President Biden took to the stage on Wednesday to kick off an outreach campaign for Black voters in Philadelphia, methodically listing more than a dozen accomplishments, executive orders, personnel decisions, investments and economic statistics.
“The bottom line is, we have invested in Black Americans more than any administration in history,” Biden said, summing up his argument.
It was a telling list that contrasted with the blunt appeal on the economy that his rival, former President Donald J. Trump, made a week earlier at a rally in the Bronx aimed at appealing to nonwhite voters.
“African-Americans are being genocided,” Trump said.
The two incidents underscore fundamental differences in how each side views outreach to Black people, whom they see as crucial to winning the 2024 election.
Biden has the list. Trump has the vibe.
Black voters are the very foundation of the Democratic coalition and a crucial component of elections in cities across battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. Polls have consistently shown Biden winning vast majorities of black voters, but he has performed below historical Democratic benchmarks, alarming the party's base and delighting Republican activists.
Trump has sought to cast his four years in the White House as a time of peace and prosperity, hoping voters, particularly Black voters, will fondly remember a pre-inflation era and help them weather the disruption of the pandemic that ground American life to a halt for much of 2020.
“It's a feeling thing,” Jaron Smith, one of the highest-ranking Black staffers in Trump's White House, said in explaining the former president's appeal to Black voters. “They know what it's like to live under a Trump economy and not a Biden economy.”
Trump has a long history of inflammatory and racist rhetoric that Biden's campaign has increasingly emphasized and that Trump hopes black voters will ignore. Biden on Wednesday reflected on Trump's promotion of birther conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama and his response to the killing of George Floyd four years ago.
“When old ghosts don new clothes and rise to power, let me be clear about what happens to you and your family,” Biden said this month in a commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta.
Biden's 2024 presidential message to Black voters so far has been a blend of shaking off memories of Trump's divisive record and touting his accomplishments. The list he outlined on Wednesday was substantial, including narrowing 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 by highways decades ago.
“Promises kept,” Biden repeated multiple times.
But a new New York Times/Siena College/Philadelphia Inquirer poll of battleground states found Biden supported by just 49% of registered black voters in races that also included third-party candidates, compared with 63% in a head-to-head race with Trump.
Ashley Etienne, who worked on Biden's 2020 campaign and later served as an aide to Vice President Kamala Harris, worries that the Biden campaign has yet to convey how the president's policies have actually improved the lives of most Black voters.
“What message is there beyond this long list of accomplishments?” Etienne said. “If people don't feel it, you can tell them all day and they won't get it.”
Etienne said one reason Biden initially struggled with black voters was because the president failed to push through two of his flagship campaign pledges in 2020: sweeping police reform and voting rights legislation in the wake of Floyd's killing. Both pledges stalled in Congress, leaving Biden limited to potentially temporary executive orders and Justice Department actions about which the public had little knowledge.
“They built Black voter turnout on those two issues, but they didn't get the Legislature to act on either issue,” she said. “That's a weakness they're not admitting, and I'm not sure they're going to address.”
Trump's core appeal to black and Latino voters is that they are suffering economically because of an influx of immigrants who are taking away jobs and opportunities — a variation of a theme he used to rally support among many white voters in 2016.
“The greatest impact, and the greatest negative impact, of these millions of people coming into our country is on our black and Hispanic people,” Trump said in the Bronx last week.
Roland S. Martin, a former television commentator who hosts his own streaming show and oversees the Black Star Network, which produces and distributes programming aimed at Black consumers, said the Biden campaign hasn't packaged its product in a compelling way.
“We need to be clear about how policy issues affect average brothers and sisters across the country, and people still struggle with that,” Martin said. “Republicans have always used bumper stickers. Democrats use white papers. We now live in the age of social media, where people don't read white papers. We need memes.”
The two campaigns have different goals: Biden needs to boost black voter turnout and maximize his support, while Trump could succeed by reducing the overall number of black voters or by winning over some of them.
Biden's latest schedule of activities underscores the importance and urgency of solidifying the support of the community that helped him win the Democratic nomination and the White House in 2020. And Biden's campaign has repeatedly argued that no other Democratic candidate has invested so much time and money so early in mobilizing Black voters.
“We need you,” Biden said Wednesday at Girard College, a Philadelphia boarding school where desegregation battles were fought decades ago.
In May alone, Biden delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College, traveled to Detroit to speak at the nation's largest NAACP dinner, spoke at the National Museum of African American History and Culture to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and appeared on black radio shows including V-103's “The Big Tigger Show” in Atlanta and 101.7's “The Truth with Sherwin Hughes” in Milwaukee.
Through these appearances, and in the new ads, he draws sharp contrasts with his predecessor.
“Mr. Trump is trying to get Americans to forget the dark and unsettling circumstances of his presidency,” Mr. Biden said Wednesday. At one point, Mr. Biden made the sign of the cross after incredulously repeating Mr. Trump's claim that he was the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln.
“Donald Trump's disrespect for black people is nothing new,” a narrator says in one of Biden's new ads, accusing him of siding with “violent white supremacists.” But the ad has aired only sparingly. The Biden campaign had paid $32,127 in airing costs in one Georgia market as of late Wednesday, according to data from ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Of course, Trump has touted his presidency as the “greatest economy in history,” a bygone utopia of low inflation and cheap gas, and he has some data of his own.
“Everybody was happy under a man named President Donald J. Trump,” he said last week. “Have you heard of him?”
He claimed that “the poverty rate for Black Americans is at an all-time low,” and in fact, according to U.S. Census data, the lowest poverty rate was in 2022 under Biden's administration.
Cornell Belcher, a veteran pollster who worked on Obama's two presidential campaigns, said Biden “has a great story to tell for black Americans from a policy standpoint.”
“In many ways, Biden can tell a better story than Obama could in 2012,” Belcher said. “The problem is, they've never heard it and they have no idea.”
He added that Trump faces a very different political calculation: “He wins by subtraction, not addition,” he said.
Maya King Contributed report.