Joe Biden is Losing: Announcing the Alliance for Black Equality Super PAC

As a social scientist and pollster for progressive causes and candidates, it is time to be honest about the danger cropping up for Black people, other communities of color, and their allies. The reality is that most polls show that if the election were held today, President Biden would likely lose the five swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania—to Mr. Trump. For those of you inclined to say things like “who cares what the polls say” and “the only poll that matters happens on election day,” my retort is that you are, of course, correct. There is no reason to give up hope at this stage of the electoral cycle. At the same time, I will say that, historically, when an incumbent president is down this late in the game it spells disaster in the poll that matters in November. What is most troubling about President Biden’s predicament is that one of the main reasons he is losing is because Black voters—the most reliable and stable segment of the Democratic Party’s coalition—are less enthusiastic about him than they were during the 2020 cycle and anywhere between 10-to-20 percent are open to the idea of voting for Mr. Trump. In order to stem this tide and hold onto to American democracy, we must radically change our approach to mobilizing Black voters by building a data-driven 527 committees (or Super PACs) to message on the key issues that matter to community. Today, I am announcing the formation of the one such committee: The Alliance for Black Equality.

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There are numerous theories about why a sizable minority of Black voters may sit home or are gravitating toward Mr. Trump. The most widely accepted viewpoint is that Black voters have not yet felt the relative gains of the Biden-Harris administration’s impressive array of wins on the macroeconomic front due to inflation. To combat this problem, President Biden and Vice-President Harris have settled on a messaging strategy to highlight their “historic” economic investments in Black communities. This is a solid strategy, but in isolation it is unlikely to work for two reasons. First, poll after poll has shown that the segment of the Black community that is most skeptical of the administration are low-propensity voters between the ages of 18 to 39. A campaign grounded solely in economic messages is unlikely to resonate with these voters because the precarity of their daily lives does not provide testimony of the administration’s successes. Second, and perhaps more important, since the beginning of the cycle, Black voters across all segments have reported in the surveys conducted by my firm, the 2040 Strategy Group, that they want the Biden-Harris administration to address the declining state of race relations and attacks on Black freedom in America. For some reason, the Biden-Harris campaign has left potent messaging opportunities around the SCOTUS affirmative action decision, critical race theory bans, and attacks on corporate DEI programs off the table. As the graphic at the top of this piece shows, our polling suggests that these are precisely the kinds of messages that can galvanize Black voters across the generational divide.

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The goal of the Alliance for Black Equality is to pick up these messaging opportunities and use them to boost voter engagement and turnout among low propensity Black voters in the swing states. Our mission is to spotlight Mr. Trump’s stated objective in his Project 2025 to overturn the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed the racial caste system in America, and drive home the reality that regardless of your views of the Biden-Harris administration they are better for Black people because they do not want to make racial discrimination legal again.

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Our plan is to raise awareness, funds, and energy for this campaign between June 1, 2024 and September 1, 2024. On September 15, 2024, we plan to go up on the air with at least one digital ad targeting low propensity Black voters in the swing states. If you are interested in helping us, please visit the Alliance for Black Equality’s campaign site on ActBlue. We believe in the power of people to move this system through small dollar donations, so we will gladly welcome anything you can contribute. We would also like you to join our monthly strategy calls, where we will share the results of our polling, talking points, and preview the packages for our digital ads. Please be on the lookout for the launch of the campaign’s official page on LinkedIn and an invitation to our kickoff webinar on June 5th.