(Headline USA) President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris got off to a rough start in what was touted as an aggressive and lofty plan to win back black voters who have strayed from the Democrat plantation due to the administration’s awful stewardship and often cavalier, exploitative way of dealing with race.
Photos from President Biden's Philadelphia rally: the school's gym is only about half full of supporters
A good amount of space is empty and spacious press workspace takes up the rest pic.twitter.com/et70d2lpCD
— Steven Nelson (@stevennelson10) May 29, 2024
The duo set out to launch a new black voter outreach effort during a visit to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Wednesday.
Speaning to a nearly empty room at Girard College, an independent, predominately black boarding school in Philadelphia, Biden characteristically stumbled over his words on multiple occasions.
He appeared at one point to confuse Franklin D. Roosevelt with Benjamin Franklin, suggesting that the president who ushered us through World War II had discovered electricity while also using the internet.
BIDEN (VERY CONFUSED): "I promised to access affordable high-speed internet — because now internet is just as important as it was in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, electricity was…" pic.twitter.com/9OQiKCNn9m
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 29, 2024
The Philadelphia visit—which also included a visit to a small business to speak to members of the Black Chamber of Commerce—was the start of what the campaign describing as an eight-figure, summerlong effort to engage black student organizations, community groups and faith centers.
“We will continue to be aggressive, innovative, and thorough in our work to earn the support of the very voters who sent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House in 2020 and will do so again in 2024,” said Quentin Fulks, Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager.
The push comes at a moment when Biden has seen his solid support among black voters show signs of alarming erosion—and his rival, former President Donald Trump, rushing to take advantage of the growing disaffection among minorities with his own successful outreach strategy.
Among black adults, Biden’s approval has dropped from 94% when he started his term to just 55%, according to a poll published in March by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The economy has been a particular thorn in Biden’s side since 2022, when inflation hit a 40-year high. But there have also been signs of discontent in the black community over his controversial open-borders policy, with many struggling inner-city residents now forced to compete for services against a growing pool of illegal immigrants.
Turning out black voters could prove pivotal for Biden’s chances in what are expected to be among the most closely contested states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump, for his part, has been offering himself as a better president for black voters than Biden. At a rally last week in the Bronx, he railed against Biden on immigration and said “the biggest negative impact” of the influx of migrants in New York is “against our black population and our Hispanic population who are losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose.”
Biden’s effort to transfer billions in student-loan debt has disproportionately impacted upper- and middle-class black borrowers, although questions loom about its constitutionality after the Supreme Court ruled one such effort was illegal.
Yet, for blacks who did not go to college, whether by their own choice or not, they, like other taxpayers, are now obligated to assume the financial burden from deadbeat borrowers who failed to pay their federal loans back.
Biden also points to his appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court and his pick of Harris as the first black woman to serve as vice president.
However, Democrats continue to relentlessly attack Clarence Thomas, the only black male Supreme Court justice, underscoring that their motives are not based in racial equanimity so much as their own political advantage.
The same is true of Trump’s prospective vice presidential candidates, including Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla.; Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; and former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, all of whom are black men who have been smeared with nasty racial invective by the Biden campaign and its surrogates.
A growing number of blacks—and men in particular—have come to identify with Trump due to the lawfare attacks against him, seeing him as an iconoclastic hero taking on the corrupt justice system.
Meanwhile, many resent the Left’s overt attempts to pander to them while otherwise taking their community and votes for granted by allowing crime and cost of living to run rampant.
Black Americans already know how Joe Biden feels about them.
And they don’t like it.pic.twitter.com/U932BJUNYF
— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) May 29, 2024
The president’s visit to Philadelphia follows on a series of engagements with black community members in recent weeks, including a poorly received commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta where some students wondered why he was there and others turned their backs on him.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
