Riley slays it again. He's incapable of missing the point.
Biden’s Worst Nightmare: Blacks and Hispanics for Trump
The former president picks up support from minority voters because they did better in his economy.
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
March 5, 2024 5:21 pm ET
How hardheaded is Joe Biden?
For more than two years, the president persisted in treating sharp price increases as a transitory phenomenon, even while “peak inflation” kept peaking until we reached a 40-year high. He likewise insisted that the surge in illicit border crossings was seasonal and nothing to worry about, even while border officials reported record levels of migrants entering the country illegally and requesting asylum to avoid deportation.
One wonders if Mr. Biden is similarly in denial about his re-election prospects. Every major poll has him losing to Donald Trump. True, Election Day is eight months away, so that may well change. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that Democrats can’t keep Mr. Trump’s name off state ballots, but the former president still has plenty of other court battles ahead, and a felony conviction could have an effect on voter attitudes.
One thing Mr. Trump needn’t worry about at the moment, however, is waning support from his base. A new Journal poll shows that the former president maintains the backing of 83% of voters who supported him in 2020, and that support grew as his legal troubles mounted and Republican voters have assumed a defensive posture. Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has retained 73% of his supporters, a 10-point deficit that might not look so bad until you consider which voters have been abandoning him.
In November, the New York Times and Siena College released polling results in six swing states that are expected to determine the election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The survey indicated that 22% of blacks would vote for Mr. Trump, along with 42% of Hispanics. In 2020 Mr. Biden won the black vote, 92% to 8% and the Hispanic vote 59% to 38%, according to the Pew Research Center. Black and Hispanic voters have been an important part of the Democratic base for decades, but these coalitions aren’t everlasting. In 2016 Mr. Trump won by energizing people who hadn’t been politically active. Now he’s stealing voters from the other team.
A follow-up Times/Siena poll of voters nationwide was released this week and showed black support for the former president ticking up to 23% and Mr. Trump leading Mr. Biden outright among Hispanics, 46% to 40%. The liberal press can’t comprehend why nonwhites would back someone who has spread conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, smeared Mexican nationals and taunted his own former transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, for being Asian. But it’s not that complicated. According to the survey, more than half of all black and Hispanic respondents rank current economic conditions as “poor,” while 26% of blacks and 37% of Hispanics say they will vote for Mr. Trump because his policies benefited them personally.
Prior to the pandemic, tens of millions of working-class voters—a disproportionate number of whom are black and Hispanic—enjoyed low inflation, low unemployment and rising wages. For them, Mr. Biden’s record doesn’t compare. “The weekly wage for Americans in the 10th percentile of earners, of which minorities make up a greater share, grew by $4.24 per quarter in the first three years of the Trump presidency, compared with an average of 88 cents of gains per quarter across Barack Obama’s eight years,” the Christian Science Monitor reported in 2020. Before Covid, the economy was attracting about 400,000 new wage earners per year, versus an average of 250,000 per year under Mr. Obama. And although “higher-income groups saw weekly wages grow by larger dollar amounts, the gains in the 10th and 25th percentiles were larger than any other group.”
None of this means that Americans endorse Mr. Trump’s behavior, but it does suggest that their priorities in choosing a president differ from many in the political press. Eight years after Mr. Trump first won office, too many in the mainstream media still fail to grasp or accept this basic dynamic. The White House believes that these nonwhite Trump supporters will come home to Democrats in November, and perhaps they will. The Biden campaign strategy is to play up Mr. Trump’s appalling behavior on Jan. 6, 2021. Fair enough, but at this stage how many voters are unaware of the then-president’s antics that day, or his other efforts to overturn the election results?
Mr. Trump isn’t leading Mr. Biden because voters are ignorant about what they’d get in a second Trump term. Joe Biden won four years ago because voters wanted the Donald Trump economy without Donald Trump. That’s not what Mr. Biden delivered, and he’ll have to do more than call his opponent a threat to democracy if he’s going to win re-election. As Democratic strategist David Axelrod dryly noted in a recent interview, “I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night.”
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