In the 2020 presidential election, African Americans were a vital part of the coalition that ended with Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump. In addition to improving Democratic performance in the suburbs and with non-college white men, voters of color favored the Biden-Harris ticket in 92% of cases. Four years later, the president is counting on maintaining and even improving those margins, which does not seem so clear-cut this time.
It turns out that the pollster HIT Strategies, close to the Democrats, recently conducted a focus group to assess the perception of African Americans about the economic management of the current president. Well, according to POLITICO, the results were "grim."
"Discouraged," "pathetic" and "pessimistic" were among the responses they got from a group of voters of color who chose Biden in 2020. Some even acknowledged things being better when Trump was president, something that surely concerns the current resident of the White House.
"Our economy is the lowest in God knows how long. We keep [sending] money to Ukraine and other countries instead of helping ourselves," said one respondent who lives in New Jersey. "I'm definitely not happy with where America was when Trump was president. And I'm not happy with where America is, now that Biden is president," said a Cleveland voter.
In addition, a Latino respondent said he was not aligned with either party, although he acknowledged that at least "Trump came in and changed things."
Voz Media recently reported on the difficulties Democrats face in attracting African American voters. For example, a survey published before the 2022 midterms warned that 73% of members of the black community did not feel that their lives had improved since Joe Biden's arrival to the White House.
"The Democratic Party has failed miserably to reach this demographic of black men, and sad to say. Black men are overwhelmingly their second most stable base, and yet they can't reach them in a way that makes their jobs easier," W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, wrote in a dialogue with The Washington Post.
