Blacks and Bidenomics
Joe Biden is losing support among blacks because his economic policies are hurting people of every color.
We’ll believe it when the votes are counted a year from now, but polls are showing that blacks are souring on Joe Biden. Donald Trump is getting 22% of the black vote according to a recent New York Times-Sienna College poll. How could that be? “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump,” Biden eloquently opined in May 2020, “then you ain’t black.”
Even so, Trump received the votes of about 12% of “you ain’t blacks” in 2020, including an impressive 19% of black men, because he did so much for blacks in economic terms. By contrast, Democrats have done nothing but impoverish blacks in inner cities, where young black men slaughter each other in horrifying numbers, and yet Democrats can usually count on winning roughly 90% of the black vote.
“You’ll see Joe Biden get at least 92% of the African American vote in the general election,” predicted South Carolina Democrat Representative James Clyburn this week. “That I am confident of.”
Clyburn, you may recall, almost single-handedly saved Biden’s failing candidacy from the ash heap in the 2020 Democrat primaries. After finishing a dismal fourth and fifth in Iowa and New Hampshire respectively, Biden won South Carolina thanks to Clyburn’s endorsement and efforts to get out the black vote.
Now, Clyburn is offering his two cents on why Biden is struggling with blacks in the polls. Biden has “unfinished business” in that Democrats “have not been able to renew the Voting Rights Act,” he says. Why? “Because this conservative, MAGA-leaning Supreme Court has desecrated the Voting Rights Act, and we have not been able to get the Republicans in the Congress to renew it. And so a lot of black people are disappointed that that has not gotten done.”
On top of that, Clyburn says, “A lot of black people are disappointed that we were not able to renew that part of the Rescue Plan and the child tax credit.”
“It’s just this war and that lyin’ son of a b**ch Johnson!” Jenny’s abusive boyfriend told her in “Forrest Gump.”
Those may be factors, but there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the room Clyburn is missing, and we’ll return to the old wisdom of another James — Carville, that is — for the answer: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
According to another poll from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, 70% of voters think Bidenomics is hurting their bank accounts. The Financial Times also says just 14% of Americans believe Biden has made them better off.
Citing the NYT poll we noted at the beginning, The Wall Street Journal reports that blacks in particular are not fans of Bidenomics in part because “wage gains have cooled more dramatically for Black workers than other Americans.” Unemployment is also a factor. After dipping to “a record-low 4.7% in April,” the Journal says, “the rate rose to 5.8% in October.”
When wages and employment are down, inflation hurts even more.
Today’s inflation report says inflation cooled to 3.2% from last month’s 3.7% on an annual basis, and during October inflation didn’t grow at all, which is good news. The bad news is that inflation is still 3.2% on an annual basis, and the drop was fueled largely by falling gas prices, which have been volatile for years now. Without volatile food and energy, core inflation rose 4% year over year. The worse news is that since Biden took office, cumulative inflation is approaching 18%.
It doesn’t matter what color you are, high inflation hurts.
Heck, even illegal immigrants are increasingly leaving because the economy isn’t what they’d hoped.
But the Journal says blacks feel it more acutely in certain areas: “Some Black Americans have faced higher inflation than the national average, likely because they spend a greater share of their income on items like transportation and housing that have seen especially steep price increases.”
All that said, we hate to go all Debbie Downer, but it’s going to take more than high prices and employment issues to change the 90-10 voting split for blacks. They’re not going to abandon the party of abortion and racial grievance just because eggs and milk cost too much. Liberty is colorblind, but until people of all colors choose it over the divisive rhetoric and redistributive policies of Democrats, not much will truly change.
