Biden and the Black Vote

Joe Biden speaks at McKinley Elementary School in Des Moines. Photo by Phil Roeder.

Vice President Joe Biden has proven to have a tight grip on the Black vote in this election cycle, polling at 48% of the Black vote nationally. His closest prior competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders, notched just 20% in comparison. To leftist factions within the Democratic party, this was quite the shock. How did a presidential candidate with a well-documented record of supporting anti-Black legislation become the favored candidate of Black Americans—especially Southern Black Americans—in an election against a Republican incumbent who has been openly and vividly racist? 

Inherent to this question is a coastal elitism that assumes that Southern Black voters are either ignorant to Joe Biden’s previous ideological stances and voting record, choosing to blindly support a candidate because of his association to a president they liked, or simply do not know what is good for them. This line of thinking reveals a deep-seated flaw in the Democratic Party’s relationship with its Black constituents. 

An Anti-Black Past

From the day he announced his candidacy, Joe Biden was subject to intense scrutiny regarding his previous ideological stances and voting record. In 1994, he authored The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act to address the criticism that the left was too soft on crime. Among the provisions enumerated in the bill were the allocation of funds for the construction of federal prisons and increased mandatory minimum sentencing. Joe Biden openly supported this legislation on the Senate floor, stating “let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties… The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party ain’t the old wing I knew.” This is liberalism as Joe Biden understands it: policing, incarceration, and death. Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, an act he would later admit was wrong, recognizing the damage it did in amplifying the problem of mass incarceration. The bill is only one part of Joe Biden’s long pro-carceral state history, a history that includes several more bills that would exacerbate the War on Crime and disproportionately incarcerate the country’s Black citizens.

As though this were not enough, one of the biggest criticisms of Joe Biden this election cycle has been his opposition to busing. While verbally supporting integration, Joe Biden voted to oppose busing, the practice of transporting children to more distant school districts in order to counteract segregation. The practice of busing itself has since been condemned for failing to solve the problem of inequities in segregated schools. By simply forcing Black children to go to more well-resourced schools, it ignored the reality that they would be exposed to overtly racist treatment they would not have been subject to in their local schools.  However, the reason for Biden’s opposition to busing at the time had nothing to do with the well-being of Black students: it was a thinly-veiled attempt to appease the white moderate sect of his constituency that objected to Black children attending school with their own children.

Unlike other candidates who have been repentant of their voting records and prior ideological stances, take Senator Elizabeth Warren who openly apologized for erroneously self-identifying as Native American, Biden has not been as forthcoming with his admissions of fault. In a 2016 interview with CNBC, Biden admitted to feeling no remorse for authoring the crime bill, believing it “restored American cities.” This is a statement that many Black Americans in communities affected by violence and drug addiction would have agreed with in the 1990s. In his 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad, Biden claimed that placing 100,000 more police officers on the streets was essential to decrease the rates of violent crime across the country, despite evidence that police presence actually makes vulnerable communities more vulnerable. It is only recently, with the 2020 election looming, that Joe Biden has admitted that War on Crime policies were misguided. When pressed by Senator Kamala Harris about his camaraderie with segregationists and his opposition to busing, Biden did not repent, instead opting to identify himself as a champion of civil rights. Since the 1970s, Biden has been claiming participation in the Civil Rights Movement, notably remarking he had marched for civil rights. This, however, is a bold-faced lie, revealing that decades spent attempting to build a reputation as a Civil Rights activist had no grounds to begin with. So how did Joe Biden become Black America’s candidate? 

President Obama holds a healthcare rally at the University of Maryland in 2009. Photo by Daniel Borman.

Barack and Biden: Allies and Friends 

Enter Barack Obama. On February 9th, 2007, Barack Obama was a 45-year-old Black junior senator from Illinois. On February 10th, he was a presidential candidate, up against more than two hundred years of history. Obama was partial to Joe Biden from the start. When asked what kind of person he was looking to make his running mate, aides report Obama saying “I want somebody with gray in his hair.” As both a comparatively young candidate and a Black man, Obama’s campaign threatened the possibility for unprecedented change. The success of his candidacy would change the course of American history, drafting new rules as to who could be the face of the most preeminent nation on earth and simultaneously creating a new politic of inclusion. And though many who voted for him bought into this opportunity to be part of history, Obama remained hyper aware of the resistance to this change. With this in mind, Obama needed a running mate that would signify the opposite, one that would serve as a voice of tradition in a campaign of progressiveness. In August of 2007, Obama would settle on Joe Biden over Tim Kaine and Evan Bayh, both of whom are more than a decade younger than Biden. 

