The campaigns of both former president Trump and current president Joe Biden are trying to win over Black votes by making racist accusations against one another.
The Biden campaign attacked the likely Republican candidate in two new radio and television advertisements that came out on Wednesday. The commercial featured an old video of Trump stating, “of course I hate these people,” from an interview he gave to CNN in 1989, in which he advocated for the death penalty in relation to the Central Park Five, a group of teens who were subsequently cleared of charges involving a brutal sexual assault on a white woman.
The Biden video, which features a narrator who says, “Donald Trump disrespecting Black people is nothing new,” was released only hours before Trump was supposed to make a campaign rally in the Bronx, a diverse borough of New York City that is home to sizable Black and Latino communities.
X (previously Twitter) was published by a Biden campaign account along with the caption, “let’s remember: Trump is a lifelong racist.”
In a swift rebuttal, Trump’s campaign released a statement highlighting “Joe Biden’s history of racist remarks,” pointing out that Biden was instrumental in passing the 1994 crime bill that disproportionately increased the sentencing and imprisonment of Black people.
“This ad is another cheap attempt from the Biden campaign to gaslight Black voters and fails to address Biden’s terrible policies that are hurting our community,” stated Janiyah Thomas, Black media director for the Trump campaign.
In the past, it was unusual for candidates to level racist accusations against their opponents. The fact that this squabbling is happening in May during an election year suggests that the race is going to be extremely contentious and intensely personal.
But same accusations have been leveled against Trump in the past when he advocated measures like a Muslim ban and attacked judges who presided over cases involving Muslims, citing their race and history as reasons. While Biden’s Democratic opponents did not accuse him of overt racism, he nevertheless received criticism throughout the 2020 campaign for his ties to segregationist lawmakers and his handling of that crime measure.
There are less than six months until the election, and Biden and Trump are vying fiercely for Black voters. And it is precisely these people that Biden hopes to rally with his advertising campaign. The tape was broadcast on nationally syndicated urban radio shows such as the “DL Hughley Show” and the “Rickey Smiley Morning Show” last week, as stated in a press release. States like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which are considered swing states, will be the target of the television commercial. Polls have showed that support among Black voters, who have historically been the most devoted group to the Democratic Party, has been declining in recent months.
Among important battleground states surveyed this month by the New York Times, over 20% of Black voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would choose the former president instead of Biden. If those numbers maintain, it would be the greatest total for a Republican running for president since the era of civil rights.
A number of Black Americans have been wronged by the criminal justice system, and Trump has been making an effort to win over Black voters by claiming that his criminal indictments make him appealing to them. Last month, when making a stop at a bodega in Harlem, Trump attacked Biden’s policies on the border and questioned why Democrats in New York have set aside millions of dollars in aid for recent immigrants to the county while ignoring Black and brown neighborhoods in the United States.
They’ve invaded your parks, your hotels, and everything else; it’s a disaster, Trump declared in April. “They’ve ruined a lot of lives; African Americans are having trouble finding work because illegal immigrants are stealing their jobs.”