- Black voters matter! Black voters matter!
- Black voters matter! - Cliff Albright
and his organization, Black Voters Matter,
helped turn out the vote for Biden in 2020.
- Remember that the Black vote was instrumental
all across this country.
What you see is that Black voters still overwhelmingly
are supportive of President Biden,
although quite obviously that support has been going up
and down and decreasing in some ways.
And there's lots of reasons for that.
- He's right.
Roughly 9 in 10 Black voters
supported Biden in the 2020 election.
But today, a Washington Post Ipsos poll of more
than 1,200 Black Americans show a drop in support.
7 in 10 approve of President Biden's job performance,
and fewer than a quarter strongly approve.
- When the nation catches a cold,
our community catch pneumonia, right?
Particularly, you know, we're always the first ones
impacted by economic downturns,
and we're the last ones that benefit from the recoveries.
But at the end of the day, these economic issues
are part of what has, it goes into the mix of
how Black folks feel about the President.
What happens on issues of racial justice
like voting rights or like police reform,
that also impacts the way that Black voters
look at the presidency.
- Those changes he's referring to have been slow in coming.
That's in part because the Senate
is split 50-50 between the parties.
And the passage of most bills requires 60 votes.
- When this campaign was at its lowest ebb,
the African American community stood up again for me.
You've always had my back.
And I'll have yours.
- Ahead of the midterms,
Biden will need to convince voters
to turn out for him and his party
amid stalled bills important for Black America.
- I don't know how much people feel taken for granted,
but we are being taken for granted.
Look at how things unfolded in 2021.
It reflected the strategic priority
of which groupings of people within the population
they thought were most important.
So this whole initiative around the marginally bipartisan
infrastructure package
was a strategic calculation to try to send the message
to white swing voters that they're not too radical
or not too scary.
Whereas at the same time, you have a fusillade of attacks
on people of color in all of these key states,
Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Florida.
And there's a very tepid response
from the administration and from progressives.
- I do think that there is a weird dynamic
between the voting base that Joe Biden had,
which is largely Black women and young people,
and that he was able to catalyze such a historic turnout
for his election, and how that comes along with
just such a historic disappointment.
- Jaime Harrison,
the chair of the Democratic National Committee,
said the Biden administration has taken a number of steps
to improve the quality of life for Black people.
- This election is about a choice.
It's a choice between a party that is built on fraud
and fear and fascism,
that is banning books written by Black authors,
that are suppressing the votes of Black voters.
We're in the process of putting the first African American woman
on the Supreme Court,
a party that worked hard to bring down child poverty
and cut it in half
and had a disproportionate impact on the Black community.
And so you have a party that actually gives a damn
about Black communities
and is working hard in order to make the lives of the folks
in those communities better each and every day.
- Still, voters say the party and the president
need to get more aggressive ahead of November.
- Midterm elections are very important.
And it's a shame the state that a lot of Black people
are in as far as their feelings towards not only Joe Biden,
but the feelings that carry over to the Democratic Party
and to civic engagement overall, because we probably won't see
the historic turnout in these midterm elections.
I hope we do. I hope I'm wrong.
- But, you know, when you're in a situation
where you just had an attempted insurrection take place,
which has never happened not just in our lifetime
but, you know, pretty much in this country's history,
we're once again at a very critical juncture of
if this democracy is imperfect as it is,
if it's going to continue with any semblance of legitimacy,
it's a process that we know that we can play a critical role in.
I think Black folks, Black voters understand that.