How the Police Helped Get Biden Elected

Ever since the killing of George Floyd in May set off a wave or protests against police violence across the U.S., there have been grumblings that messages attached to those demonstrations would either derail Democrats’ hopes for Election Day, fire up President Donald Trump’s base, or both.

In reality, pretty much every city in the U.S. that hosted protests—and, yes, riots—went for President-elect Joe Biden, as did many suburbs, despite concerns by anti-Trump and progressive organizers that they wouldn’t be able to mobilize white, middle-class voters turned off by the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements. It appears that, if anything, the protests helped Democrats in 2020 rather than hurt them, due to a galvanization of Black, urban voters.

As exit polls and voter data are crunched, one of the major narratives coming out of this election is that Black voters helped propel Biden to victory, especially in cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh, where Black voter turnout was critical. Much of the turnout among Biden voters in general was influenced by concerns about police and racism. According to The Associated Press VoteCast survey, 68% of Biden voters said these were serious issues, 63% said that the criminal justice system needed a complete overhaul or major changes, and 53% said that protests against police violence were an important factor for this election.

Police violence protests led to a “heightened awareness and increase in people across the country wanting to be engaged,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “We began to push that it was important for people to move from protest to power at the ballot box and then we saw a large turnout. I don’t think we can provide empirical evidence, but I can say there has been hype energy ever since George Floyd and we saw a lot of that leading up to Election Day, in the early vote, and on Election Day.”

The NAACP saw a huge influx of donations and financial support after the George Floyd protests, said Johnson. That was also true for many other Black-led organizations, particularly in Pittsburgh, where Biden needed a strong showing from Black voters to help counter the densely red suburbs and collar counties of western Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh-based organization 1Hood, a Black youth activist network that has been doing social justice work since 2006, experienced a surge in funding this summer from philanthropic and corporate donors due to their work organizing protests against police violence. According to its co-founder Jasiri X, grants from companies such as American Eagle Outfitters Inc. and Starbucks Corp. this year helped 1Hood meet its goal of unseating Trump.

“It was that organizing around police violence that actually led us to be able to mobilize folks to the polls,” says X. “We took that energy and those resources that we got and for the first time we were able to hire people, and to recruit digital canvassers, and put money into things like voting festivals because we had access to those resources.”

1Hood made its biggest splashes over the last few years by helping orchestrate several protests in Pittsburgh against police violence, dating back to 2018 when a police officer killed Black teenager Antwon Rose Jr. The youth activists were also behind the protests this summer sparked by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and also heavy in the mix for protests for Romir Talley, a Black man killed by police in neighboring Wilkinsburg.

However, 1Hood’s first official foray into voter mobilization work came in 2019, when under a new 501c4 branch called 1Hood Power, they began working to register and stir up Black voters around defeating District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr., the local chief prosecutor targeted among many things for failing to hold police accountable. Zappala won, but the group’s work, part of a coalition of many other progressive political organizations, definitely slowed the district attorney’s roll: In 2015, Zappala, who’s been D.A. since 1998, received 175,292 votes in an uncontested race; last year, he only won 154,015 votes against his opponent Lisa Middleman’s 115,404 votes.

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