The Biden campaign is making a big bet on voters waking up to how much President Joe Biden has accomplished, especially how much he has transformed the judiciary.
His judges elevate public defenders, voting rights lawyers, and union organizers, plus a record number of women, people of color, the first Muslim American with a life-tenured appointment, the first Navajo Nation federal judge—and, of course, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the daughter of two public school teachers.
Biden-appointed judges still trail, numerically, behind Trump-appointed Federalist Society conservatives—166 to 187 at this point in their presidencies—but are nonetheless his “greatest and most lasting achievements,” says Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) in an opinion piece penned for the National Newspapers Association (NNPA), the trade association for the Black press.
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Clyburn’s strong words are the opening salvo in what promises to be an all-out campaign making the case for Biden to Black voters and young people of color. These voters are the key to Biden’s re-election in 2024—or his defeat at the hands of his likely opponent, Donald Trump.
More than any other political figure, Clyburn helped elect Biden, endorsing him in the pivotal South Carolina primary and pushing him to clarify his promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Now the veteran South Carolina legislator is leading the charge to make the case to skeptical voters that Biden has delivered, contrary to the polls and widely held misperceptions about his effectiveness.
“I’ve heard rumblings that this president has failed the Black community when, in fact, he has invested over $7 billion in HBCUs in 3 short years, produced the lowest Black unemployment rate on record, and begun the earnest work of closing the digital divide for Black families by making broadband accessible and affordable,” Clyburn writes.
There’s more, he says: Inflation has eased, gas prices are down, and Vice President Kamala Harris has set the record for breaking the most ties in the U.S. Senate—a record previously held by John C. Calhoun, a staunch defender of slavery. “How poetic is it,” Clyburn muses that Harris, a Black woman and Asian American serving at the behest of Biden, “has set a new standard and brought us into the 21st century?”
Like Trump before him, Biden has prioritized getting like-minded judges confirmed, and given the Democrats’ thin majority in the Senate, he’s been remarkably successful. Matching Trump’s numbers will be hard because of GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s obstruction, but highlighting the diversity Biden has brought to the bench is a big selling point.
“For the African American community, part of the appeal is the historic civil-rights litigation where judges are critical,” says Jim Kessler, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist progressive group. “Younger voters and voters of color born after the civil-rights era are looking for a reason to support—or not support—Joe Biden,” says Kessler.
These voters can be reached through issues of choice, civil rights, and voting rights, where Biden has a record that contrasts well with any Republican. “Biden has done a ton of stuff, but younger voters don’t know about it,” says Kessler. “Part of a one-year campaign is to make sure voters know.”
The optimistic view of the Biden campaign is that where Biden is weak, it’s among voters that are part of the Democratic base, and they will come home once they are reminded of what Biden has accomplished.
Biden has the lowest poll rating of any recent president vying for a second term. One of the polling anomalies that analysts cite is the share of Black men that Trump is pulling from Biden. A group affiliated with the Democratic Party has done focus groups with key parts of the Democratic coalition, and a person who has seen the data explained to The Daily Beast key findings about Black male voters who are non-college-educated.
To put the findings in context, when we talk about Biden’s slippage with Black voters, exit polls showed Biden getting 87 percent in 2020, which is very much in line with what Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry got in their respective races. Other surveys had Biden at 89 percent and 91 percent. Barack Obama is in a different universe with 95 percent of the Black vote in 2008, and 93 percent in 2012.
Biden’s doing well with Black women, who remain strong supporters. Black men, not so much. They have a hard time identifying with Biden, and they’re extremely apathetic about voting. They don’t see that it makes a huge difference. But as down as they are on Biden and the Democrats, they’re more down on Republicans, which is good news for Biden.
But even that illusion was shattered with a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released this week that has Biden at 63 percent with Black voters, a precipitous decline from the 87 percent he claimed in 2020. The poll also shows Biden lagging behind Trump with Hispanic voters and young voters, key parts of the Democratic coalition.
In the focus groups conducted independently by a Democratic group, the surprising news for Biden was that non-college Black men think people did well during the Trump presidency, including themselves. They believe Democrats care about them but aren’t effective. Trump doesn’t care about them, but they believe they did better when he was in the White House.
Based on insights gleaned from these focus groups, there are obvious openings for Biden to show that he’s fighting for issues Black people and young people care about.
The numbers provided to The Daily Beast by a White House official recap the story Biden needs to tell: Out of 166 confirmed judges, 108 are women, 70 are women of color. And out of 53 Article 3 life-tenured judges, 33 are women. All are highly credentialed.
There are many “firsts” from historically disadvantaged communities. This long overdue diversity is about “making sure everybody gets a fair shake,” says the official, “and it instills confidence in the judicial system.” A worthy goal and a big bet that voters can see beyond the Trump-generated noise denigrating the judiciary.
