Joe Biden’s Black Voter Support Challenged by Rivals at NAACP

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden sought to bolster his support in the crucial black community at the NAACP convention in Detroit. But his rivals had other plans, delivering a mix of veiled and explicit jabs aimed at undercutting one of his biggest strengths as a presidential candidate.

“I got engaged early on in the civil rights movement,” the 76-year-old former vice president and senator said Wednesday, repeatedly vowing to fight “systemic racism” in the U.S. if elected to the White House.

Biden’s front-runner status is owed in part to black voters as he benefits from a mix of high name recognition, strong relationships with African American leaders, and a nostalgia for the Barack Obama presidency.

Biden sought to neutralize a vulnerability -- his authorship of the 1994 tough-on-crime law that has been criticized as exacerbating racial disparities in sentencing. Biden has also taken hits for his fond recollections of working with segregationist senators and his opposition to busing schoolchildren in the 1970s.

He defended his new criminal justice plan, which aims to reduce mass incarceration and ensure fairer sentences by expunging cannabis-use convictions and helping people reintegrate into society.

“We should shift the whole focus of what we’re doing from incarceration to rehabilitation,” he said. “I don’t think anybody should go to jail for a drug crime.”

But for some 2020 Democratic rivals who addressed the convention, Biden’s backtracking was too little, too late.

Senator Cory Booker, 50, one of two major black candidates in the field, called Biden an “architect of mass incarceration” and said his plan was “an inadequate solution” given his responsibility “for the crisis that we have now.”

“I’m disappointed that it’s taken Joe Biden years and years until he was running for president to actually say that he made a mistake that there were things in that bill that were extraordinarily bad,” Booker told reporters. “I’ve been living and working now in Newark, New Jersey, for 20 years and we’ve seen the devastating impact of legislation like that that has destroyed communities that has turned -- put mass incarceration on steroids.”

Later Wednesday, Biden and his campaign called into question Booker’s record as mayor of Newark, New Jersey’s largest city. While Biden was trying to “eliminate the crack cocaine-powder cocaine sentencing disparity,” his deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said in a statement, “Booker was running a police department that was such a civil rights nightmare that the U.S. Department of Justice intervened.”

Message Testing

The first major test of the black vote will come in South Carolina -- the fourth contest on the map after Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada -- and the first with a majority-black Democratic primary electorate.

Some younger rivals took aim at Biden’s central pitch, that he can return U.S. politics back to a time of cross-partisan cooperation because of the relationships he built over a 44-year career as senator and vice president.

Pete Buttigieg, 37, told the summit that President Donald Trump will win re-election “if our message as a Democratic Party is we’re just going to go back to normal.”

“I don’t need to tell black Americans about why the old normal isn’t going to work,” he said.

Julian Castro, 44, one of the youngest candidates after Buttigieg, called for “new energy” and a “new vision.”

Neither Buttigieg nor Castro mentioned Biden by name, but their generational pitch has been a recurring theme in a Democratic primary aiming to win a younger and diverse primary electorate.

Black Support Slipping

According to polling in mid-July by the Economist and YouGov, Biden has the support of 40% of black voters, down modestly from 45% in early June.

Next was Senator Kamala Harris, the other major black candidate, with 19%, up from 8% last month. The California senator made inroads after she tore into Biden’s past positions on racial issues in the debate, including his opposition to busing and his fond recollections of working with segregationist senators early in his Senate career.

But at the NAACP convention, she avoided mentioning her chief rival, instead echoing a theme at the convention about an America facing a crisis of character.

“I know this is an inflection moment in the history of our country,” Harris said. “We are better than this. We are up to this fight. We know how to fight the good fight when it’s about fighting for equality.”

Behind her in the Economist-YouGov poll with black voters was Senator Bernie Sanders with 11% and Senator Elizabeth Warren with 5%, who also spoke at the convention. Booker had 2%.

Warren pitched the NAACP on her plans to mitigate inequality, calling it a problem that “race lies just at the heart of” due to black-white wealth gap, rising hate crimes and diminishing voting rights.

Sanders said, “Trump may be crazy, he may be a racist, but he is not stupid. He is doing what demagogues have always done.”

The NAACP is one of the oldest continuing civil rights group in the nation. Black voters have picked the winner in all five contested Democratic presidential primaries since 1992, playing decisive roles in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 victory and Barack Obama’s narrow win in 2008.

To contact the reporters on this story: Sahil Kapur in Washington at skapur39@bloomberg.net;Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou in Washington at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Justin Blum

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