With help from Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala, Jesse Naranjo and Teresa Wiltz

What up, Recast fam! President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine is in Washington today to lobby GOP lawmakers for continued support for military assistance. Days after losing her Houston mayoral runoff, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is seeking reelection for her House seat. And Harvard President Claudine Gay holds onto her job. First, though, we focus on a new poll underscoring the president’s softening support among Black voters.

One of the most respected polls of voters of color shows President Joe Biden is facing strong headwinds among his most loyal base of support: Black Americans.

In the GenForward survey released on Tuesday and shared first with POLITICO, nearly 1 in 5 Black Americans, 17 percent, said they would vote for former President Donald Trump. Another 20 percent of Black respondents said they would vote for “someone else” other than Biden or Trump.

According to the survey, about three-quarters of Black respondents said they would vote if the presidential election were held today, a figure that trails the number of white voters who said they would vote today by 10 points.

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The GenForward survey, housed at the University of Chicago, was conducted with 3,448 eligible voters, including large oversamples with voters of color, from Nov. 8-30 in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The survey — which was conducted over the internet with a mix of respondents who were randomly selected to join a panel and those who opted-in to participate in the survey — has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Black adults backed Biden more than any other racial group in the survey, but the president notched just 63 percent among this bloc. That total, less than a year before voters head to the polls, is jarring, given exit polls following the 2020 election showed Biden carrying Black voters by more than 90 percent.

It also represents a significant jump for Trump among Black voters overall. During the last presidential election, AP VoteCast found Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters, versus 91 percent who voted for Biden.

“It is possible, and we’ve seen it before, that a higher number, in particular Black men because of a kind of hypermasculinity of Donald Trump, could vote for Trump [again],” says Cathy Cohen, the founder and director of the GenForward project and a University of Chicago political science professor.

She adds that this figure might be balanced out by the number of Black women, often thought of as the backbone of the Democratic Party’s multiracial coalition, who support Biden at higher rates than Black men.

While she notes there is still plenty of time for Biden’s reelection team to message why Black voters should support the president, Cohen suggested there are troubling signs regarding turnout ahead. Chief among them were the glaring figures of 20 percent for both Black and Latino respondents who said they would not vote if the election were held today.

“For younger people, it is the threat of a third-party candidate or staying at home,” that should be the real fear for Democrats, Cohen says.

Overall, just 46 percent of respondents across all racial groups said they would back the current president if the election were held today, compared to 57 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islanders. Latino and white respondents were nearly identical with 42 and 44 percent, respectively, saying they’d back the current president.

When broken down by race, the survey found Latinos were much more likely than Black respondents to say they would vote for Trump (17 percent of Black voters compared to 36 percent of Latinos). But while the jump in Trump support among African Americans in the survey is eye-opening, the third of Latinos who expressed support for Trump in the survey is essentially flat compared to 2020 exit polls.

“Polling numbers at this point are not predictive of the future,” says longtime Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who did not work on the GenForward survey.

Belcher, a veteran of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, adds that around this time in 2011, several polls indicated that Obama was losing in head-to-head matchups to both Mitt Romney, the eventual GOP nominee, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who won just two states — his home state of Georgia and neighboring neighboring South Carolina — during the Republican primary that year.

“If Joe Biden fails, it’s not going to be because Black people voted for Donald Trump,” Belcher says, calling that narrative both “lazy” and oversimplified.

He adds that there is a sense that all voters — especially younger voters of color — are fed up with both political parties, creating “an offramp to third-party voting, which is what we saw in 2016.”

Concerns over inflation by far outpaced all other issues for respondents across all racial groups, with gun control and immigration lagging far behind. Overall, the president’s approval rating in this survey was sitting at a paltry 38 percent. For Black respondents, half approve of Biden’s job performance, while 34 percent of Latinos, 37 percent of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and 36 percent of white respondents viewed Biden positively.

We’ll certainly keep an eye out as 2024 approaches to see if these trends hold.

All the best,
The Recast Team

HOUSTON VOTERS END ‘THE BIG 4’

She tried to follow Karen Bass’s lead. But after falling short, the “Big Four” is now down to the “Big Three.”

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the congresswoman who has represented Houston in Congress since 1995, failed in her quest to become Houston’s next mayor. Instead, voters in the largest city in the state selected Texas state Sen. John Whitmire in the mayoral runoff Saturday — and the outcome was not close.

The mayor-elect, who is white, will replace the term-limited Mayor Sylvester Turner, who had supported Jackson Lee. While both are Democrats in this very blue city, the office itself is nonpartisan.

Turner, who like Jackson Lee is Black, is part of the historic period where the mayors of the nation’s four largest cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston — are simultaneously represented by Black mayors. It was achieved last fall when now-former Rep. Karen Bass defeated businessman Rick Caruso to become La La Land’s first woman and just the second Black person to lead the city.

This unique fraternity remained intact when progressive Brandon Johnson defeated moderate Paul Vallas, who is white, to become mayor of Chicago earlier this year in a runoff. Johnson succeeded former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was ousted in the first round of voting.

The Houston mayoral runoff featured two political titans who have represented the city in politics for decades. Whitmire, who is the longest-serving member of the Texas state Senate, knocked off Jackson Lee, now in her 15th term in Congress. The runoff focused largely on rising crime, infrastructure issues and city financial controls.

Jackson Lee’s campaign was marred from setbacks down the stretch of both the general election campaign and in the runoff. As voters prepared to vote in the runoff, her campaign released an ad urging voters to “vote on or before December 7.” But the runoff was on Dec. 9 and the early voting period wrapped on Dec. 5.

Her campaign told Houston Public Media the error was made by the agency hired to cut the ad, not the campaign itself.

Before that blunder, in late October, Jackson Lee’s campaign was mired in scandal after a recording of her using expletives to demean staffers was leaked.

“I know that I am not perfect. I recognize that in my zeal to do everything possible to deliver for my constituents I have in the past fallen short of my own standards and there is no excuse for that,” she said, according to the Texas Tribune.

During his victory speech, Whitmire leaned into that controversy without mentioning his opponent by name.

“People want to go to work for me because we respect people, we don’t bully people,” Whitmire said with a wide grin, to applause from his supporters.

On Monday, Jackson Lee filed her paperwork to seek a 16th term in Congress.

ICYMI @ POLITICO

Blowback Leads to Resignation — University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned from her post over the weekend, just days after testifying before a House Education panel last week. POLITICO’s Bianca Quilantan breaks down why Rep. Elise Stefanik took to social media to write “One down. Two to go.”

Why Does Nikki Haley Beat Biden in Polls? — While GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley is delivering strong debate performances, she still trails front-runner Donald Trump by wide margins in polls. But recent polling shows that in head-to-head matchups, Haley does even better than Trump against the sitting president. POLITICO’s Steven Shepard explores why.

Sherrilyn Ifill Quits X — Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said she is ditching the social media platform, once known as Twitter, after the company’s CEO Elon Musk reinstated conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. POLITICO’s Kierra Frazier has more.

Anatomy of a Sex Scandal — A promising Democrat, Susanna Gibson, who had a legitimate shot at winning a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates had her campaign upended when a recording of her performing sex acts with her husband surfaced online. Gibson, who lost her race by roughly 1,000 votes, opens up to POLITICO’s Alex Burns about the ordeal and her new fight to tighten so-called revenge porn laws.

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