In the heated debates in our discussion section as to whether President Biden should step aside for a younger nominee, I’ve noticed charges from our handful of Black-identified commenters that the movement is driven by White elites who ignore the interests of Black Americans. I’ve largely dismissed this as frustrated rhetoric but I’m now seeing this echoed elsewhere.
MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones attributes a similar view to AOC and others.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has issued a dire warning to her party about the chaos that could ensue if they succeed in pushing President Joe Biden off the ticket. And she criticized Democrats who’ve given off-the-record quotes that suggest the party has resigned itself to a second Trump term.
In an Instagram Live video on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez warned liberals that a brokered convention could lead to chaos, in part because she says some of the Democratic “elites” who want Biden out also don’t want Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee in his place.
[…]
Ocasio-Cortez also highlighted the racial, ethnic and class divisions that appear to have formed between the majority of those pining to blow up the ticket — led mostly by white Democrats and media pundits — and those elected officials who feel they and their constituents have too much at stake to upend the process at this point and so are willing to do the work to re-elect Biden-Harris. She alluded to this cultural divide in her video when she spoke out against anonymous sources expressing a sense of fatalism on behalf of Democrats about what might happen if Biden remains on the ticket
I searched in vain for a transcription or at least a more detailed reporting of this version of AOC’s remarks and am not interested in spending an hour watching the Instagram post. So, it’s possible Jones is interpreting her comments through his own lens.
Regardless, Jones notes,
Earlier this week, I noted similar criticism voiced in a letter from the voter advocacy group Black Voters Matter that denounced some Democrats’ haphazard effort to overrule primary voters, oust Biden and potentially leapfrog Harris as the obvious second-in-line to be the party’s nominee. Part of that criticism stemmed from the fact that mobilizing Biden-Harris voters to cast a ballot for an entirely new set of nominees would most likely prove difficult.
And the criticism didn’t end there. In fact, hours before Ocasio-Cortez’s post to Instagram on Thursday, more than 1,400 Black women who are activists signed a separate letter calling out Democrats who are seeking to push Biden out and install someone other than Harris atop the ticket.
Democrats ought to heed these warnings and cease their hasty effort to oust Biden (or, failing that, to push aside Harris in the process) at the risk of fomenting resentment among voting blocs that are essential to their electoral goals.
That’s all pretty anecdotal. But the little data I can find seems to back it up.
A recent poll commissioned by Split Ticket (“We Polled Black Voters. Here’s What We Found.“), a group about which I have no knowledge, presents a lot of interesting data and analysis about Black attitudes toward the election. Regarding the specific question of replacing Biden on the ticket, we get this:
Although Black voters are ready to back President Biden by large margins if he chooses to stay in the race, it is clear that they are far more split on whether he should. While a clear majority of respondents reject the claim that he is too old to be president, Black voters are noticeably more divided on the question of whether he should step aside.
Our survey finds that 49% of Black voters think that Biden should remain in the race, compared with 43% who believe he should drop out. Notably, there is a clear divide observed among partisan lines; 60% of Black Democrats believe he should stay in, while this figure is just 33% with Independents and 12% with Republicans.
One of the other big dividing lines observed is among age — 62% of Black voters under 30 and 58% of Black voters between the ages of 30 and 44 believe that Biden should step aside. Older respondents, meanwhile, are more opposed to Biden leaving the race, with 68% of Black respondents over 65 favoring Biden staying in. This lines up with the primary elections, where older Black voters were consistently Biden’s strongest group, carrying him to commanding victories in states like South Carolina.
We also asked respondents whether Biden should take time to reconsider running in the presidential election. A majority (52%) agree that Biden should take time to reconsider, compared with 42% who disagree. While a commanding number of Black Independent and Republican respondents agree that Biden should reconsider running, Black Democrats are more divided — they split 49–46 on whether the president should reconsider his bid.
It’s worth noting, however, that if Biden does withdraw from the election, our survey suggests that Black voters are considerably more likely than not to view his decision as strengthening his legacy rather than weakening it, by a margin of 48–34.
Alas, a survey of only Blacks voters doesn’t tell us much about how they compare to White voters. But the recent AP-NORC poll shows a pretty substantial divide:
White and Hispanic Democrats want Biden to withdraw by a 2:1 margin whereas Black Democrats are 50-50.
Similarly, an Economist/YouGov poll similarly shows significantly more enthusiasm for Biden’s withdrawals among White and Hispanics than Blacks:
I’m not sure what to make of all of this, to be honest. Black support was critical to Biden’s securing the nomination in 2020 and they’re roughly a quarter of the Democratic base. Clearly, they’re either more satisfied with Biden’s performance in office, more comfortable with his declining verbal acuity, or more confident of his ability to defeat Trump (or some combination of those) than than their White co-partisans.
But this quotation from AOC’s Instagram commentary is noteworthy:
What I will say is what upsets me is [Democrats] saying we will lose. For me, to a certain extent, I don’t care what name is on there. We are not losing. I don’t know about you, but my community does not have the option to lose. My community does not have the luxury of accepting loss in July of an election year. My people are the first ones deported. They’re the first ones put in Rikers. They’re the first ones whose families are killed by war.
Hyperbole aside, it’s not unreasonable for Blacks and other marginalized groups to see the stakes of the election as higher. Although, interestingly, the polling shows that Hispanics—who would seemingly have even more reason to fear a Trump presidency—have essentially the same views on the matter as Whites.
