What Biden and Dems Must Do!

The black masses to which Trump posed the question in 2016, “What do you have to lose?” now have the answer – their jobs, their lives, and their health care during the coronavirus.

The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) need to get their unorganized operation together. At present, there seems to be no specific strategy for winning in November. So far, Biden has been able to live off the fruits of the land – Congressman Jim Clyburn’s South Carolina endorsement, the Super Tuesday anti-Bernie vote, and the general goodwill of the Democratic electorate toward him.

To be successful this time around, Biden and the Democrats need to reflect upon their shortcomings in the 2016 election. As difficult as it may be for them to accept that their plan to use Hillary as a surrogate in 2020 because of her supposed ongoing, strong base of support, this prospect is fraught with political peril; it appears they are pursuing déjà vu ‘all over again.’

Additionally, the Democrats have not come up with a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) initiative that will turn out the 7 million African American voters who sat out the 2016 election. Despite the heroic campaign efforts of President Barack and Michelle Obama, who went repeatedly into key states that Hillary lost (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and Obama won in 2008 and 2012, there was no impact on overall black turnout.

She refused to campaign in Wisconsin and mainly relied on celebrities to make her case in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and other states in which Obama prevailed during his two elections, which lead to her defeat. Biden and the DNC have not yet advanced a strategy to ensure that he wins these states this time around.

While Trump has mismanaged the COVID-19 contagion and national polls reflect the overall dissatisfaction of the general public with his performance, Democrats cannot rely on this pattern to hold through November 3rd. Hillary made a similar error when she depended on Trump’s history of misogyny and his alleged sexual harassment and assault to doom his candidacy. It never happened because Hillary never defined herself in a positive light.

Biden is on track to commit the same mistake by not defining who he is before Trump does in his distribution of a phalanx of negative ads in his political hopper.

Voter suppression and the facilitation of voter indifference among minorities in key battleground states will again be the centerpiece of Trump’s electoral scheme. Neither the DNC nor Biden has gained the necessary financial and human resources to counter the massive political assault developed by Trump’s minions. Trump operatives have also enlisted the aid of Republican governors and Vladimir Putin and his Russian trolls.

Other tactics utilized in voter suppression are: voter ID laws, purging voters from the rolls who have not voted in several years, the deployment of defective voting machines into minority communities, failure to send absentee ballots to minority voters who have requested them, and exact match requirements for new voter registrations forms (a requirement that citizens’ names on their government-issued IDs must precisely match their names as listed on the voter rolls).

Although a federal judge ruled against the Georgia law a few days before the November 6, 2018 election for governor, Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Secretary of State and the Republican candidate for the office, had already stalled 50,000 voter registrations of mostly black voters and cancelled 670,000, mostly African American and Hispanic registrations in 2017 alone.

This voter suppression tactic enabled the Republican, Brian Kemp, to defeat the Democrat, Stacey Abrams, by a very narrow margin. It is now on the political agenda in states where Republicans control the legislature as is opposition to voting by mail in the fall 2020 election.

Democratic messaging is also lackluster at present. Biden and the DNC have yet to develop a communications package that appeals to a cross section of the Democratic base. With a group that seems to be omnidirectional in its political beliefs, it is tearing itself apart internally. Among the Squad (Congresswomen Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayana Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib), the Bernie Sanders’ leftists, and the centrists, there is no unifying ideology.

In the meantime, Trump has unified and galvanized Republicans using xenophobic hysteria and their fear of being defeated in their bids for election and/or reelection. The Democrats have demonstrated no comparable approaches to bringing the disparate elements of their Party together.

Biden’s selection of a vice presidential running mate, therefore, is even more critical at this time. Of the four most prominently mentioned, Elizabeth Warren would bring no excitement to the ticket based on her performance during the primary. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar have their checkered performances with minority groups as city attorney and district attorney, respectively, as political albatrosses around their necks. This leaves Stacey Abrams as the most viable for campaign energy and GOTV.

More importantly, it is way past the time for an African American woman to have a place on the national Democratic ticket. Black women have been the primary contributors to every Democratic presidential victory from JFK to LBJ to Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama.

As the progressive, John Nichols, has written in the Nation, “It is not so much to ask, in the year 2020, that the Democratic nominee for president make an intersectional choice that breaks with political orthodoxy and seeks to inspire the turnout necessary for a transformational victory.”

On Thursday, May14th, Lawrence O’Donnell will interview Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams in a Town Hall Special on MSNBC’s Last Word at 10:00 pm (EST) with call-in questions. Biden will address his campaign methods, and Abrams will discuss her Fair Fight proposals to protect the rights of voters. Perhaps at that time, Biden will address the intersectionality that Nichols has urged.