Poll finds more Black Americans plan to skip voting in 2024

Black Americans’ desire to vote in this year’s election is down sharply compared with four years ago, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted last month — a potentially troublesome sign for President Joe Biden, whose ascent was powered by Black voters in 2020 and who has intensified efforts to court them before November’s election.

The poll of more than 1,300 Black adults finds that 62 percent of Black Americans say they’re “absolutely certain to vote,” down from 74 percent in June 2020. The 12-percentage-point drop outpaces the four-point drop among Americans overall, from 72 percent to 68 percent.

The drop in turnout interest is sharpest among younger Black people, who have always been less enthusiastic about Biden and have now shifted to majority disapproval of his job performance. Overall, nearly 1 in 5 Black voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 say they are less than certain about whether they will vote at all this year.

The softening support includes voters like Michayla Crumble, who said she held her nose and voted for Biden in 2020 — and still cringes when she remembers Biden saying, in the midst of the 2020 campaign, that if an African American voter was having trouble deciding between him and Donald Trump, then “you ain’t Black.” Four years after voting for Biden to stop Trump, the 26-year-old student from St. Louis has left Biden’s camp altogether.

“I think it’s maybe because of the way the economy is going, how inflation is going and then with the whole situation in Palestine and how he’s responded to it — it’s just made me less impressed with him,” said Crumble, who said she is likely to vote for a third-party candidate in November.