Soul of the Nation
Black women were key to Biden’s victory Biden’s black support base could yet decide who controls the Senate.
The influence of black voters as gatekeepers to the Democratic nomination cannot be measured in numbers alone. It is the moral force within the party, the centre of the diverse coalition the Democratic Party represents against the white identity politics of the Republican Party and the brazen nationalism of the Trump cult.
The 2020 electoral cycle revealed that the centre of America’s political universe is no longer the lobbying shops of Washington’s K Street or members-only sanctums at Mar-a-Lago: it is churches and community centres in places like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Greenville, South Carolina.
The black voters of the Democratic Party nominated Joe Biden. They stood in line for hours to hand him the electoral votes he needed to recapture the upper Midwest from the Trumpists. They could yet decide who controls the Senate in the two seats in Georgia that are going to a runoff in January 2021.
Back in late February, Bernie Sanders was cruising towards the Democratic nomination against more than a dozen contenders. The left-leaning newspaper Nation’s political columnist had already drawn up a fantasy cabinet. Biden’s campaign appeared dead in the water.
That all changed on the leap year date of 29 February, the same day the US recorded its first Covid-19 death. Biden overwhelmingly won the Democratic Party’s South Carolina primary by gaining the support of black voters who make up 60% of the Democratic electorate in the state.
That opened the floodgates and on Super Tuesday three days later, when a number of states voted, Joe Biden won so decisively that the race was all but over.
Before he could get to the job of healing the soul of the nation, as his campaign slogan promises, Biden had to capture the soul of the Democratic Party.
Why people chose Biden is complicated but it has to do with the pragmatism of voters, particularly women. If you had to wait 200 years for the right to vote you are more likely to be picky.
What many black voters saw in Trump was not an aberration, a temporary lapse into ugliness.
As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times, “everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history.”
People believed that Biden was the only candidate in the Democratic field who could take on and beat Trump. We need to remember, when people complain that he did not win by a landslide, that it is the only the third time in a hundred years that an incumbent president has been defeated.
Biden is a plodder and is not a master of the political skills of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, who enjoyed massive support in black communities. But what people recognise is that he possesses a fundamental decency, a quality absent in the reptilian ranks of Donald Trump’s inner circle.
What was shown by Tuesday’s election, and the agonising count that followed, is that every vote counted.
Biden was able to reassemble the Obama coalition based on several demographic calculations: 40% of white voters, a strong majority among women and college graduates, three-quarters of Hispanics, and nine out of 10 black women.
Black women played a key role in organising that victory. They included his running mate Kamala Harris, his chief strategist Symone Sanders, Harris’ Chief of Staff Karen Jean-Pierre, and the woman who put Georgia in play, Stacey Abrams.
That would be the same Stacey Abrams who narrowly lost the gubernatorial race in Georgia to the Trumpist Brian Kemp in 2018 because the minority vote — about a third of the state’s electorate — was ruthlessly suppressed. Instead of running for Senate this year, she chose to start Fair Fight 2020, a grassroots organisation devoted to registering millions of unregistered voters and ensuring they can actually exercise what is their fundamental right – participate in a democratic process.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has been one of Biden’s most important surrogates.
No one could have foreseen back in February how bad 2020 was going to get. More than 241,000 Americans have died of Covid-19, a disproportionate number of them black and Hispanic. The pandemic is still only reaching its peak. Millions have lost their jobs.
The Black Lives Matter protests after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor forced a reckoning on law enforcement and racial injustice.
The deaths of the civil rights icon John Lewis and Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – enabling Trump to shape an extreme rightwing Court – added to the sense of an absolutely brutal year for all of us who have had to live through it.
And yet the mind of America remained remarkably unmoved.
Through all of this tumult, Donald Trump’s approval rating on 3 November was basically the same as it was on 29 February — somewhere in the low 40s.
It would be beyond frustrating if, after this long slog, the Democrats take the White House only to have to deal with the Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader blocking appointments and legislation.
Any hope for the progressive agenda that the Biden and Sanders wings of the party shaped together now depends on the final round in which the battle for Senate control comes down to the two run-offs in Georgia.
You could not choose a better state to illustrate the tribal divide in America that has shaped this entire election. Georgia is one of the core states of the Deep South with a sordid history of slavery and Jim Crow, as well as being the home of John Lewis and Martin Luther King.
The senate run-off election is on 5 January 2021. It would be a hopeful beginning to a new year to win the control of Senate in Georgia, of all places.