Biden Has a Bigger Problem Than the Debate
Photographs by Arielle Gray for The Atlantic
With 224 days to go before an election that national Democrats are casting as a matter of saving democracy, a 21-year-old canvasser named Kebo Stephens knocked on a scuffed apartment door in rural southwestern Georgia.
“Hello, ma’am?” he yelled.
“What do you want?” a woman snapped back.
“It’s about the voting?” he said.
The door was in the city of Albany, a mostly Black, mostly working-class Democratic stronghold of about 70,000 people in an otherwise Republican area, the kind of place where high turnout among Black voters had delivered the White House to Joe Biden in 2020 and the Senate to Democrats in 2021.
Now it was spring, still weeks away from Biden’s unsteady debate performance, and he was behind. Polls were showing Donald Trump not only leading by several points in Georgia but chipping away at Biden’s support among Black voters nationwide. After winning just 6 percent of the Black electorate in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, Trump was polling at about 17 percent, a figure that some Democratic strategists were dismissing as an early blip and others were calling a “five-alarm fire.” If that 17 percent held, Trump would win the highest level of Black support of any Republican since Richard Nixon got about 30 percent in 1960, a margin that could return Trump to the White House.
[Read: What will happen in Georgia?]
Meanwhile, around Albany, the mood among Democratic voters was not one of urgency. No campaign signs were staked in yards. No Biden campaign offices had opened yet, and no caravan of organizers was rolling into town. Republicans controlled the Dougherty County election board. The county Democratic Party was just creaking to life after being all but defunct for years.
In a place long defined by Democratic solidarity, old loyalties were fraying, and not only because prices were high or Biden’s message wasn’t getting out. There were also signs of the sort of frustration, resentment, and burn-it-down nihilism that has defined Trumpism. Right-wing propaganda was seeping into the social-media feeds of young influencers, and even that of Kebo Stephens, for whom saving democracy was not exactly a calling but a decent-paying job that an aunt got him until he could make his fortune as a TikTok influencer with his own fashion line.
Lately, he’d started watching TikTok videos featuring a retired U.S. Army colonel named Douglas Macgregor, a regular on Tucker Carlson’s show and the Russian-government network RT. He’d heard the colonel say “I don’t think we’ll ever get to the 2024
