While those who live and breathe politics have been transfixed by the epic fight for the presidency, many young people — and especially young Black people — have been paying attention to another battle: the raging beef between hip-hop superstars Kendrick Lamar and Drake, which has produced a string of hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
These two universes collided earlier this month when President Biden repurposed part of Lamar’s blistering “Euphoria” to drop a diss track on Donald Trump.
A video slide show, which Biden’s campaign posted on its social media accounts, opens with a shot of Biden and Vice President Harris smiling incongruously over Lamar’s lyrics: it’s always been about love and hate now lemme say I’m the biggest hater.
From there, it moves on to a series of unflattering shots of Trump and revisions of Lamar’s lyrics posted as captions: I hate the way that you walk over women’s rights, the way that you talk about immigrants, I hate the way that you dress, I hate the way that you sneak diss on truth social.
Not exactly what you’d expect from an 81-year-old president whose musical tastes tend toward Irish folk and boomer standards. But neither the message nor its medium is subtle.
Biden has an enthusiasm problem among Democrats’ key constituencies, particularly Black voters. A Post-Ipsos survey last month found that 62 percent of Black adults said they are “absolutely certain to vote,” which is sharply down from the 74 percent recorded in June 2020. The 12-point decline was also significantly steeper than the 4-point drop among Americans overall, from 72 percent to 68 percent.
The numbers are especially troubling with Black voters under 40, of whom only about 4 in 10 say they are sure they will vote.
Meanwhile, a fresh New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states indicates that Trump could be winning more than 20 percent of Black voters. That would be higher than any Republican candidate in the modern era. In 2020, Biden won 92 percent of the Black vote.
The president is stepping up his outreach to Black voters. On Sunday, he gave a commencement address at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta, after which he headed to Detroit to speak at an NAACP dinner.
Biden campaign officials say they are well aware that they must find innovative approaches to reach those who have tuned out or feel that their concerns have been ignored. It is a challenge with which Biden deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks has more than a little experience. In 2020, he ran the campaign that saw the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock elected as the first Black senator from Georgia.
“I think that that is something that you have to instill into a campaign culture very early: that these voters, we have to persuade,” Fulks told me. “It’s no longer the fact that we can just parachute into their communities with a couple of months to go and think that they’re just going to turn out to vote. We have to convince them.”
“This is a Democratic problem, and it has been for a while,” he added. “Going back to 2016, you see slippage in these numbers with African American voters.”
Part of solving that problem requires being what Fulks described as “culturally competent” — understanding how to reach Black audiences in today’s fractured media environment.
Here is where Biden’s financial advantage over Trump can help. As far back as August, the president’s camp announced a $25 million ad campaign that it said would include the largest and earliest investment in Black and Hispanic media by any reelection campaign. It also placed spots during University of Colorado football games, which were drawing huge Black audiences thanks to head coach Deion Sanders.
The Biden campaign’s strategy includes targeting its ads — not only toward battleground states such as Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but also across national Black-owned media such NewsOne, Blavity and the Shade Room. Two recent ads featured Biden speaking about his achievements, including sending out $1,400 pandemic relief checks and capping the price on insulin at $35 a month. Both concluded with the president saying: “There’s a lot more to do, but we can do it together.”
Fulks insists that it is early, and that there is still plenty of time to engage Black voters on the concerns they care about — concerns, he added, that have little to do with Trump’s courtroom travails or Biden’s age.
“They are worried about their jobs,” he said. “They’re worried about their kids. They’re worried about bills. And we have to be mindful of that. I do believe that as this election comes more into focus, people are going to tune in.”
The entire election may be riding on whether they do. What Biden is out to prove to Black voters is that, as Kendrick Lamar puts it, “I’m what the culture feelin’.”
