Biden’s Survival Plan: Decry ‘Elite’ Critics, Appeal to His Base

Black voters and organized labor have been the president’s key backers and they’re going to have to carry him now.

President Joe Biden speaks during a church service at the Mount Airy Church of God in Christ in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Sunday. | Hannah Yoon for POLITICO

By JONATHAN MARTIN

07/08/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Jonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.

NEW ORLEANS — Sitting on a panel here at Essence Fest, an annual gathering of Black leaders, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) brought the crowd alive Saturday with a declaration: “It ain’t going to be no other Democratic candidate — it’s going to be Biden.”

More significant may have been the private forum Waters used to defend the president a day earlier. On a conference call Friday with other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the 85-year-old House veteran urged the lawmakers to stand with Joe Biden, sending an implied but unmistakable message to her younger colleagues not to waver, a participant on the call told me.

As the president fights for his political life this week, and calls grow from party leaders that he withdraw his candidacy, he’s counting on the support of African American Democrats and his union allies as his last line of defense. It’s a playbook Biden has turned to in the past, portraying his detractors as mostly elite white liberals who are out of step with the more diverse and working-class grassroots of the party. That’s what propelled his nomination after a string of setbacks in 2020.

It’s his only path to survival now.

If Biden can retain his allies in labor and the Black community, he will have a chance to reframe the boiling debate about his candidacy along the lines of race and class that have animated every Democratic nomination fight for 40 years. Those clashes, of course, played out in primaries and caucuses. This battle is taking place in a more chaotic and truncated fashion, in the media and on group texts, conference calls and Zooms.

Yet Biden and his lieutenants are clearly counting on the result being the same in 2024 as it has been in every one of their modern races: The donor class may have their preference, but it’s older Black women in church pews who will decide the nominee, thank you very much.

That’s why Biden literally, as he would say, showed up at an African American congregation in Philadelphia Sunday, why he’ll address the NAACP convention next week in Las Vegas and this week will, I’m told, use the time between NATO meetings to do impromptu events with diverse groups of lawmakers and Washington, D.C.-area residents.

“The people Joe Biden fights for — middle-class labor union members, Blacks, Latinos — they know he fights for them and they’re going to stay in the fight for him,” Anita Dunn, Biden’s longtime adviser, told me Sunday.

Cedric Richmond, the former New Orleans congressperson who’s a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, was even more to the point.

“I think it’s interesting that not one African American member [of Congress] has called on the president to step down,” Richmond said, before warning white lawmakers that they “risk alienating some of their base” by abandoning Biden.

“I wouldn’t be rushing to do that if I was from Virginia,” Richmond said, hurling a brushback at Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who is reportedly plotting with Democratic senators to urge Biden to drop out of the race.

In conversations with Democratic aides and elected officials over the weekend, people with diverging views on Biden’s fate, I was struck by how many of them said that while donors had largely turned on the president, it was a different story with the grassroots, who are mostly focused on former President Donald Trump and his shortcomings.

“People like my mother, people her age, they’re with Biden,” said Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, warning other Democrats: “The base is with the president, everybody else needs to stay on board. You want to abandon ship, you don’t take everyone else with you.”

The world wasn’t ready for Trump in 2016. It’s not making that mistake this time.

The president of one building trades union told me the can-he-survive conversation in Washington was very different from what he had picked up talking to his locals, who are resolutely pro-Biden.

The differing messages, between insiders and voters, have also been striking to members of Congress who’ve been at home over the July 4 holiday.

One House Democrat from a competitive district who is furious at Biden and was poised to call on him to drop out of the race decided to remain quiet after detecting little appetite for such a demand from local unions and rank-and-file voters.

As the president fights for his political life this week, and calls grow from party leaders that he withdraw his candidacy, he’s counting on the support of African-American Democrats and his union allies as his last line of defense. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), another Biden co-chair, told me he had been bombarded: “Local elected officials, civic leaders, grass-roots folks, mostly from Delaware but also around the country.” They have, he said, a “genuine and deep love for our president” and want him to stay in the race. Coons added, though, that he “also heard concerns from others and I conveyed those concerns to the president.”

On a Saturday call between Biden and his campaign co-chairs, another participant told me, Coons recounted two very different texts he got: one from a longtime contributor urging him to tell Biden to drop out and the other from a Black woman friend of his pushing him to stick with Biden.

It’s not hard to imagine which of those texts resounded more with the president.

Much as he craves the affirmation of elites, Biden is in his comfort zone donning the armor of Scranton Joe. It recalls Bill Clinton, facing impeachment and the condemnation of censorious Democratic elites, turning to the party rank and file and especially Black Americans in his hour of crisis.

There are crucial differences between then and now, though. Going back to his base is Biden’s best, and only, play but it’s not without risk.

For starters, polls indicate that plenty of rank-and-file Democrats, including African Americans, believe the president is too old for the job.

Further, if a national union or single Black lawmaker calls on Biden to withdraw from the race it will have an outsized impact on his standing. If a collection of unions or African American elected officials defect, it will be devastating.

It was lost on nobody, in the White House or on Capitol Hill, that the ranking House Democrats who used an instantly leaked Sunday conference call to express their preference for Biden to drop out did not include one Black lawmaker.

What’s more worrisome for the president, though, is not the CBC’s old guard, the former and would-be committee chairs on that call. If Biden loses support with Black members, it would come from younger lawmakers and those who represent more competitive districts, individuals who lack a generational or political connection to the president.

The other risk to Biden’s bet is even more delicate. In short: He’s counting on his Black supporters to hold the line for him when his most likely replacement would be a history-making Black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris.

When I called Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.), a canny political lifer, on Sunday he was nearly beside himself about the damage he believes his nervous colleagues are doing to Biden.

Lamenting his party’s “circular firing squad,” he trained his own fire at Democrats demanding Biden step down: You have a winning message sitting right in front of you — this man is kicking ass — and all you can talk about is ‘Oh my god, this man is senile.’”

Yet before we hung up, Scott delivered one more message. “If he drops out, there has to be a seamless shift to Harris,” said the congressperson. And, Scott added, if Democrats think there will be some sort of “deliberative kumbuya” discussion about other alternatives, “let me tell you, they are the senile ones.”

This is the crux of Biden’s challenge. He knows his most loyal supporters will be those blue-collar Democrats and their representatives who’ve always had more of an affinity for him than the latte set. “We’ve been through some shit in our lives and we don’t turn when times are tough,” as Richmond put it about the Black community.

Yet they wouldn’t be turning on him for Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders. The alternative would very likely be Biden’s vice president. And that’s the extraordinary irony of this moment: If Biden is ultimately forced off the ticket, he may have unwittingly done it to himself by picking Harris in the first place.

If she wasn’t in the wings, the Bobby Scotts of the world would have ended the conversation by demanding his white colleagues get back on message.

Instead, he recalled speaking to a group Saturday and repurposing Trump’s debate line about “Black jobs” when he was asked if Harris was ready: “I said, ‘Well, for three-and-a-half years her Black job as vice president of the United States has been to be ready.’”