In key swing state, Biden aims to shore up Black voter support
President Joe Biden’s this month to speak at the Detroit Branch NAACP’s annual Fight for Freedom Fund dinner came at a time when his reelection campaign faces a fraught question it desperately needs to answer.
It’s not whether Black voters will vastly prefer the Democratic president to his Republican challenger in this year’s election: that’s probably a given, historically speaking. The question is whether they will turn out in large enough numbers in a handful of swing states to make a difference.
And no one’s entirely sure.
Polls in key states have indicated that while Biden is well ahead of former President Donald Trump among Black voters, the level of support is far from that he saw in winning the 2020 election. And, in some cases, the difference is shocking. Exit polls, in which voters were surveyed after casting their ballots in the 2020 election, showed Biden winning 92% of the Black vote in Michigan. But recent polls of Black voters in the state show support for Biden dipping dramatically, to as low as 57% in one poll. A recent New York Times/ Siena College poll said Biden’s support among Black voters in Michigan topped out at 60%, compared with 30% for Trump in a head-to-head matchup.
“Black people are frustrated that they always come up with nothing,” said 38-yearold Jordan Smith, a Black voter in Saginaw who voted for Biden four years ago but isn’t certain he’ll do so again.
It’s extraordinarily likely that Biden will get the biggest share of the Black vote nationally and in Michigan, a swing state where Black support for Democratic presidential nominees has regularly topped 90%. Those surveys cited talk to far fewer Black voters than white ones, so the potential margins of error are far higher. But even if those polls are wrong in terms of the support Biden ultimately receives they could presage a lack of enthusiasm among Black voters.
Given that Biden already appears to be lagging Trump in key swing states including Michigan, any erosion of support could cost him the election.
So, it’s no surprise Biden is heading to Detroit for the first time this campaign to be the keynote speaker at the marquee dinner event for the largest branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. It underscores the crucial role one of the nation’s largest majority-Black cities could play in a battleground state that could decide the election.
“In 2016, everything was dependent on whether Hillary Clinton and Democrats could turn out Black support,” said Bernie Porn, pollster for EPIC-MRA of Lansing, which does work for the De USA TODAY Network and whose surveys have also shown Biden’s support lagging among Black people. “They were certainly 10,000 votes short if not more. It could have a dramatic impact.”
In 2016, when Clinton lost narrowly to Trump, her support among Black voters in exit polling was 92%. But in Detroit – where the vast majority of the state’s Black vote is concentrated – turnout was down from 2012 by some 41,000 ballots, meaning there were far fewer votes for her to get.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black person or woman to hold the position, stopped in the city this month as part of a nationwide “Economic Opportunity
Tour” aimed at Black voters, following a similar event in another swing state, Georgia. Addressing a primarily Black audience at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Harris highlighted efforts by the Biden administration to tackle racial economic disparities.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has opened offices in Benton Harbor, Detroit, Flint, Southfield and other cities with large concentrations of Black voters. Campaign surrogates have traveled across Michigan, visiting metro Detroit churches and holding events on Black maternal health and lead pipe replacement to highlight the administration’s action on those fronts.
And Biden hit the airwaves early, with a $25 million ad campaign last August his campaign says is the largest investment in Black media of any reelection effort. In between songs, Detroit-based radio stations have blasted Biden ads touting the administration’s efforts to narrow the racial wealth gap and elevate Black leaders. A mobile billboard in Detroit bragged about Black unemployment hitting record lows.
“Joe & Kamala did that,” it read.
Alexis Wiley, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s former chief of staff and founder and CEO of the strategic communications firm Moment Strategies, said Biden’s messaging tries to offer an explicit reminder of his administration’s impact on Black voters.
“People still want to know what comes next,” she said.
Trump, too, has made campaign investments, including his own radio ads appealing to Black voters. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
But Trump may not need to win over Black voters to win. He may only need them to refrain from voting. On that front, Biden’s Michigan campaign senior adviser Eddie McDonald pointed to the robust operation to turn out the vote.
Wiley suspects the challenge Democrats face isn’t a surge in support for Trump among Black voters. “It’s that they chose not to vote at all,” she said.
“It is clear what’s happening around (the Israel-Hamas conflict in) Gaza and also inflation are impacting the president’s support and enthusiasm with younger Black voters,” said Jamal Simmons, a political adviser and commentator who grew up in Detroit and served as Harris’ communication director.
In 2020, Biden won 94% of the vote in Detroit, by far the city with the most Black voters in the state. That was slightly smaller, percentage-wise than Clinton’s 95% in the city. Across the state, that trend – with Biden doing slightly worse than Clinton did, percentagewise – held in most of Michigan’s majority-Black cities.
“We’re going to do everything we can to never ever repeat that kind of result,” McDonald said.
In Wayne County – with Detroit as its anchor and home to roughly half of Michigan’s Black population – Biden saw a 2-percentage-point gain on Clinton’s vote share. But compared with his showing in many other places in Michigan, that was minuscule. In Kent County, for instance, the Democratic margin went from 45% in 2016 to 52% in 2020. In Oakland County, it went from 51% to 56%.
If margins in those other counties aren’t as strong, a lagging Black vote could cost Biden the election, even if he carries reliable Democratic strongholds. Trump won Michigan with 10,704 votes in 2016, or about twotenths of a percentage point, and pundits, in part, blamed Clinton’s loss on low voter turnout in Detroit.
Biden is heading to Detroit for the first time this campaign to be the keynote speaker at the marquee dinner event for the largest branch of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.