D. Elisabeth Glassco
2 min readNov 6, 2023

Today, the pundits and media are all in a tither because a recent New York Times poll revealed that President Joe Biden is running behind Donald Trump and find battleground states. Some of the places you can find that polling here and here and here.

The poll itself is here.

Per NYT:

Black voters are more disconnected from the Democratic Party than they have been in decades, frustrated with what many see as inaction on their political priorities and unhappy with President Biden, a candidate they helped lift to the White House just three years ago.

New polls by The New York Times and Siena College found that 22 percent of Black voters in six of the most important battleground states said they would support former President Donald J. Trump in next year’s election, and 71 percent would back Mr. Biden.

The drift in support is striking, given that Mr. Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters nationally in 2020 and 6 percent in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center. A Republican presidential candidate has not won more than 12 percent of the Black vote in nearly half a century.

Mr. Biden has a year to shore up his standing, but if numbers like these held up across the country in November 2024, they would amount to a historic shift: No Democratic presidential candidate since the civil rights era has earned less than 80 percent of the Black vote.

Okay, real talk!

Biden has disappointed Black voters. He said he wouldn’t forget us, but he has. He wouldn’t even be in the presidency if it had not been for southern black voters. No law enforcement reform. No voting rights legislation. Just like the others before him, he threw us overboard once he got in that seat.

Moreover, it’s under appreciated how the latest Middle East crisis is making Biden look to people of color. You see him sending aircraft carriers and planes and submarines to fight for Israel a country of, let’s be real, people who mostly look white like him. Bombing women and children and old people who are not white. But he can’t do that for black majority countries, though. The whole thing about Biden being old is not really on point. It’s not that he’s old. Bernie Sanders is old. Elizabeth Warren is old. And Trump certainly is old (and talking nonsense). It’s that Biden is old in his THINKING. as I have said, Biden’s strength (caution, steadfastness, traditional) is also his greatest weakness.

We have to worry about young and black/brown voters voting in great numbers for Trump. Voters of color are not stupid and, in particular, Black voters are pragmatic voters. Frankly, Black voters are used to NO political parties being truly on our side. But what many will do is stay at home or vote down ballot only.

D. Elisabeth Glassco

A native of of the great state of Mississippi and proud resident of New Jersey. Lecturer and Doctoral candidate in Media, Race, Class, and Politics @Rutgers.