A January NBC News poll showed 75% of Black registered voters saying they’d support Biden in 2024, while 16% said they’d back Trump. These results are consistent with earlier NBC News surveys and other polls, according to a current NBC News report. They show a drop among registered Black voters from 2020, when 85% of the Black voters surveyed said they backed Biden, 7% said they backed Trump, and most of the remainder said they didn’t vote.
A focus group of 14 undecided Black voters in North Carolina who see both President Biden and Donald Trump negatively complained that Biden is “old,” and did not follow through on his campaign promises. Ten of the 14 complained that the economy is in bad condition, groceries cost too much, the cost of living has not gone down, and student loan debt is suffocating. Despite reading a White House fact sheet enumerating the Biden administration’s accomplishments for Black Americans, the participants declined to believe what they read.
“I think that’s all political mumbo-jumbo,” Julius C., a 66-year-old from Mint Hill, said of the White House’s message. “People are hurting.”
“If it was a significant change in those areas, then it would be obvious. We could all see it and we could feel it in our day-to-day lives,” said Michael G., a 54-year-old from Greenville. “We would know people who were able to get a house that’s been struggling to get a house, and we would have seen people change their state from living check-to-check to doing better.”
Many of the focus group said that President Biden could improve his favorability with them and their communities if they saw tangible positive changes on affordability or more follow-through on his promises to eliminate student loan debt.
On March 4, the Biden administration announced that that it would be reducing student loan payments and pushing out a key deadline for some federal student loan borrowers who are repaying their loans under income-driven repayment plans. The announcement followed some concerns raised earlier by advocates that some student loan borrowers were being pushed into higher monthly payments sooner than they should have been. The Education Department will be providing the relief automatically
The Biden plan to cancel student loan debt for millions of borrowers was blocked last June by
a Supreme Court ruling undoing a broad executive action on student debt. But as of February of this year, the Biden administration has wiped out $136.6 billion in debt.
So: Student Loan Forgiveness box checked.
Affordability: Affordability is hurting everybody in the United States who is not in the top 10%. Only 16% of home listings were affordable for the typical household in 2023.
And the situation is in fact worse for Black and Hispanic households - housing affordability was three times worse for black households than for white households. Only 6.9% of homes for sale in 2023 were affordable for the typical Black household, compared with 21.6% for the typical white household. The share was nearly as low for Hispanic/Latino households (10.4%) and was highest for Asian households (27.4%).
The difficulty is that the housing crisis was and continues to be created by unregulated greed, not by any president. And who would regulate the cost of housing? If a congress were to pass, and a president were to sign a bill proposing to cap prices of housing, the Supreme Court would naturally rule the restraint of trade as unconstitutional.
Blaming Biden and punishing him by not voting for him for failing to bring down housing prices is voting for Trump. (Elementary school: Votes are counted by the numbers of votes for each candidate. Not voting for A reduces the number of votes for A. This advantages B. )
As for the cost of living in general – groceries, gasoline, health care, child care – blame the Federal Reserve. In order to try to bring inflation back down, the Fed has been drastically raising interest rates. This increases the cost of borrowing, meaning consumers have less money to spend. And the Federal Reserve admits that wealth inequality is systemic, multigenerational, and intransigent.
Why didn’t the Fed devise a protocol that would have the lending banks raise interest rates on corporate borrowers, instead of putting the hurt on ordinary Americans? In the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits rose to $2.1 trillion, the inflation rate was 7.5%, while salaries rose 5.5%. Jerome Powell and the mainstream economists of the Federal Reserve Board appear to have faith in the Chicago School of Economics Testament, which is as related to reality as Palmistry, Tarot, Astrology, and Numerology.
Writing in In These Times ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote “The companies who set prices are really reluctant to stop increasing them,” says Jeanna Smialek, who writes about the Fed for the New York Times. “What we saw was that corporations were actually pocketing quite a bit more profit off this…. They’re still putting up prices very rapidly, even in instances where their own costs are starting to fall.”
He went on to write “Corporate funders of Democrats have made it clear they don’t want the White House or the (Democratic) Party to blame this inflation on them.
“That’s a pity, because until Democrats tell it like it is — and talk accurately and clearly about such abuses of corporate power — their electoral majorities will continue to be fragile. And they’ll never get the political mandate they need to take on corporate power as directly and forcefully as it must be taken on.”
And this is the way Washington works. That’s my home town, it’s where I was raised, my father a right-wing economist for congressional committees and for two presidents.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
This is why we can’t always get what we want.
This is how Washington works. We can not refuse to vote – drop out like Beatniks – because Biden couldn’t wouldn’t didn’t give us what we want. Refusing to vote is voting for Trump. We can not expect the President to produce results that rely on a supportive congress and court system.
Most of us Americans are not taught civics, law, and How Washington Works in school. So it’s shocking when we get smacked in the face with the facts we didn’t know. There are corporate funders. They are called lobbyists. They have the members of Congress by the short hairs. Because Money.
There are things that ordinary people can do. Emailing and phoning your Congressional office is effective – they pretty much all tally calls and emails about specific issues. Voting matters. Getting other people to vote matters. But we have to know what we’re up against.
Besides corporate donors, we are up against the Roberts Supreme Court and an entrenched system that increases the voting power of White Christian Nationalists in the Senate, and fosters them in the House of Representatives.
Quoting from “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Sources of MAGA Madness,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O,
From 2010 through 2022, a historically high number of House Republicans were defeated in primaries, with the vast majority of successful challenges happening in the most evangelical districts.
The result: When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats.
Republicans represent 98% of the most evangelical safe districts and 82% of the remaining above-median evangelical safe districts. These two categories elected just under 75% of the House Republicans in safe districts.
Mike Johnson becoming speaker is best understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA.
So this is what we are up against.
With this set of facts, do you think it is in your interest to not vote for the Democratic candidate for President?