(PatriotWise.com)- If President Joe Biden does indeed run for re-election in 2024 as he has indicated he plans to do, there is likely no Democratic challenger that will be able to take him down in the primary.
But, if he ends up deciding not to seek the White House for a second term, the apparent leading candidate to rise above all other Democratic candidates is someone close to the president — Vice President Kamala Harris.
Politico reported this week that the reason Harris has an apparent inside track to the Democratic nomination isn’t just because she’s in a very prominent role as the nation’s #2 politician; it’s also because she has built quite the following with Black voters.
Harris spent her first year in office battling bad headline after bad headline, trying to recover from multiple mistakes and a huge exodus of staff from her office. That being said, Politico reports that hasn’t mattered much to Black voters, who have ended up being most decisive constituency for the Democratic primary races in 2008, 2016 and 2020.
A December poll conducted by Politico/Morning Cast reported that Harris had the support of 52% of Black voters in a hypothetical 2024 Democratic primary that didn’t feature Biden.
While that percentage is impressive by itself, it’s even more impressive considering the next closest potential candidate on the list was New York progressive Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who only had 7% support among Black voters. In third was Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, with 3% support.
An April poll conducted by Echelon Insights said the support for Harris among Black voters was even higher at 53%. In second place in that poll was Stacey Abrams, who is currently the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, at only 13%.
This is significant news for Harris, should Biden indeed decide to step aside following his first term in office. It’s a telling story, too, considering she wasn’t able to garner much support from Black voters when she ran for president in 2020.
Despite this support, most people still believe that Biden will run for re-election, meaning the polling won’t matter much at all. One of those people is Cornell Belcher, who wrote the book “A Black Mani n the White House.” He said that any polling done two years before a presidential election needed to be taken with “a huge nugget of salt.”
That being said, he also commented:
“I am amazed at how she’s running away from the field with African American voters this early on, because I have not seen it.”
He added that even Barack Obama didn’t have numbers like these during much of the 2008 primary season when he ran against Hillary Clinton. Belcher explained further:
“You don’t see this often … It is clear that the work that she’s been doing is beginning to give her credibility and likability with African American voters in a way that no one else in the field has right now.”