After two terms together, Biden and Obama were often presented to the American people as the best of friends. They were photographed enjoying one another’s company, hugging one another, sharing a laugh, and even eating ice cream together on White House grounds. What began as a relationship of necessity had blossomed before the public’s eyes into a close friendship. The American people watched as Barack Obama surprised a tearful Joe Biden with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the nation. Obama was known to speak at length about his respect for Joe Biden, using the words of William Butler Yeats to compliment him: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”

This mattered to Black America, who began to see Joe Biden as the proto-white ally. He was the guy that helped give us our first Black president and stood beside him for eight years. He was the guy in the pictures laughing with the first Black president, the guy who supported him in everything. He was the guy who believed in Barack Obama and believed in Black America. How could we see him as anything but a friend?

President Obama and Vice President Biden in the Oval Office. Photo by Pete Souza.

A Complicated Relationship

Despite what the outside world was allowed to see, this was not the entire picture. Obama and Biden were not the fast friends that they seemed to be. Their opposing styles, a reserved Obama and a loquacious Biden, clashed initially. Obama was not initially comfortable around Biden, viewing him as a consistently condescending presence. It did not help matters when Biden referred to Obama in an interview as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” a remark Obama simply had to laugh off. Biden would later apologize. 

Even now, years after their final term together has ended, there is evidence of strain in the relationship. In 2019, Biden’s official Twitter account tweeted an image of a friendship bracelet with beads that read “JOE” and “BARACK” along with the caption “Happy #BestFriendsDay to my friend, @BarackObama.” To this day, the official Barack Obama Twitter account has not replied. In 2016, Obama allegedly pushed Biden not to run, eventually giving his endorsement to Hillary Clinton. This is not to say that the two are enemies and spent years in the White House deceiving the public as to their closeness. Rather, the admiration they hold for one another as people was simply second to their political aspirations both for self and for country. As Grant Addison puts it for the Washington Examiner: “Obama’s legacy is Biden’s hope, but Biden’s candidacy is a threat to Obama’s legacy.”

The relationship has become extremely one-sided and understandably so: Biden still needs Obama, but Obama does not need him. Obama is Biden’s campaign. His defining strategy on the campaign trail has been, though he denies needing any “crutch,” referring to the successes of the Obama Administration, which he often refers to as “our administration.” Given the way his record of support for anti-Black policies has been weaponized against him, it is in his best interest to be remembered as the loyal sidekick of the first Black president rather than the architect of the the devastation of Black communities at the hands of his crime bill and bolstering of the prison-industrial complex. Given how long it has been since his policies have been considered his own rather than tied to a presidential administration, Biden also depends on the Obama Administration for his political relevance.

Biden’s Success 

Because this Biden was the one in our most recent memory, he has proven unmatched in his grip on the Black vote. On Super Tuesday, the Black vote was crucial for Biden victories in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama. In Virginia alone, exit poll data showed that Biden won more than 71% of Black voters in the primary. More than half of Tennessee and North Carolina’s Black voters also voted for Biden. Several theories have been offered to explain why Sanders, despite his more progressive campaign and documented history as a Civil Rights Activist, was not able to emulate Biden’s success with Black voters.

One theory is Biden’s notoriety, a benefit awarded to him by virtue of the office of the Vice President. In South Carolina, the sheer number of candidates worked in his favor because he was among the few candidates that voters were familiar with. As South Carolina educator Antonio Robinson explained, people simply didn’t know Warren and didn’t know Yang. He describes Joe Biden as a “commodity” compared to the other candidates that remained under the radar. Biden is an establishment candidate, and establishment candidates are usually the preferred candidates of Black voters. Establishment candidates usually have an existing relationship with the Black community, often through the community’s leaders, indicating to Black voters that they care to some extent about the welfare of the country’s Black citizens.

Another possible reason Joe Biden’s success with Black voters comes as a shock to those that are familiar with his voting record is that the Black political agenda is consistently misunderstood. In large part, the Black older voting population is conservative as a means of self-preservation. What is most misunderstood about Black voters is that history requires them to be pragmatic rather than aspirational about their hard fought gains in fear of taking political risks that won’t pay off. American politics for Black America has been a story of waiting: waiting for freedom, waiting for equal rights, waiting for the vote, etc. Black Americans have learned to embrace change that takes time rather than sweeping reforms like those Bernie Sanders promised. 

