Black Voters In Virginia After Democrat Losses: Biden Made Promises To Black People And Hasn't Kept Them Photo: President Joe Biden tours the African Americans in Defense of our Nations Corridor at the Pentagon with Vice President Kamala Harris, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, Feb. 10, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
Election day, Nov. 2, turned out to be a day of reckoning for Democrats who were counting on winning the Virginia gubernatorial race, but Black voters in the state are telling the Democratic National Committee not to blame them for the loss.
Democrats worried that Black voters, frustrated by the lack of pro-Black-America policies delivered by President Joe Biden’s administration, would not turn out. Especially after mailers attacking Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe for being “on the side of abusive police officers” started showing up in Virginia voters’ mailboxes, urging support for third-party hopeful Princess Blanding, who is Black, Politico reported.
“Biden made promises to Black people he hasn’t kept yet,” said William Joyner, a 54-year-old Democrat, in a New York Times interview. “A lot of people are upset with Biden. We have high gas prices. Everything is so expensive right now.”
There has seemingly been no movement on Biden’s much-touted “Lift Every Voice: A Plan For Black America,” which was a major campaign to Black America.
“There’s always this air that in some way, that Black Americans are supposed to wait,” LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told NPR in October. “Oftentimes, when we’re engaged in this process, it’s a sense of urgency, of what we need when there’s an election. But then once there’s a result, it seems that our issues are always put to the back burner.”
Black voters did turn out for McAuliffe in his 2013 race against Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. McAuliffe lost the white vote in that election by 20 points but won the Black vote by a 90-8 percent margin. He ended up winning that Virginia governor’s race by 3 points, 48-45 percent, according to a 2013 NBC report.
Initial exit polls on Nov. 2, 2021, showed that McAuliffe claimed a majority of Black voters as well. Eighty-six percent of Black voters chose McAuliffe, compared to 38 percent whites, according to CNN‘s exit polls.
Black state leaders and voters say the 2021 loss is a sign that the DNC should “not rely on minority voters to cover its cratering totals in more white areas of the state, particularly in rural communities that voted heavily for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican businessman who won the governor’s race,” The New York Times reported.
“I believe that Black voters are easily the first target for when things don’t go for how they want it to go,” said Marcia Price, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who won re-election.
“It’s a trash take to look at us and not the middle,” she said. “The middle said Youngkin is more palatable than Trump, and they were willing to take a chance with him.”
Asked about the gubernatorial loss in Virginia — a state President Biden won a year ago by 10 percent — longtime Democrat strategist James Carville blamed the poor results in Virginia on “stupid wokeness” during an interview with “PBS NewsHour.”
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 74: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin returns for a new season of the GHOGH podcast to discuss Bitcoin, bubbles, and Biden. He talks about the risk factors for Bitcoin as an investment asset including origin risk, speculative market structure, regulatory, and environment. Are broader financial markets in a massive speculative bubble?
“Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey,” Carville said. “Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this ‘take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools,’ that — people see that.”
Carville also suggested that progressive Democrats “need to go to a woke detox center,” The New York Post reported.
“They’re expressing language that people just don’t use. And there’s a backlash and a frustration at that,” Carville said. Suburbanites in Virginia and New Jersey “pulled away” from such “wokeness,” he said.
The Biden plan for Black America promised to:
The Biden Plan for Black America promises to:
