Joe Biden made it through the Democrat primary, in part, because of support from the party’s black demographic. But that support is now on shaky ground.
While Biden’s approval numbers among black Americans are still higher than among voters more broadly, they have fallen significantly throughout the year.
According to a poll by HIT Strategies, 48 percent of black voters in November said Biden was addressing their needs, compared to 66 percent in June. The growing dissatisfaction is driven by frustration that some of the biggest pieces of legislation Democrats promised the black community, such as the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, have not been signed into law.
Theresa Moore, a woman who said she voted for Biden “because he promised he would not forget Black people once he got in office,” told NBC News she is now less enthusiastic about her vote and concerned about his administration’s commitment to fulfilling his campaign promises.
The Biden regime has made overtures to the black community by including many blacks (22) in his administration and appointing black judges to the federal courts.
The White House contends it has done good for blacks in the United States. According to Erica P. Loewe, the White House’s director of African American media,
Since Day One, the Biden-Harris administration has taken a whole-of-government approach to advancing racial equity and enhancing the lives of Black families across the nation.
The president and vice president have already delivered on their promise by increasing investment and economic opportunity in Black communities, improving health outcomes, providing historic support for HBCUs, taking action to reform our criminal justice system and using executive authority to protect voting rights.
Biden’s troubles partly are due to Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), whose vote against in an evenly divided Senate has shut down the Build Back Better bill for now. Without a strong Democrat majority, passing more controversial pieces of legislation such the Lewis voting and Floyd policing bills is all but impossible.
Some allies are willing to give Biden a break for now due to Republicans’ resistance to his agenda.
“The next couple of months are going to tell a very important story,” said president and CEO of the National Urban League.
Morial added:
I’m not going to give out the MVP award at halftime. The administration gets a B+ overall but an incomplete on voting and police reform. I am as impatient as anyone. But we have to be very seasoned and mature and understand that the reason we’re in this situation is because you have a couple of Democrats not supporting the president and the Republican obstructionists on the other side with the filibuster. It’s not that the president isn’t fighting for these bills.
Yet there is still a lingering sense that Biden isn’t fighting hard enough — that with the right amount of political will he could push through his promised voting and police reform bills like he did with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Martin Luther King III, the eldest son of the famed civil-rights leader, showed dissatisfaction with the White House while discussing plans to lead a march on his father’s birthday next year to support the voting bill.
Said King:
The president has said that “you had my back,” essentially meaning the “Black and brown communities were reasons why I was elected, and I’m going to have your back.” That means delivering on voting rights and some police reform issues that just did not happen, as well.
It seems like the administration and Congress took on the challenge of the infrastructure bill, and what we did see was what happens when the administration puts their full focus and weight behind something. What we are saying is that we want to see that full weight and power used for the people.
Prior to the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 government shutdowns and business closures, President Donald Trump presided over the lowest rate of black unemployment in history. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2020, Trump noted the fact that in 2019, black unemployment averaged 6.1 percent and hit 5.4 percent in August of that year.
On average, the unemployment rate for blacks was 11.6 percent between 1963 and 2012.
Seven months after Biden occupied the Oval Office, black unemployment was at 7.9 percent in October.
