Interviews with students at two historically black colleges in Orangeburg — South Carolina State and Claflin universities — reveal a glaring generation gap: a chasm separating what the students say is important to their lives, and what older officials believe ought to be important. Biden wants to talk about broadband; the students want to talk about civilian deaths in Gaza. Democrats tout a road widening project along Interstate 26 in Columbia underwritten by Biden’s infrastructure program; the students are focused on “food deserts” that contribute to diabetes and obesity.

Asked if they believe elected officials are addressing such issues, a chorus of voices filled a campus conference room: “No.”

Some of the students objected to what they saw as a transactional mentality underpinning Biden’s case for reelection: Goodies in return for votes. Christian Nathaniel, an 18-year-old Claflin student, was among those whose home was wired for broadband last year. “You’re doing these things as a last-ditch chance to beat Trump and get over it a little bit," said Nathaniel, who wants to be a doctor and eventually run for elective office. “‘Now you’ve got internet, so hopefully you can give me a vote.’” He said he plans to vote for Biden, albeit reluctantly. “This is my first time voting and this is very discouraging to the young Black voter,” he said, adding that he is not “confident in either of the choices.” “We’re picking the lesser of two evils,” Nathaniel said.

Ginning up excitement isn’t so easy, though. Jaime Harrison, a Black South Carolinian who chairs the Democratic National Committee, turned up at a party breakfast in Spartanburg recently to rally support for Biden. All went fine as the audience listened to his speech over a breakfast of grits and eggs. Then, when Harrison finished, 36-year-old Amia Harrison approached to say she was fed up with “voting blue no matter who.”

Harrison listened a bit and then turned away with a clipped, “I appreciate you.”

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This was Clinton’s strategy when she lost to Trump.

Political polling has also always carried the inherent bias of more opinionated people being more willing to participate. This doesn’t matter in, say, health studies, but it sure does with politics.

You might get a range of opinions, but it’s heavily biased toward people who have a stronger urge to share their opinion. That may not always be a matter of huge significance in every single issue, but it definitely is when you’re talking about enthusiastic support for a candidate known for having a particularly loudly opinionated base versus begrudging support for a candidate whose base isn’t super happy with him.

Polls are going to show that Trump has more support in that context regardless of the truth if it’s anywhere remotely close to the level of support for Biden.

Because the reality of polling is that most of the pool of calls you’re getting your sample from are no answers, hung up during intro, endless voicemail, or straight up refusals. Completes make up a tiny portion of phone surveys.

Polling has become a mess, mainly because we can no longer rely on landlines for generating unbiased samples. Most attempts at fixing this issue, such as online polling, have their own massive biases. So it’s incredibly difficult to figure out what’s real and what’s not. And no, doing a hundred bad polls or increasing the sample size won’t fix it. Bias in the data can only be fixed by figuring out a way of creating truly fair samples.

That’s a fair point and it should be taken into account. But at the same time, this is Nate Silver. He’s essentially the pre-eminent expert on polling, polling errors, and best practices in that regard. And what’s more; when you imagine the different potential political factions amongst the African American community (a practice Dems try not to do); it’s not hard to see why 2016 to today could have soured them significantly. Some examples from my family, friends, and extended family:

• As much as Republicans aren’t great on “black issues” under Trump Black Labor saw unprecedented gains in employment and income (until COVID hit). And a cohort of black voters are economic voters first.
• The “vaccine mandate” talk from the left didn’t go over well in Southern Communities where the oldest (like my grandparents) remember. And Oftentimes knew people that were part of things like Tuskegee (which was also one of many experiments like this. It’s just that the exceptional journalistic work and integrity of several academics and journalists brought this one instance to light).
• Student Loan debt affects people from lower and middle-class families a lot. The promise and almost delivery of student loan relief and then the total rug pull of it and sellout of the Biden Administration towards it soured lots of people.
• It’s not like Africans don’t know what Alzheimer’s is. And Biden’s refusal to even address the concerns impact black voters as much as they do whites.
• For the BLM cohort; running the guy who designed and championed the three strikes policy that has put so many blacks in jail for life unnecessarily and then running a prosecutor who knowingly tried to keep innocent black people in jail to maintain appearances doesn’t sit right. Especially when the other guy made it a habit to pardon wrongly or likely wrongly convicted men and women of color and did so at an exceptional clip.
• Inflation is super high and FED interest rates are 59 times higher than they were when Biden was elected. For “low information” voters that’s just Biden’s fault. But even for “high information” voters they realize that Trump was willing to bully the FED to keep those numbers down. “Stagflation” killed Carter it can kill Biden too.

It’s really not at all surprising that the current Dem ticket isn’t going to win black voters at 90% clips.