After Segregationists Remarks, Biden’s Support From Black Voters May Face Stress Test

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign was forced into a defensive posture this week after he invoked his work with Southern segregationist senators to make a point about bygone comity in Congress. The backlash has posed an early and important stress test on Mr. Biden’s hold on a constituency that has helped elevate him to his front-runner perch in the polls: African-Americans.

Mr. Biden’s nostalgic recollections of working with senators with whom he vehemently disagreed — “at least there was some civility,” Mr. Biden recalled — stirred immediate condemnation from his rivals on Wednesday, including the two black candidates in the 2020 race. Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both questioned Mr. Biden’s grasp on the painful history of segregation, and Mr. Booker called on him to apologize.

The former vice president struck back. “Apologize for what,” he said outside a fund-raiser on Wednesday night, in turn calling for Mr. Booker to apologize.

The episode was the most frontal confrontation yet of the presidential primary for Mr. Biden. It came one week out from the first debate and ahead of this weekend’s high-profile gathering of candidates in South Carolina, a state where black voters make up a large segment of the Democratic electorate. Most of the 2020 field — including Mr. Biden, Mr. Booker and Ms. Harris — will attend an annual fish fry on Friday hosted by the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, Representative James E. Clyburn, and then the South Carolina Democratic Party’s convention over the weekend.

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“The vice president has a deep well of support here and it’s real,” said Stephen Benjamin, the mayor of Columbia, S.C., who is black. “It is real,’’ he added. “But it is not permanent. The other candidates are here and they’re working hard.”

But Mr. Biden and the segregationist senators were not always in disagreement. Letters provided to The New York Times by the University of Mississippi show that Mr. Biden wrote one of the men, Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, in 1977 to make the case for a bill limiting the transportation of students to nearby school districts to counteract segregation, a practice known as busing.

In a subsequent letter, Mr. Biden wrote, “I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week’s Committee meeting in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote.”

The flap over Mr. Biden’s working relationship with segregationists amounted to the second self-started controversy this month for Mr. Biden. Two weeks ago he defended and then reversed his long-held position that federal funds should not go to support abortions.

The twin episodes involving race and abortion — two of the most controversial issues in American politics — raised questions about whether Mr. Biden is sufficiently sensitive to the trip wires of a modern Democratic Party whose ideological shape bears little resemblance to the one to which he first was elected as a senator more than four decades ago.

For Mr. Biden, the risk is that it affects his standing with black voters, who are seen as crucial to his pathway to the presidency. Polls have regularly shown Mr. Biden performing strongest among African-American voters — popularity established following his two terms as vice president alongside the country’s first black president, Barack Obama. The question is how durable that support is.

An Economist/YouGov poll earlier this month showed Mr. Biden as the overwhelming choice of black voters, with 50 percent support. In the same poll he was second among white Democrats, narrowly trailing Senator Elizabeth Warren.

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Another recent poll from the Black Economic Alliance showed that Mr. Biden had, by far, the largest share of black Democrats who said they would be “enthusiastic” about his candidacy, even compared with Ms. Harris and Mr. Booker.

But Cornell Belcher, a former pollster for Mr. Obama, warned that Mr. Biden’s current “support is wider than it is thick” in the black community and endangered by episodes like this week’s back-and-forth, which showed a “disconnect from the community.”

“There’s not a lot of long-term substance behind it. He has to build roots in it of his own,” Mr. Belcher said of Mr. Biden.

Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, whose group commissioned a poll in May showing Mr. Biden leading among black voters of all ages, said that Mr. Biden’s connection to Mr. Obama had led to his current popularity. (Mr. Biden had 45 percent support over all in that survey with an overwhelming 66 percent support among black voters 65 and over.)

Ms. Shropshire added that “the potential for him to lose support as black voters learn about his record, and positions he has taken in the past, is very real.” She ticked through Mr. Biden’s stance on busing, the 1994 crime bill and his handling of Anita Hill’s appearance before Congress a quarter-century ago.

The reaction to Mr. Biden’s comments Tuesday at a New York fund-raiser, where he cited his ability to work with Mr. Eastland and another segregationist senator, Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia — “he never called me ‘boy’, he always called me ‘son,’” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Eastland — appeared more personal than policy-driven.

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“As a black man in America, I know the deeply harmful and hurtful usage of the word ‘boy’ and how it was used to dehumanize and degrade,” Mr. Booker said on CNN Wednesday night, adding, “Vice President Biden shouldn’t need this lesson.”

As for Mr. Biden’s call that he should apologize, Mr. Booker said: “He knows better. And at a time when Donald Trump never apologizes for anything, he’s better than this.”

Senator Bernie Sanders voiced support for Mr. Booker, as did Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the influential freshman from New York, who wrote on Twitter that “it’s important to realize that we can’t risk depressed turnout in 2020.”

The whole incident also served to highlight that Mr. Biden, 76, has been around Washington long enough to have served with open Democratic segregationists.

Mr. Biden’s advisers argued that his story of working with segregationists was both not new and taken out of context. Symone Sanders, one of Mr. Biden’s top African-American advisers, wrote on Twitter that critics accusing Mr. Biden of praising a segregationist were “disingenuous.”

“I think we are spending a lot of time on two sentences and ignoring more than two decades of very real service advancing and advocating the cause of civil rights in our country,” said Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is close to Mr. Biden.

Representative Cedric Richmond, a national co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign and former leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, brushed aside calls for an apology from Mr. Biden on this and other matters in his record. “With a 40-plus-year track record, how long do you want him to live in the past?” Mr. Richmond asked.

Mr. Richmond pointed out that many Democrats “worked with Donald Trump just last year to pass criminal justice reform, and Donald Trump has the same type of issues.”

“We work with people we don’t like all the time to get things accomplished,” he said.

Mr. Biden has made his get-along-with-everyone pitch a part of his argument that he would be the strongest general election candidate against Mr. Trump, promising that he could uniquely restore some of the nation’s lost civility of recent years.

In selling his electability, Mr. Biden has focused in particular on his ability to win back working-class white voters who defected to Mr. Trump in Midwestern swing states in 2016. Pointedly, Mr. Biden’s first event as a presidential candidate and his formal kickoff speech were both in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Belcher said the short-term risk for Mr. Biden is sapping support from black voters in the primary. But the bigger, longer-term risk for Democrats is that Mr. Biden becomes the nominee and black and younger voters would stay home in the general election.

“It’s fair for some Democrats to step back and wonder is Joe Biden Hillary Clinton 2.0,” Mr. Belcher said, “and wonder if we’re going to run into the same problem in that he’s going to struggle the same way Hilary did with younger voters of color.”

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