A second term for President Joe Biden could hinge on support from Black voters in the key battleground state of Georgia.
(Bloomberg) — A second term for President Joe Biden could hinge on support from Black voters in the key battleground state of Georgia.
The president hasn’t yet announced he’s running for re-election, but he’ll test his campaign message with the important constituency on Sunday from the pulpit of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Biden will join a key Georgia ally, newly re-elected senator Raphael Warnock, who is the senior pastor at the church.
Warnock invited Biden to speak at the historic church in Atlanta on the eve of the federal holiday honoring King — a reversal from the run-up to the Nov. 8 midterm election, during which the president and the senator steadfastly avoided appearing together. Biden’s closest proximity to Warnock in the final election stretch was about 1,000 miles away in Boston, where he joined a labor-union phone bank to boost the Georgian’s campaign.
But with Biden planning to seek re-election — and Warnock not set to face voters again for six years — the political calculus has changed: Instead of Biden’s mediocre approval rating weighing down Warnock’s re-election prospects, the president now depends on Warnock as an asset.
Georgia is likely to be a must-win for Biden next year. A razor-thin margin of victory there in 2020 — fueled by support from Black voters — helped Biden defeat former President Donald Trump, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in nearly three decades. Black people account for nearly half of the 1.9 million increase in Georgia’s eligible voter population between 2000 and 2019, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
In 2019, the Black voting population in Georgia reached a record of 2.5 million eligible voters, making up a third of the state’s electorate, Pew found. A CBS exit poll found that 88% of Georgia’s Black voters backed Biden over Trump in 2020.
Yet some Black Americans are frustrated with Biden’s progress on key issues, including voting rights and police reform. Some civil rights organizations in Georgia blasted Biden’s initial student loan forgiveness proposal as too stingy, before it was stalled by legal challenges.
“There are promises that have been left outstanding, and he would be better served to make good on those promises,” said Gerald Griggs, president of the nonpartisan Georgia NAACP, and an Atlanta civil rights attorney.
Biden’s approval ratings fell to 43% last year among Black voters, according to an October Morning Consult poll, only a slightly higher average than voters overall.
Tammy Greer, a political scientist at Clark Atlanta University, said Georgia’s Black voters still deeply support Biden, but how strongly they turn out will depend on whether he can clearly lay out what he has accomplished.
Greer said court blocks on his student loan forgiveness program and Republican Governor Brian Kemp taking credit for spending federal stimulus dollars have left some voters confused.
“It’s muddied the waters for Biden,” she said.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, a senior Biden adviser and former Atlanta mayor, defended Biden’s record on voting rights, saying he’s done as much as he can.
“The president has done and will continue to do all that he can do in his executive powers, but there’s only so much that he can do,” she told reporters Friday. “We need Congress to act.”
Primary Power
Biden backed changes to the Democratic primary calendar that make South Carolina — where support from Black voters helped revive Biden’s then-flagging 2020 campaign — the first state to vote and move Georgia ahead of Super Tuesday.
The reshuffle will elevate the Black voters’ impact in future races and could play in Biden’s favor in 2024.
“The Biden folks obviously think that Black voters continue to provide a strong base for the president,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican consultant in Atlanta.
Before South Carolina’s primary in 2020, in which Biden placed first by a large margin, his campaign “was circling the drain, and they corked it,” Robinson said.
A Symbolic Backdrop
Warnock and Biden will appear together on the heels of Warnock’s victory over Republican challenger Hershel Walker in a tight race that went to a Dec. 6 runoff and helped Democrats slightly expand their narrow Senate majority to 51 seats.
Warnock “never made a secret that he supported Joe Biden,” said Kevin Harris, former chief of staff for Biden’s 2020 campaign. “But, in the context of that campaign, he understood what it was about. It had to be about Raphael Warnock.”
The Democrat’s win came despite a decline in Black turnout compared to the 2018 midterms, and an increase in turnout among White voters, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning think tank at New York University.
Given that getting Black voters to come to the polls next year in Georgia is essential for Biden, the site and timing of Sunday’s speech carry symbolic weight there and beyond.
King, a champion of landmark voting rights and anti-discrimination legislation, served as co-pastor at Ebenezer before he was assassinated in 1968. Biden will be the first sitting president to address a Sunday service there, Lance Bottoms said. She said Biden would touch on issues of importance to Black Americans.
“There’s no better backdrop for that than Ebenezer Baptist Church, and standing in Georgia, which has become just the epicenter of some major sort of political movements here in recent years,” Harris said.
–With assistance from Justin Sink and Josh Wingrove.
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