Joe Biden may have picked Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate but the choice doesn’t appear to be a favorite with Black voters.
Harris is the first Black woman and the first candidate of Indian descent on a major party’s presidential ticket and Biden selected her because of her appeal to communities of color, but she doesn’t seem to be making inroads with Black voters.
While 76 percent of likely Democratic voters have a favorable impression of Harris — and 48 percent have a very favorable impression — a third of Black voters say the choice makes them less likely to support the Democratic ticket, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey.
The Biden-Harris ticket isn’t gaining much ground with young Black voters.
Biden’s past is coming back to bite him with Black community. The 1994 crime bill put a disproportionate number of Black people behind bars. Some see Biden’s selection of Harris as a way to excuse his past slights to the Black community.
“For every African American, especially, young African Americans, we point clearly to the 1994 crime bill, which was sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden — one which gave $9.7 billion to build private prisons in our country and provided grants and incentivized states to create what we call the three-strike law,” Fox News political analyst Gianno Caldwell told “Fox & Friends.”
The legislation was “very intentional and it created a fair amount of injustice for African Americans,” Caldwell said.
“Joe Biden is a part of the problem therefore I don’t understand how anyone could be thinking he could fix the injustices when he was the one who created them.”
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
On top of Biden’s shaky past with the Black community, is Kamala Harris, who has problems too. “Many voters have also taken issue with Harris’ past as a prosecutor, regardless of how progressive she has claimed to be during her time working as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011 and later going on to become California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017,” Newsweek reported.
“We are in the midst of the largest protest movement in American history, the subject of which is excessive policing,” said Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, in a tweet. And yet, she wrote, “the Democratic Party chose a ‘top cop’ and the author of the Joe Biden crime bill to save us from (President Donald Trump). The contempt for the base is, wow.”
