As 2020 Democrats Court Black Voters, Biden Faces Reckoning on Race

Speaking at the National Urban League Annual Conference on Thursday, Booker sought to undercut Biden’s strong poll numbers with black voters, a core constituency in the Democratic primary and a current key base of his support.

The speech followed days of attacks from Booker on Biden’s new criminal justice reform plan, in which Booker highlighted Biden’s role in championing the 1994 crime bill that experts link to mass incarceration, dubbing him “the proud architect of a failed system.”

“It is easy to call Donald Trump a racist now; you get no badge of courage for that,” Booker said. “The question is, what were you doing to address structural inequality and institutional racism throughout your life? Don’t just tell us what you’re going to do. Tell us what you’ve already done. Don’t just tell us you’re going to be a champion for our communities when you become president, if you haven’t been a champion already.”

Biden and his campaign, meanwhile, have increasingly criticized both Booker and Harris in the lead-up to next week’s debate, forcefully defending Biden’s record on race and openly drawing contrasts on issues ranging from health care to policing. Biden’s willingness to engage his rivals comes after Harris tore into his record of opposing busing initiatives on the debate stage last month, dealing him his most significant blow of the campaign to date.

Virtually everyone in Biden’s campaign, from the former vice president on down, subscribes to the idea that he can no longer seek to stay above the Democratic fray on the debate stage, a posture he had tried to maintain in the early weeks of his campaign.

“I’m not going to be as polite this time,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Detroit on Wednesday. When an attendee told him that clashing with Booker and Harris now could make him a stronger general election candidate, Biden said: “If they want to argue about the past, I can do that. I got a past I’m proud of. They got a past that’s not quite so good.”

The confrontation on race and inequality between the candidates has been building for weeks and appeared to be approaching a boiling point Thursday. Ever since Booker dispensed with the primary’s early-stage niceties and demanded Biden apologize for his warm remarks about working with segregationists in the Senate, he and Harris have gone on the offensive by aggressively denouncing Biden’s record on race.

By highlighting Biden’s opposition to school busing, his support for the crime bill and other aspects of his long career in Washington, Harris — who later had to clarify her current stance on busing — and Booker have sought to portray their rival as having been on the wrong side of issues and developments affecting black Americans for decades. But polls have shown Biden with consistent, and sometimes commanding, leads among African American voters at this stage in the race.

Though Booker never mentioned Biden by name Thursday, his speech amplified the critique, making the case that Biden’s record on issues like criminal justice could hamper his ability to energize African American voters, whose turnout will be critical if the Democrats wish to defeat President Donald Trump next year.

“I want to talk about what people often mean when they say or ask, ‘Is someone electable,’ ” Booker said. “Because most of the time when somebody is asking about electability, they’re not asking about the African American voters who make up the most reliable constituency of the Democratic Party. And that’s a problem.”

A day earlier, Biden swung back at Booker’s criticisms by making his own arguments against Booker’s record while he was mayor of Newark, New Jersey.

“His police department was stopping and frisking people, mostly African American men,” he said of the Newark Police Department’s record of conducting improper stops under Booker’s watch.

His campaign also sent a lengthy statement to reporters Wednesday afternoon responding to Booker’s criticisms of Biden’s record. “It is Senator Booker, in fact, who has some hard questions to answer about his role in the criminal justice system,” the statement said.

The return volley from Biden’s campaign elevated Booker, a candidate who has struggled in the polls for months, as the back-and-forth created a drumbeat of media coverage leading into next week’s debate. And the aggressive response from Biden further freed Booker to take more direct aim at Biden in the debate Wednesday, when he and Harris will be standing on either side of him.

Less than an hour after Booker made his comments about electability, Kate Bedingfield, the Biden campaign’s communications director, returned fire, sending a tweet with photos of two polls that indicated Biden’s support among black voters far surpassed Booker’s.

Later Thursday, Monmouth University released a new poll out of South Carolina that bolstered that case. The survey showed Biden with a wide lead in the state, one of the first to vote next year, thanks in large part to his support from 51% of black voters there. Only 2% of black voters said they would vote for Booker.

At the same time, Harris’ decision to highlight Biden’s stance on school busing and integration at the June debates also gave her a significant boost in recent polls that was propelled in part by black voters. In the Monmouth poll, Harris finished a distant second behind Biden, drawing support from 12% of black South Carolina voters.

Biden has said he felt blindsided by Harris’ questioning, a point he reiterated in a radio interview that aired Thursday morning on “The Tom Joyner Morning Show.”

“I thought we were friends,” he said. “I hope we still will be.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.