‘Very, Very Significant’: A Quiet New Move Could Spell Disaster For Biden With Black Vote

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A new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rule aimed at protecting black Americans could backfire in a big way on President Joe Biden.

The FDA sent the final draft of a ban on menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars to the White House last week, the last regulatory step in a process that began in April 2022. Menthol cigarettes disproportionately harm black Americans and ban could save scores of lives within that demographic, health experts contend. Between 1980 and 2018, 40 percent of excess deaths due to menthol cigarette smoking were black Americans, and black Americans smoke menthols at nearly triple the rate of whites, according to the FDA.

Healthy or not, moving forward with the rule could cost Biden a number of black votes in the 2024 presidential election, retired law enforcement professionals and GOP strategists told the Daily Caller. Some even wondered why the administration would consider such a proposal at a time where Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is surging in polls and Biden’s approval rating is slumping.

“The ban could potentially create political problems for Biden,” Mark R. Weaver, a GOP consultant, told the Daily Caller. “Black voters are the strongest constituency of the Democrat Party, with black women being more loyal to Democrats than black men. The studies I’ve seen suggest that, among those in the black community who smoke, specifically menthol cigarettes, it skews heavily towards men. So to the extent that black men have been less loyal to the Democrats than black women, any issue that affects them more specifically could cause them to be less enthusiastic about Joe Biden’s reelection.”

In the 2020 presidential election, black voters backed Biden 92% to 8%, according to Pew Research Center. But ahead of the 2024 election, the voter base isn’t as excited about Biden — as of May, just 58% of black adults approved of the president, compared to a rate of nine in ten when he first entered office, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.