Biden will visit Charleston church rocked by shooting, setting the stage for emotional appeal to Black voters

For nearly nine years, since June 17, 2015, the spire atop Mother Emanuel Church has watched over Charleston, South Carolina, and served as a reminder of the horrors of racial violence.

Nine Black churchgoers were killed when a white supremacist walked into one of the South's oldest Black churches, intent on starting a race war. The shooting laid bare the racial tensions in South Carolina polity and society and eventually brought down the Confederate flag, which until then flew on top of the statehouse.

On Monday, Jan. 8, President Joe Biden will visit the church and is expected to highlight the importance of preserving democratic institutions to combat hate and extremism. His visit is also being viewed as a way to reconnect with Black voters, whose support for him seems to be waning in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, as per the New York Times and a Siena College poll.

Charleston County Democratic Party Chair Sam Skardon said Biden's visit was a strong metaphor for the choice voters face in 2024. "Between Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges for violently rejecting the results of a democratic election, and President Biden, who is working to expand voting rights and strengthen our democratic institutions," Skardon said in an email.

University of South Carolina Professor Todd Shaw, an expert in African American politics, characterized Biden's visit to Charleston as a necessary move to reintroduce his campaign.

"I think he's going to have to demonstrate why Black voters should mobilize given that there is some real genuine softness in his numbers," Shaw said, adding that several Black voters who supported Biden in 2020 presumably did so thinking that they were voting for a transitional president. Biden will be the oldest president at 81 years old if he were to be reelected this year.

Though Biden's economic track record has been effective, frustrations of not being able to institute voting and civil rights safeguards like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act have also remained.

"Political scientists often talk about the fact that in political psychology, voters don't vote just logically or cognitively— they vote emotionally," Shaw explained. "Biden has to make a genuine appeal. Not just sort of based on his record, which is a very hard thing for a candidate to do. He's going to have to make an appeal about character, about personality, about integrity."

Before his South Carolina visit, Biden gave a searing speech in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania on the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks, and cast former President Donald Trump as an autocratic leader on the path of endangering American values, and himself as the protector of democracy. It was the most emotional Biden has been on the campaign trail.

What does Biden's visit to Mother Emanuel Church mean?

Rep. JA Moore's sister, Rev. Myra Thompson, was one of the nine Black churchgoers killed in the shooting, and he has since then advocated for gun safety laws as well as the embattled Hate Crimes legislation, named after South Carolina Senator and Mother Emanuel Church Pastor Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also killed in the shooting.

"I do think us always remembering what hate looks like and being conscious that it's not something that we just read in history, that racial violence happens every day in this community," Moore said.

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During his Monday visit, Biden will likely contrast his campaign's message on racial tensions with that of former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's bewildering explanation of the Civil War and Trump's comments about immigrants from Africa, Asia and South America "poisoning the blood" in a Dec. 16 rally.

Biden staffers on his campaign team have said that anti-immigrant and racially charged comments were evidence of the GOP's "flirtation with white supremacy."

But for that to be a convincing campaign platform, especially since polls have remained unfavorable to his candidacy, Biden needs to effectively shore up the coalition that supported him in 2020. In that regard, South Carolina has always been viewed as an asset to Biden's campaign. The Democratic National Convention made South Carolina the primary launching pad seeing as how the state and its Black voter base revived Biden's chances back in 2020.

"One visit doesn't do that," Moore said, adding that he hoped the visit was the one among "a long line of action items that the Biden-Harris campaign plans to do to show that we need a president and vice president that will be able to not just empathize with us but also promote policies and use the executive branches in a way to uplift Black and brown minorities."

Will this visit also put Haley under the spotlight?

David Woodard, a professor at Clemson University, said Biden's visit could also shed a spotlight on Haley, who was the governor at the time of the mass shooting.

"The compromise of moving the Confederate flag to a monument on the statehouse grounds in 2000 was never satisfactory to anyone, and Haley used this shooting to get it off government grounds in 2015 and off the public agenda," Woodard said. "It was probably her best day as governor with that move."

Haley's handling of the massacre helped launch her to a national profile and paved the path for her eventual move to the United Nations as an ambassador. But for Moore, her response was unsatisfactory.

"I think Nikki Haley exploited the tragedy for political gain," he said. "I don't look at her attending the funerals of people that were killed in such a horrific manner or her being the governor when the flag came down a testament or favorable to her. That was a bare minimum that she could do. Where was Nikki Haley before nine parishioners were murdered at the church when it comes to civil rights?"

South Carolina Democrats are confident they will take Biden to victory. But can Biden do the same for local Democrats?

It's all hands on deck for the South Carolina Democratic Party. Earlier in December 2023, the state party announced they will be deploying nearly 50 new staff members, and target all 46 counties for voter outreach. The party also said that they would be launching a statewide bus tour for "reaching voters where they are."

The Feb. 3 primary, despite New Hampshire's decision to go ahead with its own on Jan. 23, provided a deep Southern state like South Carolina a rare opportunity to reinvigorate its base to garner some local wins on the backs of the presidential race.

But whether Biden can be beneficial to local and statewide races remains to be seen.

"The only way Biden becomes more of an asset to local Democrats is that his poll numbers come up and his poll numbers come up only through some grassroots efforts," Shaw said.

That's an uphill climb for a state like South Carolina where the Democrats have not been the dominant party for quite a while. But that is not to say that a bevy of civil rights activists do not remain active in their communities, Shaw said.

Local Democrats in Greenville County and all across the state have begun having conversations about key issues: How big is the disconnect between Black voters and the Democratic Party? Does that transfer from the local level right up to the national stage? Will voters show up to vote?

Greenville County Democratic Party Chair Amanda McDougald Scott said several Upstate-based grassroots workers have expressed the desire to see Biden campaign in the ruby-red part of the state as well.

On the national stage, Biden's second in command Vice President Kamala Harris has been ramping up visits to the state in the Midlands and the Lowcountry areas.

Harris visited the 7th Episcopal District AME Church Women’s Missionary Society annual retreat in Myrtle Beach on Jan. 6., and is also scheduled to headline the NAACP's annual King Day at the Dome event on Jan. 15 on MLK day. The significance of the event is key as it began as a protest to the statehouse's Confederate flag.

On Nov. 18, Sen. Cory Booker appeared as a surrogate for Biden's campaign in Spartanburg and defended Biden's record.

“It’s no coincidence that both Joe and Kamala are making plans to visit less than a month away from the Democratic primary," GOP State Party Chairman Drew McKissick said in a press statement. "Along with the majority of Americans, South Carolinians are sick and tired of what this administration has done to our country, and they’re going to use their voices and their votes to make a change – starting with the Republican Presidential Primary on February 24.  No amount of appearances from Biden is going to change that fact.”

Devyani Chhetri covers SC politics for the Greenville News. You can reach her at dchhetri@gannett.com or @ChhetriDevyani on X.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Joe Biden visits Charleston church in emotional appeal to Black voters