“Laundry list” or “impression”: Biden and Trump’s conflicting appeals to black voters

As President Joe Biden took the stage in Philadelphia on Wednesday to launch his agenda to reach black voters, he methodically reviewed a dozen accomplishments, executive orders, appointments, investments and economic statistics.

“Bottom line,” Biden said, summarizing his speech, “we are investing more in Black America than any previous administration in history.”

It was a compelling catalog that contrasted with the blunt appeal that his rival, former President Donald Trump, had made a week earlier on the economy at a rally in New York, intended to underscore his appeal to nonwhite voters.

“African Americans,” Trump said, “are being murdered.”

These two events captured a fundamental difference in Black coverage that both camps see as crucial to victory in 2024.

Biden has a list. Trump has the vibe.

Black voters are the backbone of the Democratic coalition and are a key component of city election boards in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and more. And while polls consistently show Biden winning the vast majority of black voters, he is trailing behind previous benchmarks for Democrats, to the deepening concern of party loyalists and the delight of GOP operatives.

Trump has tried to call his four years in the White House a period of peace and prosperity, hoping that voters — and Black voters in particular — will remember those pre-inflation days fondly and look back on the disruption caused by the pandemic that brought American life to a halt for much of 2020.

“That’s the impression,” said Ja’Ron Smith, one of the highest-ranking Black officials in the Trump White House, explaining the former president’s appeal to Black voters. “They know what it’s like to live in a Trump economy, not a Biden economy.”

Trump has a long history of inflammatory and racist remarks that the Biden campaign has increasingly highlighted and that Trump hopes black voters will forget. On Wednesday, Biden recalled Trump’s spread of a birther conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama, as well as his response to the murder of George Floyd four years ago.

“Let’s be clear about what will happen to you and your family when old ghosts in new clothes take over,” Biden said this month in a commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta.

Biden’s 2024 message to Black voters so far has been a combination of shaky, loose recollections of Trump’s divisive history and selling them on his record. The list he outlined Wednesday was lengthy: helping close the racial wealth gap, investing in historically black colleges and universities, appointing the first black woman to the Supreme Court, expanding high-speed Internet access and pushing policies to reconnect black neighborhoods divided several dozen years ago by highways.

“Promises made and kept,” Biden said over and over.

But in the latest poll of battleground states by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Biden had only 49% support among registered Black voters in a race that included candidates from third party. In a head-to-head matchup with Trump, he scored 63%.

Ashley Etienne, who worked on Biden’s 2020 campaign and later served as communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris, worried that Biden’s campaign had yet to translate into how the president’s agenda actually improved the lives of most Black voters.

“What is the message beyond the laundry list of achievements?” – said Etienne. “If people don’t feel it in your life, you can say it all day long – it doesn’t permeate.”

Etienne attributed Biden’s early struggles among black voters in part to the president’s inability to follow through on two signature promises in 2020: sweeping police reform after Floyd’s murder and voting rights legislation. Both are stuck in Congress, limiting Biden to executive orders that may prove temporary and to Justice Department actions that the public knows little about.

“They boosted Black turnout based on these two issues, and on neither of these two issues did they force Congress to take action,” she said. “It’s a loophole they haven’t acknowledged and I don’t know if they’re addressing it.”

The gist of Trump’s pitch to both black and Latino voters was that they are suffering economically from an influx of migrants who are depriving them of jobs and opportunities, a variation on the theme with which he won the support of so many whites in 2016 voters.

“These millions of people that are coming into our country are having the greatest impact and the greatest negative impact on our black population and our Latino population,” Trump said last week in New York.

Both campaigns have different goals. Biden needs Black turnout to be high and maximize support among these voters. Trump can succeed either by reducing the overall number of black voters or by shifting some to his column.

Cornell Belcher, a veteran pollster who worked on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, said Biden has a “politically fantastic story to tell” Black America.

“In many ways, Biden has a better story to tell than Obama did in 2012,” Belcher said. “The problem is, they haven’t heard it and they have no idea.”

He added that Trump faces completely different political calculations. “He wins not by addition,” he said, “but by subtraction.”