Biden campaign set to double down on Black voter outreach with visits to Georgia and Detroit this weekend

President Joe Biden plans to visit with Georgia voters on Saturday ahead of his commencement speech at Morehouse College on Sunday, before heading to Detroit to meet small business owners later that afternoon, according to a new memo shared with NBC News by the Biden-Harris campaign. He will also deliver an NAACP speech that night. Neither of the additional stops on these trips have previously been made public.

The purpose of the trips, according to the campaign, is to meet Black voters where they are.

“This campaign will not take a single voter for granted,” Trey Baker, a senior advisor for the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign, wrote in the memo. “We are not, and will not, parachute into these communities at the last minute, expecting their vote.”

The Biden campaign declined to provide more specifics about the president’s meetings with voters and small business owners in the two states ahead of time. 

Earlier this week, Biden met family members of the plaintiffs in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled racial segregation in American public schools to be unconstitutional. And Friday Biden is scheduled to speak at the National Museum of African American History and Culture alongside Vice President Kamala Harris before meeting with leaders of the Divine Nine, a group of historically Black sororities and fraternities.

The outreach comes as President Biden looks to secure a voter base that historically has supported Democrats by an overwhelming margin. But so far, recent polling shows some softening. The latest NBC News poll shows that Biden has support from about 58% of Black voters 18-49 and 88% of older Black voters. In the 2020 election, 87% of Black voters supported Biden for president, according to NBC News exit polling data.

Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has garnered about 25% support of the young Black voters ahead of this year’s election and 6% of older Black voters, according to the NBC News poll, in an election when even minor changes in voting patterns in battleground states could decide the race. Dating back to 1964, no Republican presidential candidate has received more than 13% of theBlack vote.

The memo says that Biden’s visits this weekend illustrate a commitment to Black Americans after the campaign has also visited cultural spaces like Dreamville Fest in North Carolina, reached record low Black unemployment and made efforts to forgive nearly $160 billion in student loans, which they say, disproportionately impacts Black Americans. 

It also comes as Biden is facing a growing number of questions over his handling of the war in Gaza, which has sparked concerns at Morehouse and among Democrats more broadly. Many critics have become increasingly frustrated by the administration’s unwillingness to call for a permanent and immediate cease-fire in Gaza as the death toll surpasses 35,000. 

“Every day, from now until election day,” Baker wrote, “we will continue working diligently to ensure that come November, Black voters send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris back to the White House to continue delivering for Black America in unprecedented ways.”

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