President Joe Biden may not be able to lean as heavily on black voters going into 2024 as support for Democrats among some black populations is slipping, according to Politico.
In both polls and recent elections, Republicans have been increasingly able to draw votes from a group that has long been Democrats’ most reliable source of support, leaving Biden unable to assume his path to a win will look the same as it did in 2020, Politico reported Saturday. An early October Fox news poll shows Biden leading 74 percent to 26 percent among black voters in a hypothetical match-up with former President Donald Trump, down from his 90 percent lead among the demographic in 2020, according to a new report from Democratic data firm Catalist.
Only 88 percent of black voters choose the Democratic candidate in the 2022 midterms, versus 91 percent in 2020, per the firm’s data.
Declines in support across the elections are sharper among subsets of black voters: millennial and Gen Z voters dropped from 91 percent to 84 percent, men from 87 percent to 83 percent, rural voters from 84 percent to 80 percent and those without a college degree from 91 percent to 87 percent, Politico reported.
Louisiana’s gubernatorial election last week, which the state’s Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry won, underscores another factor that could hurt Democrats: voter turnout. Turnout dropped statewide by ten percentage points from 2019, but it saw an even greater drop among black voters, according to Politico.
“Jeff Landry was getting double digits [in heavily Black precincts] once you got outside of the urban areas of Baton Rouge and New Orleans — that very much catches my attention,” John Couvillon, a Louisiana Republican pollster, told Politico.
Katelynn Richardson on October 21, 2023
