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Biden’s black support base could still decide who controls the Senate.
First published in Daily Maverick 168
The influence of black voters as guardians of the Democratic nomination cannot be measured in numbers alone.
It is the moral force within the party, the center of the diverse coalition the Democratic Party represents against the Republican Party’s white identity politics and the blatant nationalism of the Trump cult.
The 2020 election cycle revealed that the center of America’s political universe is no longer the lobbying shops on Washington’s K Street or the member-only shrines in Mar-a-Lago: it is the churches and community centers in places like Atlanta, Philadelphia and Greenville, South. Carolina.
Black voters in the Democratic Party nominated Joe Biden. They queued for hours to deliver the electoral votes he needed to take back the upper Midwest from the Trumpists. They could still decide who controls the Senate in the two Georgia seats that will be held in a runoff in January 2021.
By late February, Bernie Sanders was advancing toward the Democratic nomination against more than a dozen contenders. The political columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Nation had already put together a fantasy cabinet. Biden’s campaign looked dead in the water.
All that changed on the leap year date of February 29, the same day the United States recorded its first death from Covid-19. Biden overwhelmingly won the Democratic Party primaries in South Carolina by gaining the support of black voters who make up 60% of the Democratic electorate in the state.
That opened the floodgates and on Super Tuesday three days later, when multiple states voted, Joe Biden won so decisively that the race was over.
Before he could get to the job of healing the soul of the nation, as his campaign slogan promises, Biden had to capture the soul of the Democratic Party.
Why people elected Biden is complicated, but it has to do with the pragmatism of voters, particularly women. If you had to wait 200 years to get the right to vote, you are more likely to be picky.
What many black voters saw in Trump was not an aberration, a temporary slide into ugliness.
As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times, “Everything we have seen in the last four years – nativism, racism, corruption, rampant exploitation of the weak, and overt contempt for the vulnerable – is also part of the American history as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the entire history of the United States. “
People believed that Biden was the only candidate in the Democratic field who could face and beat Trump. We must remember, when people complain that he did not win overwhelmingly, that it is the only fourth time in a hundred years that an incumbent president has been defeated.
Biden is industrious and not a master of the political skills of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, who enjoyed massive support in black communities. But what people recognize is that he possesses a fundamental decency, a quality absent in the reptilian ranks of Donald Trump’s inner circle.
What was demonstrated by Tuesday’s election, and the painful recount that followed, is that every vote counts.
Biden was able to assemble the Obama coalition based on various demographic estimates: 40% of white voters, a vast majority of women and college graduates, three-quarters of Hispanics, and nine out of 10 black women.
Black women played a key role in organizing that victory. Among them were his running mate Kamala Harris, his chief strategist Symone Sanders, Harris’s chief of staff, Karine Jean-Pierre, and the woman who put Georgia on the line, Stacey Abrams.
That would be the same Stacey Abrams who narrowly lost the Georgia gubernatorial race to Trumpian Brian Kemp in 2018 because the minority vote – about a third of the state’s electorate – was ruthlessly suppressed. Instead of running for Senate this year, he chose to start Fair Fight 2020, a grassroots organization dedicated to registering millions of unregistered voters and ensuring that they can truly exercise their fundamental right: to participate in a democratic process.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has been one of Biden’s most important substitutes.
No one could have predicted in February how bad 2020 would get. More than 241,000 Americans have died of Covid-19, a disproportionate number of them Black and Hispanic. The pandemic is still reaching its peak. Millions have lost their jobs.
The Black Lives Matter protests after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor forced a reckoning over law enforcement and racial injustice.
The deaths of civil rights icon John Lewis and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which allowed Trump to shape a far-right court, added to the feeling of an absolutely brutal year for all of us who have had to live it.
And yet America’s mind remained remarkably impassive.
Despite all this tumult, Donald Trump’s approval rating on November 3 was basically the same as on February 29, somewhere below 40.
It would be more than frustrating if, after all this long work, Democrats take over the White House only to have to deal with Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader blocking appointments and legislation.
Any hope for the progressive agenda that the party’s Biden and Sanders wings formed together now hinges on the final round in which the battle for control of the Senate comes down to two runoffs in Georgia.
No better state could be chosen to illustrate the tribal divide in America that has shaped this entire election. Georgia is one of the central states of the Deep South with a sordid history of slavery and Jim Crow, as well as being the home of John Lewis and Martin Luther King.
The Senate runoff election is January 5, 2021. It would be a hopeful start to a new year to win control of the Senate in Georgia, of all places. DM168
Phillip van Niekerk is associate editor of Scrolla.
