African Americans still support Biden; but in lieu of his losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, they’re reconsidering their options.
The American political universe is focused on black voters and whether they will rally to Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or Klobuchar in the Democratic Party’s presidential contest.
Black voters are key because, historically, they have voted overwhelmingly Democratic and will represent an increasing share of the party’s primary electorate in the weeks and months to come.
But there is real doubt and uncertainty about how they will vote and what might sway them. Very few African Americans, after all, have thus far voted, since Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly caucasian.
So it’s not as if we have real-world results by which to gauge or measure whom black voters will support.
Still, no one doubts that black voters will determine the party’s nominee. For numerical reasons alone if nothing else, they are too important a Democratic Party constituency.
Indeed, as Joe Biden put it on the night he badly lost the New Hampshire primary:
The fight to end Donald Trump’s presidency is just beginning… because, up til now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency of the Democratic Party: the African-American community…
I want you all to think of a number: 99.9 percent—that’s the percentage of African American voters who have not yet had a chance to vote in America…
You can’t be the Democratic nominee, and you can’t win a general election as a Democrat, unless you have overwhelming support from black and brown voters… It’s just really simple… It’s a natural fact. It’s true. It’s absolutely true…
All those Democrats who won against incumbents, from Jimmy Carter to a guy named Clinton to a guy named Obama, my good friend—guess what? They all had overwhelming African American support. Without it, nobody [in the Democratic Party has] ever won [the presidency]…
In short, to understand what has happened politically since New Hampshire, and what is to come, you have to understand the challenges and opportunities that exist for each of the candidates re: the black vote. Herewith a status update in a race that is still fluid and uncertain.
In this post, we’ll address Biden’s prospects with African American voters; and, in subsequent posts, we’ll do the same for each of the other Democratic presidential candidates.
Biden. As his aforementioned remarks indicate, and as we’ve explained here at ResCon1, Biden needs to win in South Carolina or his campaign is finished.
The good news for Biden, reports FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich, is that his “firewall in Southern states appears weakened but still standing.” A Feb. 13 East Carolina University poll, for instance, shows him with 28 percent of the vote in South Carolina versus 20 parent for Sanders.
Biden, moreover, “still has a strong lead (16 points over Sanders) among [the state’s] African American voters, a crucial voting bloc that has sided with the eventual nominee in every Democratic primary since 1992,” Rakich notes.
In fact, black voters account for roughly 60 percent of the Democratic Party primary electorate in South Carolina.
The bad news for Biden: he is losing ground in the Palmetto State and his rivals are gaining at his expense. “It wouldn’t take much more of a drop to put Sanders in the lead in our polling average ,” Rakich writes. “There are still two weeks until South Carolina votes, remember.”
“Interviews with two dozen South Carolina lawmakers, consultants and voters here suggests there are deep cracks in Joe Biden’s firewall state,” writes Maya King in Politico.
A February 10 Quinnipiac University national poll she notes, “shows Biden’s support among African-Americans at 27 percent—a 22-point slip from before the Iowa caucus.”
With bad back-to-back losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden has lost the air of inevitability that one surrounded his campaign; and black voters, consequently, seem to be reconsidering their support and looking at other candidates.
The bottom line: Biden is still afloat politically, but he’s taking on water at an alarming rate, and his ship may yet capsize. All hands are on deck in South Carolina, which is do-or-die politically for him. He needs a very strong showing of support from black voters.
Right now, Biden has sufficient support from African Americans to prevail in South Carolina Feb. 29; but Sanders remains a formidable political foe, and billionaire Tom Steyer is “doing an incredible job” attracting the interest of Palmetto State black voters, says the dean of the state’s Congressional delegation and House Majority Whip, Rep. Jim Clyburn.
Next up, we’ll consider the prospects of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Feature photo credit: Demetrius Freeman/New York Times via Redux and published by ABC News.