Joe Biden is on defense in the wake of a resurgence of violent riots and tense clashes sparked by anger over race relations and police brutality, forced to confront one of the largest electoral arguments from Republicans — that the Democrats are unwilling and unable to restore law and order across the country.
Protests and violent riots, which included looting and arson, broke out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after a video of a police officer shooting Jacob Blake, a black man, in the back on Sunday went viral. Also in response to the Kenosha shooting, activists in Washington, D.C., confronted individuals sitting in restaurants, yelling in their faces to raise a fist in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. The “tactic” was widely condemned by liberal commentators.
While Biden on Monday quickly called for an “immediate, full, and transparent investigation” into the shooting of Blake and called him a “victim of excessive force,” he waited to comment on the riots until after rioters sparred with vigilantes with guns, who showed up saying that they intended to protect private property, and one 17-year-old vigilante allegedly shot three people, two of whom died.
As Biden remained quiet, CNN host Don Lemon called him out.
“What you said is happening in Kenosha is a Rorschach test for the entire country. And I think Democrats are ignoring this problem or hoping that it will go away. And it’s not going to go away,” Lemon said Tuesday night. “Joe Biden may be afraid to do it,” Lemon mused, but “he’s got to address it. He’s got to come out and talk about it. He’s got to do a speech like Barack Obama did about race. … The rioting has got to stop.”
Lemon also mentioned polls turning in President Trump’s favor because of the protests, though it is not clear which polls he was referring to. Biden’s national lead over Trump fell from about 10 points in late June to 7 points in late August, according to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. One early June Morning Consult poll found 58% support for using military force to quell nationwide protests, while a mid-June Rasmussen poll found people were more divided, with 34% support for military action.
A Pew survey released earlier this month found that violent crime was the fifth most important issue to voters in 2020, with 59% saying that it is “very important,” just behind the coronavirus outbreak at 62%.
The Wisconsin riots are only the latest example for Republicans to use in their key 2020 electoral argument that if Democrats win the White House, they will not restore law and order and will allow the violence to spread.
Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward railed against Democrats failing to mention the nationwide violence in their convention last week: “The atrocities that are happening in places like Portland and Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, across the board, and these Democrat-run, you know, hellholes that they have become,” she told the Washington Examiner on Monday.
Biden senior campaign adviser Symone Sanders issued a statement Tuesday condemning the violence and referencing a speech that the former vice president gave in late May about nationwide violent demonstrations that followed the death of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis man. Another Biden spokesman said in a press call on Wednesday that “you’ll continue to see [Biden] be out in front and show leadership on this issue.”
Statements from Biden’s campaign rather than him directly were not good enough for Republicans. The Republican National Committee sent an email to press Wednesday after “deafening silence on the Kenosha rioting.”
Later in the afternoon, Biden released a video specifically condemning the Kenosha violence — and revealed that he had talked to Blake’s family.
“As I said after George Floyd’s murder, protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary. But burning down communities is not protest. It’s needless violence,” Biden said. “Violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses, and shutters businesses, that shutters communities. That’s wrong.”
He quoted Blake’s mother, Julia Jackson.
“She looked at the damage done in her community, and she said this: ‘This doesn’t reflect my son or my family.’ So, let’s unite and heal, do justice, end the violence, and end systemic racism in this country now,” Biden said.
Democrats, though, are not saying what specific actions a Biden White House would take in response to the riots, instead simply arguing that a change in administration will solve the problem. They are reluctant to talk about the riots separately from the issues that sparked them.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday said that “President Biden and Vice President Harris will be leaders who will comb the waters,” before turning to criticize the president for “the acquiescence, if not more than that, that he gives to vigilantes coming in to make matters worse in these situations.”
A Wednesday statement from Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez about Kenosha, Blake, and the Tuesday shooting had a fleeting reference to the riots. “Our nation will not heal through fear, division, and violence. We will heal through justice, unity, and action,” he said.
The Biden campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment on whether he would take any federal action to stop the riots if he were in office, what he thought about the Washington, D.C., restaurant confrontations, or if he agrees with Trump’s Wednesday announcement that Wisconsin’s governor “agreed to accept federal assistance” (which the governor has not confirmed, saying only that he would double the state National Guard presence).
On Sunday, Kamala Harris dodged answering a related policing question in her first televised joint interview with Biden since becoming his running mate, failing to answer if she still believes that there should be more police on the streets, not less. She called the Black Lives Matter movement “a counterforce against a very entrenched status quo.”
Blake, the 29-year-old black man who was walking away from police and reached into the driver’s side of a vehicle before he was shot in the back by an officer who was responding to a domestic disturbance on Sunday, is now paralyzed from the waist down, according to his family.
