Black voters way of Joe Biden’s broken promises

He has acknowledged that he owes his presidency to black voters after they saved his campaign in the South Carolina primary.

African-American voters still overwhelmingly support Joe Biden’s Democrats but fewer are likely to vote in this November’s midterm elections. Picture: AFP

Support among black voters for Joe Biden is falling amid dismay over the economy, racism and gun violence.

African-American voters still overwhelmingly support the US President’s Democrats but fewer are likely to vote in this November’s midterm elections, which will make it harder for the party to retain control of congress.

Mr Biden, 79, has acknowledged that he owes his presidency to black voters after they saved his campaign in the South Carolina primary and helped him win the crucial states of Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

“You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours,” Mr Biden said in his victory speech.

However, polling by Ipsos for The Washington Post showed clear signs black voters are growing weary of his presidency despite being generally more supportive than the population as a whole. Nine in 10 supported him for the presidency but seven in 10 now approve of his work; six in 10 say he is keeping campaign promises but almost four in 10 say he is not.

Most worrying for the Democrats, only 54 per cent say they are “certain to vote” in November, down from 74 per cent who said so in a poll two years ago before the presidential election. Of the main issues facing the country, black voters disapprove the most of Mr Biden’s handling of immigration (42 per cent) and the economy (41 per cent). When asked how much of a threat is posed to black people by a range of issues, the top were racism (86 per cent), gun violence (85 per cent) and police brutality (84 per cent).

Asked about the failure to reform voting rights, 46 per cent of black Americans said they were disappointed and 15 per cent said they were angry.

There is still a sharp difference with how black Americans see the Republican Party, with 75 per cent saying it is racist against them, compared with a quarter saying the same of the Democrats. Just over one in 10 had a favourable impression of former president Donald Trump.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, have marked its 50th anniversary with an article accusing Mr Trump of going further than Richard Nixon in trying to retain power by any means possible. They called Mr Trump America’s first “seditious” president because of his encouragement of actions on January 6 last year to overturn the election result.

“Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history … in a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination,” they wrote in the Post.

They said Mr Trump embraced Nixon’s 1969 adage: “A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.”

THE TIMES