By Andrew Kerr
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested Thursday that black people voted for former Vice President Joe Biden on Super Tuesday because they’re ignorant of his record outside of his association with former President Barack Obama.
“You had a whole lot of candidates,” de Blasio said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The information that I think people received about Joe Biden was some of his historic connection, which understandably means something to people.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Host Willie Geist asked: “To Barack Obama?”
“Of course,” de Blasio responded.
Biden won black voters by 41 points across Super Tuesday states, according to exit polls analyzed by The Washington Post.
De Blasio, who endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in February after ending his own presidential bid in September 2019, said Biden’s record wasn’t fully examined by the electorate when there was a more crowded field.
“The one-on-one race — and I do think this is just pure political science — the one-on-one race brings out a whole different set of information, a whole different set of comparisons,” de Blasio said. “Joe Biden’s record, I think this is a fair statement, did not get a ton of examination when there’s eight candidates.”
Geist pushed back, asking if de Blasio was suggesting that “all those voters in South Carolina, all those voters across Super Tuesday states who voted for Joe Biden overwhelmingly didn’t know enough about him after 50 years in the public square?”
De Blasio doubled down on his stance that the formerly crowded Democratic field prevented Biden’s record from being properly analyzed.
“There’s three people who can be president of the United States now. There’s Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden,” de Blasio said. “Now the public gets deadly serious in its estimations and those comparisons really, really matter at this point.”
“If black voters, and I’m someone who has had the blessing of tremendous support in my campaigns in the black community,” the New York mayor continued. “I ran as a candidate of change because black voters certainly do not like the status quo. If Joe Biden cannot present to black voters a vision of change and Bernie Sanders can on a one-on-one match-up we start to have a different discussion.”
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