The first slaves arrived in the United States in 1619 via the transatlantic slave trade. Slavery would not end for almost 250 more years. Even once slavery was officially ended, African Americans were subject to predatory sharecropping practices that often resembled slavery in its cruelty. Post-sharecropping era, African Americans found themselves again institutionally victimized by segregation and the violence of Jim Crow. In the modern day, Black Americans are subject to the oppression of a prison-industrial system that incarcerates them at disproportionately high rates. Moreover, the Civil Rights Movement represented a time when Black Americans saw those that fought for them be murdered by the state. They watched the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King and the quasi-exile of Assata Shakur. All of this to say, Black America has been subject to a painstakingly slow journey toward equality, with each step revealing the lengths to which the government would go to impose oppressive restrictions on Black life. Understandably, post 1970s Black America is not a constituency of risk takers. 

With Biden and Sanders, who as a democratic socialist advocated for reforms far more extensive than Biden’s, being the two frontrunners throughout the race, research supports the theory that Sanders may simply have been too progressive of a candidate for the majority of the country’s Black voters. Sanders centered his campaign on a platform of radical change advocating student debt cancellation, free college, Medicare for all, and social security expansion. At a town hall moderated by CNN in South Carolina back in February, Sanders was confronted by an audience member about how he would ease the minds of those worried that he was pushing an agenda too far left for the country and too far left to beat Trump. These criticisms have been levelled against Sanders not only by prospective voters but also by former candidate Pete Buttigieg and Biden himself. The Black voting populace is far less radical than media representations may lead one to believe. In fact, according to research by Dr. Katherine Tate of Brown University, Black voters have become demonstrably less liberal since the 1970s. As Dr. Theodore R. Johnson of the Brennan Center for Justice explains, “most black voters, something on the order of 70%, identify as moderate or conservative. Only just over a quarter identify as liberal.” 

Additionally, though it may seem hard to believe, Biden’s role in the 1994 crime bill may not be a deal breaker for many older Black voters. In fact, many Black Americans bought into the logic of the War on Crime. Witnessing increased crime in their communities, Black people started to believe the claims that drugs were making people violent and aggressive. They started to recognize the drug users in their communities as the problem the media made them out to be. The media did the work of convincing the Black community that it was a scourge unto itself and that the carceral state was the only way to restore their communities. In their eyes, Joe Biden’s crime bill was not a major transgression. The crime bill, despite all its flaws, was presented as a solution to the plague of drug addiction and violence that had infiltrated Black communities of the 1980s and 1990s.

It is worth noting that Biden’s success is not due to Black voters as a whole: his Black base is composed predominantly of older Black voters. Biden struggled to captivate younger Black voters in the same way he did their parents and grandparents. Some of these voters interviewed at Texas Southern University stated that they believe the Democratic nominee should be supporting more progressive policies such as student debt cancellation and the Green New Deal, which Biden does not. They attribute his success to their elders’ more conservative political leanings. Research conducted by Data for Progress also shows that Biden’s support from older Black voters is more secure: when informed of Biden’s voting record, Black millennials were twice as likely to rescind support for him than their older counterparts. The Biden campaign has highlighted a generational gap in values that may reverse the post-1970s trend of decreasing liberalism among Black Americans.

Democratic Coastal Elitism

Liberal criticisms of the Black vote as being under informed or backwards speaks to the Democratic Party’s deep-seated coastal elitist mindset. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters began to ask one another “how could this happen?” Seeking someone to blame or some sort of explanation for Clinton’s failure to defeat Trump, many democratic coastal elites turned toward the south and middle America, blaming Hillary’s loss on the ignorance of these regions. Herein lies the problem: those outside of quaint college towns and coastal major cities are made a monolith and forced to shoulder the blame for any shift toward what liberals see as a regressionist, conservative way of thinking.This problem was even highlighted on the debate stage by former presidential candidate Representative Tim Ryan who claimed that the party must work to shift from its reputation as “coastal, elitist, and Ivy League.” But the South is not a monolith, nor can it be solely held responsible for any elitist accusations of backwardness or one candidate’s failure. The South is the most densely Black region of the United States and historically has proven to be key to many progressive victories that Democrats hold near and dear. 

Much of what liberals consider key tenets of their political philosophy find roots or at the very least active support among Black southerners. The Democratic Party lists among its goals: economic fairness, achieving equality, and protecting voting rights. These same goals were key tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, a movement which began in Montgomery, Alabama with the arrest of Rosa Parks. The leaders of the movement were largely Southerners: Parks (Tuskegee, Alabama), Martin Luther King Jr (Atlanta, Georgia), Medgar Evers (Decatur, Mississippi), and Jesse Jackson (Greenville, South Carolina) are among the most recognizable. The movement was integral in pushing legislation to secure the rights Black people have today such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, rights and protections their forefathers did not enjoy.

