OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Things are getting desperate for President Joe Biden and his administration as they prepare to face former President Donald Trump in the next election.
The coalition of voters he galvanized to defeat the former president in the 2020 presidential election appears to be crumbling and that includes black voters, The Washington Examiner reported.
A recent poll shows that 30 percent of black men in seven swing states are planning to vote for the former president, which represents a massive increase from the 12 percent who supported him in 2020.
The president is still anticipated to carry the black vote, with 57 percent saying they will vote Democrat, but that is a marked collapse from 2020 and could mean the end of the tenure of President Biden.
“In the same poll, 42% of black women surveyed revealed they are still uncertain or persuadable in their voting choice. In 2020, 6% of black women voted for Trump. Now, 11% said they are definitely or probably going to vote for Trump,” the report said.
“In this particular election, the persuasion isn’t just to vote or not to vote,” Adrianne Shropshire, head of BlackPAC, a Democratic super PAC, said. The persuasion is actually to get people to come to Biden and away from third parties and away from Trump.”
The eligible black vote is anticipated to count for 1 percent of the vote in 2024 at 34.4 million.
“In an effort to garner support from the black community, Biden invested $25 million in an advertising campaign to reach key voters in swing states back in August. This includes the largest investment in black media for a reelection campaign in history. The move comes as Democratic pollster Michael Bocian pointed out that ‘Biden is further off than where we have seen Democrats in the past’ in capturing the black vote,” the report said.
And the president is said to be getting desperate to stop the bleeding of the black vote.
President Joe Biden is drawing new criticism after he directed his Food and Drug Administration to delay a ban on menthol cigarettes until after the election in what is seen as blatant pandering to black voters.
“Under Biden, the Food and Drug Administration has worked toward enacting a ban on menthol cigarettes for two years, but it has recently moved to delay the finalization of the ban until after the election,” columnist Jeremiah Poff wrote at the Washington Examiner.
“The delay is blatant election-year pandering. Biden is trying to shore up support among black voters, a demographic that, according to recent polling, is somewhat shifting away from him, imperiling his reelection prospects, and he believes that keeping menthol cigarettes accessible will help him politically,” Poff added.
The columnist went on to speculate that “the jury may be out” over whether the delay will help Biden at the polls with black voters continuing to cast a ballot for his party. But, he notes, treating the rule as a blatant election tool used to pander to black voters “is showing how little he thinks of” them.
“Black voters, according to Biden and his party, can be swayed to vote for the president by delaying this one rule that will no doubt take effect after the election if Biden is able to win reelection. In other words, Biden and the partisan Democrats at the FDA think black voters are so dumb they will vote for the Democratic Party as long as they can buy menthol cigarettes through Election Day,” Poff wrote.
“With such a small view of this voter demographic, it is no surprise that polling has continually shown that former President Donald Trump is doing better among black voters than any Republican has in more than a half-century. Biden has overseen rampant inflation, wage stagnation, and an unparalleled border crisis,” he added.
In conclusion, Poff suggested that those issues are problematic for all voters regardless of skin color, though “Biden thinks he can neutralize these serious electoral liabilities with a bit of old-fashioned pandering.”