President Biden's support among Black voters has dropped significantly since 2020, and his supporters are beginning to blame the change on "disinformation."
The Democratic Party in South Carolina, where the Black vote essentially saved Biden's candidacy in the 2020 primary, launched a program seeking to "educate" the state's Black voters this month. Party officials went on a 30-stop bus tour of the state in an effort to close "the information gap" among Black voters.
"I think there’s a lot of disinformation out there," Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison told NOTUS. "There are a lot of folks who don’t want this president for whatever reason, and I think some foreign and some domestic. They don’t want the record to be straight in terms of what this president has done and accomplished."
"We needed to educate our voters and create a space for our candidates to come talk about their record," Christale Spain, the Democratic Party chair in South Carolina, told the outlet. "That’s really why we launched this historic effort, to fill what I feel is an information gap and not an enthusiasm gap."
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Democrats argue Black voters need to be taught about what they say are Biden's major successes, pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act, student loan forgiveness and other issues.
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According to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released in January, Biden's support among Black voters has fallen to just 63%, down from the 92% that Pew Research Center data shows he won in the 2020 presidential election. His support among Hispanic voters is down to 34% from 59%.
One student at South Carolina State University told NOTUS that she only began supporting Biden after finding out his record on appointing Black judges to the bench.
"I really didn’t know the information," the student, Zyah Cephus, told the outlet. "I think those are things that the youth need to hear. I think, oftentimes, we’re kind of connected with the wrong things and disconnected with the right things. We know about Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, but we don’t know about what’s going on in politics."
Biden's poll numbers more generally have remained historically low, with some Democratic commentators saying it is time to "panic."
"Precisely how scared Democrats should be about Biden’s standing depends on how his plight compares with those of presidents past. And there’s no sugarcoating it: This might be the worst polling environment for an incumbent president one year out from an election since the advent of the polling era in the 1930s and also the most dire situation facing any Democratic presidential candidate in decades," David Faris, a writer and political science professor at Roosevelt University, said last month.
"Panic is entirely warranted," he added.
Fox News' Brandon Gillespie contributed to this report
