Give it up for MAGA hat wearers and 53% of white women; they did a pretty solid job of scaring black people into thinking Joe Biden could and should be a thing, based squarely on Joe Biden’s ability to be white and be inoffensive to Joe Schmoe from Idaho.
Biden, who is trash, has a 48% lead with black voters, compared to 20% for Joe Biden and 9% for Elizabeth Warren. Cory Booker, who until this week was the only remaining candidate of color in the race, was only just polling at 4%.
We don’t have to go into an extensive reason of why Biden’s advantage with black voters makes no sense; Biden assisted Congressional Republicans in dismantling busing country-wide; he wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that helped lead to higher mass incarceration rates for African-Americans; in 1986 he co-sponsored legislation that treated crack cocaine (which ravaged black communities) more harshly than powdered cocaine (which white people used more); participated in (or at least did nothing to stop) the national harassment of a successful black woman and led directly to a monster being put on the Supreme Court. (Okay, I said we didn’t have to go into the reasons, I didn’t say I would.)
But, as was the case with Hillary Clinton, don’t mistake black people stepping in line behind Biden to mean they think he’s actually good. As stated, Biden is trash, for reasons that are numerous and plentiful as sweet bass licks in an Earth, Wind and Fire song. And black people know he’s trash.
But he’s acceptable, presentable trash. He’s trash that won’t upset the apple cart. Black people voted in record numbers to help elect the first African-American president, and white people flipped the hell out and elected Donald Trump instead.
Hillary Clinton was also trash, but she was competent trash. What black people didn’t and couldn’t count on was, in addition to America be racist AF, it is also sexist AF. I don’t need a lengthy list of reasons why Clinton wasn’t the best candidate (believe you me, I know), the fact that she couldn’t gain traction even with other white women speaks to how deeply white-male centered patriarchy has infected the country.
Biden’s lead in the polls with black voters isn’t about something he has to offer the country, which is functionally “make shit more like it was in 2016, when it was only kinda bad instead of catastrophically bad”. It’s a self-preservation technique. It’s trying to restore order by giving white people what they seem to want in a President more than anything else; a mediocre white dude running shit.
(This is the part where I add the caveat “not all white people”, because somebody will be mad about it.)
Sure, black America could back a candidate like Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, or Kamala Harris, or Julian Castro, or Cory Booker, or hell, even Tulsi fuckin’ Gabbard…but black Americans have bought into the media created lie that the way you win the nomination is by not upsetting people who haven’t voted for a Democrat since the Civil Rights act passed. And the way you do that is by presenting a paragon on centricism, a guy who won’t make people mad by suggesting anything as insane as “black lives matter”, “maybe cops shouldn’t be able to shoot unarmed black people”, and “healthcare probably shouldn’t bankrupt you”.
Biden is going to ride the center line straight to the Presidency (probably, hopefully, because even Biden would make a better president than the bloated corpse of a drowned pig currently scarfing down a Big Mac in the Oval Office), and black people are going ride with him, not because he’s the best guy for the job, but because he’s the guy in the office who will both nod intently and seem empathetic when your black colleague talks about the bullshit ticket he got pulled over for, and also laugh at the off-color racist joke the dude who has a MAGA hat just sitting in his cubicle waiting to be remarked on just told.
Electing Donald Trump was a power play by white, cisgender, straight Americans who felt that progress and equality got a little too close. The message was clear; “do this shit again, America, and we will burn this shit to the ground”.
Biden’s seemingly unshakeable lead amongst candidates who are demonstrably better than him suggests that people of color got that message loud and fuckin’ clear.
That Ipsos poll used a different methodology than the more recent Vice poll. Check this shit out:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z3bnvw/exclusive-poll-just-as-many-african-americans-say-theyd-consider-voting-for-bernie-sanders-as-joe-biden
I am so nervous we are going to get Biden but I think we are. Not just nervous for the general, but even if he wins, I don’t trust that he’s going to help us.
What I’m also really worried about is the racism within the left if black people give us Biden; we can’t blame them if he’s who we end up with; they are trying to cover their asses from white Democrats and moderates scaring the fuck out of them (and some of us non-black people).
I honestly think the racism will be less if Biden is the nominee and gets elected, if only because it won’t be amplified by the sexism some people on the left had for Hillary. 2016 was a really toxic as fuck combination of both.
Yeah that is the damn truth.
Biden’s biggest short-term problem is that his best argument — his “electability” — rests on a very slender string of gaining more racist-but-not-racist-enough-to-vote-Trump whites in MI WI and PA than losing fed-up voters seeking change in those states.
FWIW: I think any Democrat, and I really do mean “any,” has a pretty reasonable shot in all three states, which were incredibly close in ’16 when Trump was still a somewhat unknown quantity to low-info voters. But I’m really not sure the pool he wants to draw from is bigger than the one that might not vote for him or might vote for whatever moonbat the Green Party runs out in 2020.
His much deeper, longer-term problem is that his *best* pitch is “let’s go back to the way things were that worked so poorly my party lost 1,000 seats of government and the other party invested in a sunsetting racist moron.”
Heads up:
“Biden, who is trash, has a 48% lead with black voters, compared to 20% for Joe Biden”
The 2nd Biden should be Bernie
I know that Biden is the most popular with black voters, mostly through name recognition and association with Obama but it still just doesn’t make sense to me on many levels. His record screams of that old generation of “take what I give you and be thankful” kind of racism. That, and he’s basically a republican which is why Obama chose him back in 2008.