In reaching out to Black voters this 2024 campaign season, surrogates are ready to tout the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris White House to date.
As President Joe Biden continues to negotiate with congressional Republicans to avert a default on the nation’s debt and a subsequent financial crisis, on the other side of Biden’s world, his 2024 reelection team is assembling its surrogate war room to ensure another four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
Last week, the Biden-Harris campaign announced a national advisory board composed of 50 members of the Democratic Party tasked with delivering the campaign’s message and engaging voters across the country.
The board, chaired by U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker, comprises diverse voices, including Black and LGBTQ+ Democrats – a likely strategy by the campaign to ensure outreach to voters of color and other coalition groups who will be crucial in next year’s general election.
“It speaks to the administration and the Biden-Harris team’s intentional efforts to make sure that they are including everyone,” U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, a member of the advisory board, told theGrio. “They’ve done that with their cabinet appointments and continue to do that on the campaign trail.”
Board member and Florida state Sen. Shevrin Jones said selecting a diverse group of Democrats for the advisory board was critical. Referencing Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan, “Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” Florida’s first openly gay Black lawmaker told theGrio, “If you want to capture that soul of the nation, you have to make sure you have everybody at the table.”
Jones said he’s particularly thrilled to see fellow Floridian U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost – the nation’s first Gen Z member of Congress – on the Biden-Harris campaign advisory board. The 26-year-old congressman, said Jones, could help galvanize young voters, who took to the streets to protest issues like gun violence, climate change and civil rights.
“These young people are pumped,” Jones said. “They can’t wait until they can get out and begin to make some noise to create change.”
Angela Angel, an adviser for Black Lives Matter Global Network, told theGrio that while she appreciates the diversity of the Biden-Harris advisory board, she would’ve also liked to see members who might have been critical of the administration in the past. She said that would show “they’re listening to dissenting voices.”
“That’s something I really want to see the campaign build because a lot of folks are not excited right now,” Angel said. “[They’re] going to have to go closer to the ground levels to get people reaching and talking to voters that really understand where they are.”
For decades, Black voters have overwhelmingly voted Democratic in presidential elections. In 2020, 92 percent of Black Americans voted for the Biden-Harris ticket. In 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned 91 percent of Black voters’ support. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama garnered 95 percent of the Black vote.
While Democrats “very rarely lose to Republicans,” said Angel, they do lose to people staying home and … people [saying] they aren’t invested because they don’t feel seen and heard.”
But “Black voters are what brought Joe Biden the presidency,” she added, “and that’s what’s going to carry him over again.”
In reaching out to Black voters for this 2024 campaign season, surrogates are ready to tout the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris White House to date.
“There are so many things that we can speak to that have already had and will continue to have a generational impact on Black communities,” said Brown.
The lawmaker named key legislation she and the Democratic Party, led by Biden and Harris, passed in the past two years that will greatly benefit Black Americans, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which invests billions of dollars to rebuilding areas “neglected” by underinvestment and years of racial redlining.
“We will be removing 100 percent of the lead pipes … often affected by communities that have been redlined, which is going to greatly impact Black communities,” said Brown.
She also lifted up historic investments in HBCUs and the Inflation Reduction Act, which capped the price of insulin at $35 per month “for a community that has the greatest disparity when it comes to diabetes.”
Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta told theGrio, “There’s so much that the president has accomplished that … unfortunately and unfairly sometimes in the press gets treated like wallpaper.”
The 32-year-old legislator, the only state representative on the Biden-Harris advisory board, said he and other surrogates are ready to hit the road and “talk about how personal the policy is, and what this translates to in real people’s lives.”
Kenyatta praised the Biden-Harris administration for establishing an environmental justice office and “making the largest investment in history in clean energy.”
“When we think about the impacts of climate change, Black and brown communities are hit first and worse by us not being climate resilient,” he noted. “If we don’t act on climate, we know that a lot of poor communities, a lot of Black communities, a lot of urban communities are going to be really impacted by this first — and worse, frankly.”
While the nation is awaiting a decision this summer from the Supreme Court on whether Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness program can move forward, Kenyatta said, “We know the profound impact that canceling the amount of student loan debt … would have on communities of color.”
Angel admitted the student debt program was an accomplishment “we can’t deny.” However, the organization prefers to see total student debt cancellation, which Angel said, along with raising the federal minimum wage, could lead to closing the racial wealth gap.
She acknowledged other achievements by the Biden-Harris White House, including appointing the nation’s first Black woman Supreme Court justice, sending a record number of Black judges to the federal bench and driving the Black unemployment rate down to a record low.
However, Angel argued the Biden-Harris administration “over-promised and under-delivered” to Black voters, particularly as it relates to addressing policing and “state-sanctioned violence against Black folks and in the Black community in non-carceral ways.” She acknowledged the administration has used the bully pulpit to name and shame police violence and “domestic terrorism of white supremacy.”
But as debates continue to be had about what the Biden-Harris administration has or hasn’t done, Kenyatta maintained the stakes are high if Biden and Harris are not reelected in 2024.
“This debate that’s being had right now on whether or not we should ban books on whether or not LGBTQ folks are even allowed to exist in public space – that is what the stakes are,” he told theGrio.
He and everyone who spoke to theGrio said a Republican administration would be dangerous for Black communities.
“If President [Biden] is not reelected, we’re going to have a chief executive in, most likely, Donald Trump, who has made it clear what his agenda is – and it is a radical anti-freedom agenda,” said Kenyatta.
Referring to former President Trump’s controversial CNN town hall last week – in which he called a Black Capitol Police officer a “thug” and continued to falsely claim the 2020 election was “rigged” – Brown said it’s important for voters to “really look at the comparison” between Trump and Biden.
“For those who are undecided or have any doubts or forgot about the insanity of what life would be like with Trump as president,” she said, “they got a really good reminder.”
Gerren Keith Gaynor is a White House Correspondent and the Managing Editor of Politics at theGrio. He is based in Washington, D.C.
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