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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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President Joe Biden's support among Black voters in the battleground state of Pennsylvania is slipping, according to a new poll.
Biden is looking to repeat his success with Black voters, a key demographic that helped him beat former president Donald Trump in 2020, as he faces a tough reelection battle in November.
The president and his campaign have stepped up their efforts to reach Black voters in recent weeks, amid signs he is losing support among the important voting bloc, particularly in battleground states.
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A Marist Poll published on Wednesday shows that Biden has lost considerable support among Black voters in Pennsylvania, a state he narrowly won in 2020.
He had won the support of most Black voters in 2020, with 92 percent voting for him and just 7 percent choosing Trump.
But the new survey found that significantly fewer Black voters are planning to cast their ballots for Biden in November. Sixty-eight percent of Black voters said they were supporting Biden, or leaning towards him, in November's election, while 23 percent said they were backing Trump.
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Four percent of Black voters in the state said they were supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate, while another 3 percent said they were backing Cornel West, another independent candidate.
The poll surveyed 1,181 registered voters between June 3 and 6 and had a margin of error of 3.6 parentage points.
It found that Trump is leading in the state overall, with 47 percent backing him and 45 percent going for Biden.
"Biden can't win without key Democrat coalitions, and the increased get-out-the-vote effort by the campaign to woo Black voters is emblematic of growing apathy that advisers see among that demographic," Thomas Gift, who heads the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, U.K., told Newsweek.
"The fact that Biden is having to spend so much time and energy shoring up a constituency that's for decades voted consistently Democrat also has an opportunity-cost.
"The campaign is having to expend resources for outreach efforts that might otherwise have gone to courting swing and moderate voters. In a state like Pennsylvania, where margins are so tight, that trade-off could prove decisive."
Last month, Biden launched a new push to court Black voters with a rally in Philadelphia.
There, he thanked Black voters for propelling him to the White House in 2020 and ran through a list of his policy achievements that he said improved the lives of Black Americans. He told them that Trump was "pandering and peddling lies and stereotypes for your vote, so he can win for himself, not for you."
On Monday, the White House marked Juneteenth—celebrating the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in the United States learned they were free—early with a concert on the South Lawn.
"Black history is American history," he told the crowd there. "That's why Kamala and I and our administration will always uplift it and protect it."
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