Beyond securing the legal rights of Black Americans, the Civil Rights Movement inspired several other social movements, providing the template for how to fight for equal rights in the US. According to Dr. Ruth Rosen of the University of California-Davis, Black liberation movements have twice been the inspiration for women’s rights movements, with the abolitionist movement inspiring women’s suffrage in the 19th century and the Civil Rights Movement inspiring women’s rights movements of the 20th century. Dr. George Chauncey claims that the same is true of the Civil Rights Movement’s effect on queer rights movements in the US—by laying the groundwork of oppressed groups depicting themselves as minorities, other marginalized groups were able to fight for rights they were deprived from as minorities as well. 

Black Southerners did not just inspire other movements—they were actively part of them. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed in North Carolina aimed to give younger African Americans a voice in the Civil Rights Movement. It was also a pillar of the anti-war movement that protested the Vietnam War. Black Southerners were also integral members in the struggle for bodily autonomy. Many Southern women were signees to “We Remember,” a document highlighting Black support for reproductive justice. Blaming the South is a form of erasure that aligns Black progressivists with the oppressive forces they themselves fought against.

Much of the rhetoric that surrounds Biden’s Black support from the left has not helped their chances in swaying Black voters toward more progressive candidates. Mayor Bill de Blasio drew ire after stating in an interview that Biden was only doing well with Black voters because they had not looked at him as a candidate past his connection to Barack Obama. Many of these black voters that he criticized felt as though he was calling them stupid, suggesting they could not think for themselves and make informed decisions. Black voters have been made to feel that way a lot recently. In the earlier days of the election cycle, it was made clear that Tom Steyer’s idea of reaching out to Black voters was dancing to “Back That A— Up” on stage with a local rapper while de Blasio penciled in visits to Black churches. The strategy to win the Black vote as shown by Democratic candidates has been to attend a service at a Black church, prove literacy in rap or hip-hop, eat fried chicken, and maybe reference a previous interaction with Reverend Al Sharpton. This behavior was criticized by Cory Booker on the debate stage, asserting that Black people in America are tired of the Democratic Party only ever showing up for them or expressing concern for Black issues when they need something. Even Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, felt it necessary to issue somewhat of an apology to Black Americans for the way the party had spent years taking them for granted.

Anita Hill presents sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991. Biden, who chaired the meeting during his time as a senator, has been criticized for mishandling Hill’s accusations. Photo by R. Michael Jenkins.

Our Best Days Still Lie Ahead

Joe Biden is not the ideal candidate for Black America. He has not demonstrated a concern with issues that affect Black people the way other candidates have. In his endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders, Civil Rights Activist Reverend Jesse Jackson described the Black community’s need for a radical candidate, stating “with the exception of Native Americans, African Americans are the people who are most behind socially and economically in the United States and our needs are not moderate.” The candidate for Black America should be the candidate that understands how systemic wealth inequality has harmed Black communities for centuries, the candidate that understands how racial health disparities are only compounded by difficulty accessing medical care, and the candidate who advocates the systematic overhaul of a society based in the devaluing of Black lives and dehumanization of Black people. 

That is not Joe Biden. He has helped construct the prison-industrial complex, lied about involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, rubbed elbows with segregationists, and his campaign has recently been shaken by sexual assault allegations against him. Despite this, he is the candidate that many Black voters see as most likely to help them hold on to rights they fought for centuries to obtain, the candidate that stood beside America’s first Black president and sent a message that he was the ally of the Black community, the candidate that has not made them feel stupid, and most importantly, the candidate they know. He is not a risk. 

To suggest that the Southern Black vote is based solely on sentimentality the way the white left does, however, would be a gross misunderstanding. Black voters are pragmatic and calculating. Like any other group, they vote in what they believe to be their best interest and their pragmatic political mindset has historically yielded results. I will not be the person to denigrate and bully elders who have lived through Jim Crow segregation and mass incarceration for voting for the candidate they feel will safeguard the rights they fought so valiantly to gain. However, I do believe it is time that pragmatism ceases to be the guiding principle of the Black vote. It is time for Black America to demand candidates that work for us and work for our vote. We do not need to accept candidates who pander during election cycles and then abandon our communities until the next, nor must we accept candidates that have done harm to our communities for decades but send messages of allyship and support. Though Joe Biden has already become the de facto nominee for the Democratic party, there will be other elections and other candidates that push moderate policies while preaching allyship. Our needs are not moderate; our politics should not be either.

Eriife Adelusimo is a staff writer at CPR and a sophomore in Columbia College studying Political Science and Public Health. She does not believe minorities and oppressed groups owe the Democratic Party—any party for that matter—their loyalty and dreams of the day when electoral politics are less awful.