U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at the White House’s official dining room in Washington, D.C., on September 6, as the International Port and Warehousing Association and the Pacific Maritime Association finalized a new contract covering West Coast ports. Talk about strengthening ports and supply chains. , 2023.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
President Joe Biden is touting his investments in Black and Latino-owned small businesses as the Latino vote slips out of his grasp heading into the 2024 election year.
The president on Wednesday at the Wisconsin Negro Chamber of Commerce in Milwaukee highlighted parts of his Invest in America plan aimed at supporting small businesses. His remarks specifically focused on the success of “Bidenomics” for minority-owned small businesses, especially in contrast to former President Donald Trump’s policies.
“Under my predecessor’s watch, women and minority-owned small businesses were last in line to receive emergency relief,” Biden said Wednesday.
“On my watch, energy and emergency relief went to minority-owned businesses first, not last.”
The Treasury Department estimates that Biden’s investments in community financial institutions will increase lending to Latino communities by $50 billion and increase lending to Black communities by $80 billion. White House officials noted before Wednesday’s event that Black small business ownership is increasing faster than in the past 30 years, and Latino small business creation rates are at the highest level in a decade. .
Biden is seeking to spotlight his support for economic justice despite his disastrous decline among Latino voters, a key demographic that helped elect him to the White House in 2020. It was conducted in a public opinion poll.
According to a recent CNBC poll, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has a 5-point lead over Biden among Latinos. Mr. Biden maintains a significant lead over Mr. Trump among black voters, with 75% of them saying they would support the current president in a hypothetical showdown.
Biden’s efforts to emphasize his commitment to investing in minority-owned small businesses are the latest attempt to regain some of that momentum.
It’s a strategy that has helped him before. In 2020, Biden campaigned on the idea that closing the racial economic equity gap would help the pandemic-hit economy recover.
That’s why Biden has made minority-owned business investment a central pillar of his “Build Back Better” economic platform. He created a fund with $30 billion in seed money for small businesses and pledged to “advance racial equity.”
The rhetoric comes against a backdrop of widespread condemnation of racism in policing that has sparked protests across the country. Mr. Biden’s focus on redressing racial inequality also contrasted with his Republican opponent, Mr. Trump.
“President Trump’s every instinct is to throw fuel on the fire,” Biden said at the time.
On Wednesday, Biden again differentiated his stance on diversity from Trump.
“Diversity is our strength as a nation,” Biden said. “As our former president said again yesterday, I do not believe that immigrants contaminate our blood.”
The president was referring to Trump’s recent claim that immigrants are “tainting the blood” of America, which the Biden campaign said was “parroting Hitler.”
Biden is making progress on some of his campaign promises from 2020 and wants voters to know.
In early 2023, Biden will select 24 small businesses in economically distressed areas to receive grants of between $20 million and $50 million, and 24 others with grants of between $250,000 and $500 million. We have launched a re-competition program to select people as recipients of subsidies.
These grants will provide a meaningful boost to small business owners of color, who face well-documented obstacles to securing capital investment and financing.
But these victories come after a year of economic hardship that has exacerbated the headwinds faced by minority small business owners.
Beyond the deep-seated obstacles faced by Black and Latino business owners, this year has also brought “inflationary pressures,” White House officials said.
There are many reasons why record inflation is straining budgets. These include product shortages due to supply chain disruptions, rising costs for producers due to interest rate fluctuations, and pent-up demand due to the pandemic. Biden pointed to price gouging by businesses to explain why some consumer prices have not fallen even though the economy appears to be recovering.
But for now, voters still condemn the president.
In December, the CNBC National Economic Survey found that Biden’s approval rating had fallen to an all-time low, due in part to his handling of the economy.
For Latino voters in particular, polls show that rising costs of living and employment are top concerns heading into voting season, which could explain why they are fleeing the Biden camp.
Correction: Biden is scheduled to speak at the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce in Milwaukee on Wednesday. The previous version had an error in the description of that day.
