President Biden has officially announced his re-election bid with a goal of finishing the job he started in 2021. No one wants him to complete that job more than African Americans who voted him into office based on his promises that addressed many of their most dire issues and concerns.
With his campaign run, once again Biden is going to have to depend heavily on the Black vote.
Long the most loyal Democratic constituency, Black voters resurrected Mr. Biden’s struggling presidential campaign in South Carolina and sent him to the White House with his party in control of the Senate after two runoff victories in Georgia. In 2020, Biden and Harris received 92% of the African-American vote, which was critical in them flipping five states blue.
In return, they hoped the administration would go beyond past presidents in trying to improve their communities — and they listened closely to his promises to do so. But exactly What has the Biden-Harris administration accomplished for Black America?
After officially announcing their 2024 re-election campaign this week, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will have to make the case to voters as to why they should get another four years in office.
Where They Delivered
On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order to advance racial equity throughout the entire federal government, appointed a historic number of Black members of his presidential cabinet and nominated a historic number of Black federal judges. He nominated Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court
The Biden-Harris administration can also tout that the Black unemployment rate reached its lowest level in U.S. history.
With the infrastructure and clean energy bills, billions of dollars are being invested in rebuilding Black and Brown communities.
The former adviser to the Biden-Harris 2020 campaign also noted the administration’s work to address environmental racism, including Biden’s recent executive order advancing the government’s work in environmental justice.
Biden pardoned federal marijuana convictions of formerly incarcerated people. Those pardons cleared the way for those individuals to seek housing and employment and to have more opportunities post-conviction.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan helped provide housing and employment relief to black and Brown communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and lift millions of children out of poverty. His $65 billion investment in making high-speed internet more accessible and affordable to communities of color is another Biden positive.
The Challenges
That’s all well and good, but the Biden-Harris administration still failed on a number of important deliverables the Black community was hoping for.
Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness program is currently stalled as the Supreme Court weighs a decision expected this summer,on whether to allow it to proceed. If the Black community ever expects to decrease the racial wealth gap, student loan debt forgiveness would play a big part.
The Black community had hoped voting rights reforms would be authorized on a national level. Instead, they’ve stalled as state legislatures continue to chip away at voting rights on the state level.
Nationally, voting rights and police reform were both “held up by filibusters” in a tightly divided U.S. Senate. It took too much time to get the President on board with getting rid of the filibuster to enact those federal reforms. That didn’t go over well with a lot of activists and now, it’s too late with a slim Republican lead in Congress.
Some activists had also hoped Biden would sign an executive order on reparations. Finally, the chance was there for the establishment of a reparations commission to at least look into the possibilities of reparations.
Turning Out the Vote
The challenge for Biden-Harris is getting the Black community excited and engaged about this election. If the Black community doesn’t turn out in big numbers, America has seen what can happen and there was evidence of a drop-off in Black voter engagement during the 2022 midterm election, even though things didn’t turn out as bad for the Democrats as had been forecast.
The share of Black voters in the electorate dropped by 1% nationally from 2018 to 2022, the biggest drop of any racial group measured, while the share of White, college-educated voters increased, according to data from HIT Strategies, a Democratic polling firm.
It does not take much of a decrease in Black voters to alter the outcome of elections in the most competitive states. In 2020, Mr. Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, each by fewer than 35,000 votes.
The number of ballots cast for Democratic Senate candidates by voters in Milwaukee — home to a large majority of Wisconsin’s Black population — dropped by 18% from 2018 to 2022, while the statewide turnout remained the same, according to Wisconsin voter data. Had Milwaukee delivered the same margin for Democrats in 2022 that it did in 2018, Mandela Barnes, a Democrat, would have defeated Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican.
The city’s mayor, Cavalier Johnson, attributed the difference in part to Republican efforts in Wisconsin to make voting harder — particularly after Mr. Biden’s narrow victory there in 2020. That’s something African-American voters will be up against in almost any state currently controlled by Republican legislatures.
Biden and Harris have a lot to be concerned about, but the black vote is large among them.