Dear President Biden: Please, Please Read This

Black Voters on Biden and Gaza + Thoughtful links

Hi you.

I’ve written a massive essay on President Joe Biden’s reelection challenge grounded in his slipping numbers with some Black voters. It’s a doozy of a journey I take through economic and justice policy challenges right through Gaza and Black people’s solidarity with both Jews and Palestinians. Plus some thoughts on those tacky Donald Trump sneakers. The full piece is, as usual, behind the Puck paywall. But I’ll do a live reading on my YouTube channel live this Tuesday at 1:30pm PT / 4:30pm ET

Meanwhile, here’s the dispatch part of the email I wrote last week but didn’t send to you yet!

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Greetings from… home. I’m not on a plane, and it feels good. Some personal news: I’ve been elected as chief marshal of alumni for Harvard University! It’s a ceremonial post without much in the way of formal power, but it’s still an honor and humbling to be chosen by my class for our upcoming 25th reunion and Alumni Day.  

Here are a few other items capturing my attention and thoughts…

• Snap decisions: At a recent brunch in D.C. I reconnected with my friend Emily Tavoulareas, managing chair of the Tech & Society initiative at Georgetown University. She shared some insightful thoughts about Snapchat’s risks to children that I haven’t heard expressed much and wrote about it here. While the company doesn’t operate a traditional social media platform with feeds and content algorithms, it does play a defining and often damaging role in determining who your friends are.

• Reading list: I’ve been thinking all week about Dara Horn’s opus in The Atlantic, entitled Why The Most Educated People in American Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies. It’s the most comprehensive assessment I’ve found of specific antisemitic acts perpetrated on college campuses. Horn served on former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s antisemitism advisory committee and shares what she learned. She also offers a deep dive on the long history of antisemitism, where it comes from, and how it keeps coming back. I don’t agree with all of her conclusions or analysis of pro-Palestinian activists, but on the whole it’s impressive, disturbing, and essential reading.  

• Sound and fury: Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people, which has essentially brought an end to IVF fertility treatments in the state. Behind the decision is an aggressive Christian nationalist movement with goals of exercising dominion over all of society. Fun! Listen to this segment from On the Media to learn more about the New Apostolic Reformation and why abortion bans aren’t the end of the line for this movement. 

• Around the web: I keep coming across the work of scholar, cultural critic, and feminist bell hooks. Lately it was this Instagram reel, in which she discusses the importance of love to men: its importance as a verb that goes beyond romance and expansion to the realm of care, compassion, and unity. It’s a perspective we desperately need more of right now. 

Speaking of missing perspectives, my column, as Democrats voted “Uncommitted” is massive numbers during last week’s Michigan primary, is all about the Black voices and voters that the White House has so far failed to engage with this election cycle—and how the disconnect between Democrats and the core of the Democratic base could cost President Biden, and all of us. Consider this a wake-up call.

Biden’s Black Voter Dilemma

The election of Joe Biden didn’t come easily in 2020. A perfect storm of factors coalesced at the perfect time to deliver the Electoral College margin—and it was still close, coming down to less than 45,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Throughout Trump’s presidency, a record number of Americans hit the streets in protest: Black people responding to police violence; Muslims demonstrating against a religious travel ban; Jews activated by Charlottesville and rising antisemitism; women fighting an anti-abortion Supreme Court; even Republicans concerned by Trump’s authoritarian bent. All of that collective energy translated into votes.

But today, that historic coalition is obviously weaker, in large part due to declining support for Biden among the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency: Black Americans. From NBC News to the AP, all the surveys point in the same direction. According to exclusive polling produced for Puck by Echelon Insights, 18 percent of Black voters said the outcome of this year’s presidential election didn’t matter to them personally—five points above the national average. For non-college-educated voters of color, that number is even higher. 

There are two clear factors driving this shift: a perception that Biden has failed to deliver on key campaign promises, and his full-throated (though increasingly qualified) backing of Israel in its response to Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack. Of course, there’s a danger in simplifying a complex story. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Black voters remain overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats. There isn’t some sort of great exodus, or “Blexit,” underway. Nor is every Black American aligned with Palestinians over Israelis. But in yet another tight presidential race, likely to come down to tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, the disillusionment of Black Americans could very well decide the election. 

The White House is certainly aware of this enthusiasm gap. They’ve responded with a flurry of fact sheets, dispatched the president to Black churches, and launched a Black History Month media blitz to spread the word about Biden’s accomplishments for Black people. There’s data to support their case: Unemployment, inflation, and crime are all down; small business formation, healthcare access, and wages are all up. In fact, median inflation-adjusted wages for Black Americans have grown faster than for any other racial group over the last four years.

So why the obvious disconnect? I wanted to better understand this myself, so I called plugged-in members of the Black community, dug through historical records, and reflected on my own life to make sense of the shifting sentiment on the ground. 

“The biggest word that rings out for me these days is ‘dissonance,’” Pastor Michael McBride told me when I asked how he saw the 2024 election, and Biden’s fraying relationship with Black voters. McBride, who goes by “Pastor Mike,” is a Berkeley-area faith leader, was active in Ferguson, and has led successful campaigns against gun violence and mass incarceration. He also served on President Obama’s Faith-Based Advisory Council, and is regularly in touch with the Biden White House and Congressional Black Caucus. And he’s deeply worried that a meaningful number of these voters will express their frustration—with the economy, the lack of progress on criminal justice reform, and especially Israel’s war in Gaza—by tuning out the election or even voting for the other guy.

Like me, he’s aware of the statistics being touted by the administration and the Biden campaign. But that message is notably out of sync with the sentiment in his community: “Man, here we are in 2024, and life just feels like it’s worse. They told me voting for Biden would make things better. But it doesn’t feel better, doesn’t look better, doesn’t seem better,” McBride said, channeling the frustrations of Black voters he talks to. “But there’s this looming madman who we just experienced four years ago, in Donald Trump, and that really didn’t feel that good, either. So why are we only being offered these two choices where it just doesn’t feel like it’s getting better?”

Read the rest in Puck or join me on YouTube live. Super Tuesday March 5th. 1:30pm PT.

Much love.