Biden’s campaign is led by an older and whiter group of operatives who came of age during a political era when many Democrats saw large-scale protests for racial equality as inherently alienating to many white voters. In some quarters of the party, street protest brought back the traumas of 1968 and Nixon’s 32-state landslide.
“The first thought of someone my age is Nixon and law and order,” said an adviser to Biden, who is white and in his late 60s and admitted concern early on that the protests could benefit Trump. The person was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “But as long as we don’t have a reversion to looting and lawlessness, as long as it’s peaceful and about the inequality of society and the treatment of African Americans, this has seen a shift in Biden’s direction—and more than we thought it would be.”
Biden did not endorse the controversial activist slogan, steering clear of Trump’s attacks. On June 10, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today laying out his views on police reform and stated unequivocally, “I do not support defunding police.”
The spasms of vandalism and theft that marked some of the early protests have diminished, replaced by the targeted toppling of statues memorializing the Confederacy. Mitt Romney marched in Washington and said, “Black Lives Matter.” Polls reflected a seismic shift in the electorate’s attitudes: 76 percent of the public say racism and discrimination is a major problem, up from 68 percent in 2016. Seventy-one percent of white people agree. The Black Lives Matter movement now has majority support.
The expected revolt of white suburbanites against the protests hasn’t materialized. Instead, they’ve joined them.
“This is no longer a traditional wedge issue because all of a sudden white Americans, particularly college educated whites, understand that racism is real,” said Cornell Belcher, a veteran Democratic pollster who worked for Barack Obama. “Those white suburban women now understand that they have skin in the racism game as well. And that changes everything.”
But the question remains: What is Biden’s role as the Democratic nominee, as America reckons with racism?
Despite his consistent edge in polls, there are risks for Biden. Though he has endorsed banning chokeholds and reforming qualified immunity, his promotion of community policing has left activists and organizers in key states angry and concerned that he’s missing a moment to be bolder. Internally, Biden’s campaign is balancing how to best respond to the transformational demands of protesters while maintaining his commanding lead over Trump. Biden gained the lead by staying largely out of the spotlight as Trump has praised the “beautiful heritage” of the Confederacy and called protesters “thugs.”
If elected president, Biden must force a “frank, truthful, painstaking conversation” about America’s racism, said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.).
“I'm not sure if he has the understanding, but he has to become a transcendental president,” Rush said. The opportunity is here; the question is, can he rise up to it?”
Dismissing the social media left
Biden’s advisers point out that racial justice is at the heart of why he’s running for president. He has often said that Trump’s 2017 comment praising “very fine people” at a pro-Nazi rally in Charlottesville is what pushed him into the 2020 race.
“He’s been very clear he wouldn’t be running unless Donald Trump were president,” said Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Biden.
During the primaries, Biden bet everything on winning overwhelming support from African American voters, who eventually reversed the near collapse of his campaign in the first three states.
Biden’s advisers were often less attentive—and sometimes downright dismissive—of certain obsessions of the social media left. Biden did not discuss white privilege the way Kirsten Gillibrand did. He didn’t endorse reparations or the legalization of marijuana when some of his chief rivals did. He stubbornly insisted that the two most important primary constituencies were political moderates and older working-class African Americans, two groups without much influence online. The Biden campaign’s unspoken primary slogan could have been, “Twitter isn’t real life.”
This cautiousness and skepticism has spilled into the general election. One way to think of the Biden campaign’s navigation of racial issues is that he and his advisers care a lot more about addressing policy demands than they do about addressing cultural issues.
“There is a conversation that’s going on on Twitter that they don’t care about,” one Democratic strategist observed. “They won the primary by ignoring all of that. The Biden campaign does not care about the critical race theory-intersectional left that has taken over places like The New York Times. You can be against chokeholds and not believe in white fragility. You can be for reforming police departments and don’t necessarily have to believe that the United States is irredeemably racist.”