said Biden’s biggest strength with black voters is rooted not just in his ties to Obama, but also in the perception that he’s the best general-election candidate.
“African American Mississippians in the long run are just looking for someone to beat Donald Trump,” said state Rep. Jeramey Anderson, a rising star in the Mississippi Democratic Party and someone who in 2013 became the youngest African American to win a legislative seat in the nation.
Neutral in the race, Anderson marveled at how the large Democratic primary brought Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Mississippi, which is “often a forgotten state,” and said that “it’s refreshing to see that even the former vice president of the United States needs to campaign very, very hard in the community to win the nomination.”
The Biden campaign will be returning to the Deep South, said Rep. Cedric Richmond, the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus and the campaign co-chair for Biden, who visited the congressman’s New Orleans district with him on Tuesday.
“Real leadership is you go to the people. You don’t make the people come to you,” said Richmond. “He’s always had good outreach with the African American community and respect within it.
“Wherever you find the people, we’re going to go to them. If you look at the South, in those Democratic primaries, they’re dominated by African American voters in the primary, you go down there.”