Black voters key to powering Biden
9 in 10 backed the former VP, AP VoteCast says
DETROIT — Power. Respect. Finally.
When Eric Sheffield first saw Joe Biden take the lead in the vote count in Georgia, the 52-year-old Black man immediately thought about all the years he spent urging his Black friends and family to vote and all the times he saw his preferred candidate lose.
“Over the years, a lot of Black people have said, ‘Well, my vote doesn’t matter,’ ” the real estate development analyst in Atlanta said lastweek. “This is proof that our vote does matter.”
Even as votes are still tallied, there’s little dispute that Black voters were a driving national force pushing the former vice president to become the presumptive president-elect.
By overwhelmingly backing Biden and showingupin strong numbers, Black voters not only helped deliver familiar battleground states to the Democrat, but they also created a new one in the longtimeGOPbastion of Georgia — potentially remaking presidential politics for years to come.
Activists pointed to the results as a repudiation of what many critics say is the racist rhetoric of President Donald Trump and an endorsement ofBiden’s choice of Kamala Harris, the first Black aswell as South Asian woman on a major party presidential ticket, as his running mate.
But they also credited their years of work organizing voters and signaled they intended to seek a return on their investment.
“We saw this early — we believedinus,” saidMaurice Mitchell, a Movement for Black Lives strategist and national director of the
Working Families Party — a progressive multiracial grassroots effort. “We believed in the power of Black voters and Black organizers in ourmovement.”
Black votersmadeup 11% of the national electorate, and 9 in 10 of them supported Biden, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide. Both figures are about on par with 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton also overwhelmingly wonBlack voters’ support but fell short of winning the White House, according to Pew Research Center estimates.
But when compared to Clinton, Biden drew more voters in critical areas with large Black populations.
InWayne County, Michigan, which includes Detroit, and in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Biden added to his vote totals and his margins compared to Clinton, while President Donald
Trump’s votes failed to match the Democratic gains. The increase in the Democratic vote inMilwaukee, about 28,000 votes, was more than the 20,000-vote lead Biden had in the state.
But perhaps the most striking evidence for the influence of Black voters was in Georgia, where Biden’s slim edge could make him the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the Republican stronghold in nearly three decades. The AP has not called that race.
So far, the Democrat has added 588,600 voters in Georgia compared to Clinton’s tally in 2016, while Trump saw an increase of only 366,900. Almost half of Biden’s gains came fromthe four largest counties — Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb — all in the Atlanta metro area with large Black populations.
Biden acknowledged Black voters’ role during his
victory speech Saturday night, noting the “African American community stood up again for me.”
“You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours,” he said.
In 2008 and 2012, Black voters showed up in record numbers for Barack Obama, the nation’s first Blackpresident — setting a new high bar.
But Black voter turnout dropped significantly in key cities in 2016, prompting debate within the party about why and a feeling among Black voters that they were being blamed for Trump’s victory.
But as Biden declared his candidacy and was competitive in the Democratic primary, it was Black voters in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Alabama who aligned with the former vice president and helped him win the nomination.
The choice of Biden was
a source of tension within the party — particularly among progressive activists whowere critical of his role in the passage of federal criminal justice legislation in the 1990s that lengthened sentences for violent crimes, helped fill prisons and flooded Black communities with police officers.
Others in the party were unhappy with his positions on health care, climate change and economic policy.
Polling suggests those tensions did not hurt Biden in the end. Black Biden voters were much more likely than other Biden voters — especially those who were white — to say they were casting their ballots for the Democrat rather than againstTrump, according to APVoteCast.
Behind that sentiment was massive voter mobilization.
Black Voters Matter Fund targeted more than 15 states, sending a fleet of buses on road trips across the nation. InGeorgia alone, they reached more than 500,000 voters and sent nearly 2 million text messages.
The effort was helped in that state by implementation of statewide automatic registrationwhenvoters obtain or renew state IDs. Black voter registrations increased by 40% in both Fulton and Gwinnett counties, according to the Georgia secretary of state. The increase in the growing counties outpaced the 6% increase in the Black population over the same time period.
Fair Fight, the voting rights group founded by Stacey Abrams, launched widespread voter education efforts and pushed back aggressively against GOPled efforts to limit mail voting. Abrams, a former candidate for Georgia governor, said she saw the election as a critical moment to try to “mitigate harm” done under the Trump administration.
“It’s one of those few moments where we have this power to shape the future for ourselves, to insist upon at least attention to our plight,” she said. “And to demand behavior that meets this notion that we have as a nation that there should be justice for all.”
Organizers and activists are now pivoting to plans to hold Biden accountable for promises of economic investment, tackling systemic racism, policing reforms and improved health care.
The Rev. William Barber II, a civil rights leader, said he expects Black poverty — a rate of 18.8% worsened by the coronavirus pandemic — to be an immediate priority for a Biden administration.
“We’ll be expecting followsaid Barber, a leader of the Poor People’s Campaign. “Biden needs to have a 50-day strategy, not a 100-day strategy, for addressing the issues.”