The Rev. Al Sharpton, a host on MSNBC, warned President Joe Biden that he needs to start taking Black voters seriously if he has any chance of defeating former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Sharpton was of course referencing the hypothetical rematch that many expect to happen between Biden – the current president and far-away leader in the Democratic primary – and Trump – who has a commanding lead in GOP primary polls thus far.
He said that there Black voters as well as young voters all don’t have much enthusiasm for Biden, and that’s a potentially major problem for his re-election hopes.
As Sharpton said earlier this week while appearing on the “Morning Joe” program on the network:
“There is a lack of enthusiasm among young voters, particularly young Black voters, the Biden campaign needs to take seriously. You need to really build a ground game movement from the bottom-up, rather than poo-poo it and be in denial.”
In describing the re-election campaign that Biden is waging, Sharpton made a comparison to a boxing match. He suggested that some of the best fighters in the world are told that, even when they’re behind in a match, that they’re actually winning.
The thought behind it is that it prevents them from getting too relaxed for the rest of the fight.
Sharpton then said that the Biden campaign desperately needs to tell all Black voters that the Department of Justice “has prosecuted more federal civil rights cases” that have to do with young Black victims than any administration before it.
As he explained:
“They need to be saying that to young voters, to Black voters, saying, you compare our record and ask what the Justice Department is doing for cases like this under Donald Trump. The question is, you have to make voters feel that you’re not on Biden’s side, you’re on your own side. If you’re on your own side, you have to bet on it.”
A recent poll conducted by NBC News that surveyed voters across the country found that Trump is leading Biden in the cohort of 18 to 34 year olds by a margin of 46% to 42%.
While that’s not an insurmountable lead, it’s certainly a major eye-opener for the Biden campaign. This is especially true considering that young voters were one of the major reasons why Biden won last time around in 2020, as the current president defeated the former president by 20 percentage points in the 18- to 29-year-old cohort.
To have such a major turnaround in less than three years’ time is quite remarkable, actually.
A similar poll conducted by Siena College and the New York Times found that Trump is ahead of Biden in most of the major swing states, including Nevada (10 points), Georgia (six points), Arizona and Michigan (five points each), and Pennsylvania (four points).
Biden is ahead in Wisconsin, with a lead of two points over Trump. The problem, though, is that Biden took all six of those states in the 2020 election, which propelled him to victory.
That same poll also revealed that 22% of all Black voters in those swing states prefer Trump over Biden. In 2020, Trump was only able to garner 8% of the Black vote in those same states.
