Joe Biden’s Debt to Black Voters Comes Due

Read: Why Biden won

Americans patiently (and impatiently) waited for days as election officials counted ballots in Wisconsin and Michigan, and they continue to wait as officials count ballots in Pennsylvania and Georgia. Hillary Clinton lost all of those states in 2016, some of them by fewer than 11,000 votes. Democrats were aware, going into this election, that they would need at least some combination of them to be competitive this year. “All these battlegrounds went marginally to Donald Trump [four years ago], and we knew that defeating an incumbent president, even one as disastrous as Donald Trump, was going to be very hard,” Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me. The group began beefing up organizing efforts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania shortly after Trump’s election. A win for Democrats in 2020 would be marginal, “so every vote is going to matter, and Black voters—in Milwaukee, in Atlanta, in Philly, in Detroit—are the voters that are going to decide it,” Mitchell said.

As mail-in ballots were counted in heavily Black areas, and many of the battleground states began to flip to Biden, Mitchell’s thought proved prescient. For Clyburn, the reason for Black turnout was simple: “The Black vote this year responded to Trump as much as anything else,” he told me. “This guy shows nothing but disdain for Black people.”

On one level, the portrait is simple. Biden won more votes in areas with high Black populations than Clinton did in 2016. Although votes are still being counted in Pennsylvania and Georgia, Biden holds 93 percent of the vote in Philadelphia wards that are more than 75 percent Black, and he has earned roughly a quarter of a million more votes than Clinton did in the Atlanta metro area, according to the Associated Press. But this narrative is complicated by the fact that cities such as Detroit are rapidly gentrifying and shedding residents (nearly 5,000 in Detroit in the past two years alone). Biden ultimately won 1,000 fewer votes in Detroit than Clinton did in 2016, but his significant gains in nearby towns and counties, such as Oakland County, which has trended blue in recent years, may partially explain why Biden won fewer Black votes in Detroit proper.

The activation of Black voters is also the result of years of work by activists. There has historically been a gap between the rhetoric around the importance of registering Black voters and the investment in moving Black voters to action, Nse Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, told me. The New Georgia Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to registering nonwhite voters, was founded by Stacey Abrams in 2014 and has registered an estimated 500,000 voters since its inception. Particularly in places such as Georgia, Ufot said, party leaders have followed the conventional wisdom about who shows up to vote, and spent money on elections based on that. Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign showed the flaw in that logic; her campaign betrayed the fact that investment in turning out Black voters could later potentially flip a state in the Deep South. “Both the Confederacy and the civil-rights movement lay claim to Georgia’s past. The question now is, who will write this story about Georgia’s future, and will write a story about the South’s future?” Ufot said.

The Biden-campaign leaders actively sought to court Black voters throughout the race. They dispatched Magic Johnson to Detroit, Barack Obama to Philadelphia, and Spike Lee to Atlanta to speak explicitly to Black men. They listened to people such as Abrams on what the effects of reaching out to Black voters and registering new voters would be. And they highlighted aspects of their blueprint for America—such as funding for historically Black colleges and universities and boosting retirement savings—that would specifically impact Black Americans.