“Young blood,” starvation, fruit-only diets: How the rich are striving to “age in reverse”
Rich tech entrepreneurs are by all accounts a hyper-competitive bunch.
Whether it’s taking a shuttle to the edge of space, buying the biggest yacht, or challenging one another to a cage fight, with great wealth and power seems to come a voracious desire to engage in games of one-upmanship.
The Rejuvenation Olympics, an online leaderboard launched by tech millionaire Bryan Johnson earlier this year, takes the rivalry of the rich to the next level. The game? “Reversing” your age.
Participants compete not on physical abilities but on how quickly and by how much they can slow their “biological age.” It’s almost who can be the best Benjamin Button. Competitors do this mostly by adjusting their diets (like which macronutrients and supplements they consume), being physically active, and retesting their “age” regularly. They’re not actually reverting to a more youthful version of themselves — that’s not biologically possible. Rather, these competitors are racing to see who can age the slowest; as the Rejuvenation Olympics website quips, “You win by never crossing the finish line.”
A few players of this peculiar game stand out: Steve Aoki, the DJ and heir to the Benihana restaurant chain, appears toward the bottom of the site’s “absolute” ranking, which reflects the 25 competitors with the lowest rate of aging. The biohacker Ben Greenfield makes the list, too, as does millionaire and longevity science advocate Peter Diamandis. Most of the top 25 names, however, don’t spark immediate recognition, and some are anonymous.
Right now, tech millionaire Bryan Johnson, who is 46 years old, is leading. But 46 is just what competitors describe as Johnson’s “chronological age,” which means, simply, the years that have passed since his birth date. According to one well-known “biological age” test, he’s aging at a rate slower than his chronological age. He has made waves for his outlandish lifestyle that’s oriented entirely toward the goal of not just appearing young, but becoming younger: He has claimed that he eats 70 pounds of vegetables per month, most of it pureed. He receives blood transfusions from his 17-year-old son. He wears a red-light cap that’s supposed to stimulate hair growth. His body fat once fell to a dangerous 3 percent (though it has since bumped up a few percentage points).
The Rejuvenation Olympics tend to attract this kind of person: those obsessed with collecting and analyzing their personal health data, with the financial means to experiment with the minutiae of their lifestyles. Yet Johnson and the other Olympics competitors are hardly alone in their expensive attempts to gain maximal health. Such extremes are common among the ultrarich, and particularly the Silicon Valley set, a crowd known for its obsession with making moonshot ideas into reality. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is renowned for his eccentric wellness habits; he eats one meal a day, meditates for at least two hours daily, and has a penchant for ice baths. For a while, Steve Jobs was a “fruitarian” — as in, only ate fruit. The wealthy indulge in countless health trends of varying dubiousness, whether it’s getting IV drips to reduce hangovers, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, implanting devices in the body to monitor health and live longer, even injecting themselves with young blood (a treatment called parabiosis, which Johnson is receiving).
The optimized lifestyle, with its constant monitoring and regimentation, costs money. This year alone, Johnson will reportedly spend at least $2 million on reducing his biological age.
There’s a certain hubris to the tech founders who insist they’ve cracked the code to a longer, healthier life. Society treats them as idols, geniuses whose savvy has vaulted them into the 0.0001 percent of the wealthiest people on Earth. It’s a small hop from there to believing they’d also be savvier than the rest of us about turning back the clock.
Among various health and wellness fads, longevity is the pursuit receiving much of the attention — and money — from the ultrarich. Last year, according to a report from the news and market analysis site Longevity.Technology, more than $5 billion in investments poured into longevity-related companies worldwide, including from some big-name tech founders and investors. Many of these companies are aiming to prolong life by focusing on organ regeneration and gene editing. The buzzy life extension company Altos Labs, which researches biological reprogramming — a way to reset cells to pliable “pluripotent stem cells” — launched last year with a whopping $3 billion investment, and counts internet billionaire Yuri Milner and, reportedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its patrons. Bezos was also an investor in the anti-aging startup Unity Biotechnology.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman, meanwhile, recently invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, a company vying to add a decade to the human lifespan. Some of the most famous names in the death-defying sector are old: Calico Labs, a longevity-research subsidiary of Alphabet, was launched by then-Google CEO Larry Page in 2013. Nor is it just Silicon Valley that’s excited about the prospect of living longer. Tally Health, a new biotech company co-founded by Harvard scientist David Sinclair — who is something of a celebrity in the longevity community — boasts some Hollywood A-list investors: John Legend, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ashton Kutcher, Pedro Pascal, and Zac Efron.
Basically, if you’re anyone with any kind of serious money, chances are you’ve thrown some of it into the life-extension industry.
But all this hype and capital also means there’s a higher chance of being sold bullshit. Just because someone appears to be aging more slowly right now doesn’t mean they’ll live longer, and experts are highly skeptical of the idea of turning back the clock entirely.
“Somebody’s got to blaze the trail,” but there are also plenty of companies offering snake oil, says Michael Lustgarten, a Rejuvenation Olympics competitor who has a PhD in physiology and is a scientist at Tufts University’s Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. “The longevity community usually gets excited about snake oil — the latest supplement or the latest mouse study that extends lifespan.”
“It’s not possible to reverse your age,” Stuart Jay Olshansky, an aging expert and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago, tells Vox. “There’s validity to some of the work that’s going on in epigenetics that may be telling us something about the rate of aging. It’s not yet telling us about longevity.”
Life extension does sound like pseudoscience at first blush, but epigenetics, which is concerned with how our genes are expressed depending on environment and lifestyle, is one field that’s widely considered promising, making immense strides over the past decade in unlocking the secrets of how we age.
The first epigenetic “clock” was devised by Steve Horvath in 2013, but personal epigenetic age tests for consumers started getting popular just a few years ago. (Contestants in the Rejuvenation Olympics take these tests to track their progress.) Epigenetic age testing can give us a rough idea of how old someone is chronologically if they don’t know — for example, if someone doesn’t have a birth certificate.
More recent versions of the tests are offering clues not just to chronological age but to how much aging is happening biologically based on environmental factors and lifestyle habits, which can then potentially be used to predict the likelihood of disease or death. Here’s how it works: No two people age in the exact same way. Discrete from chronological age, “biological age” is the attempt to capture the often invisible difference through epigenetic gene expression, the state of someone’s organs, their immune system, and more. A 40-year-old with a history of heavy drinking and smoking, for example, may have a higher biological age than someone who never drinks or smokes. (In 2018, a Dutch man even complained that he ought to be able to change his legal age to match his biological age.)
The testing is nothing like an annual physical; it’s more a burgeoning wellness trend for those who have a few hundred dollars to spend on a home DNA test. The makers of such age tests contend that knowing your “biological age” can be the impetus for making healthy lifestyle changes.
There is some promising evidence behind attempts to extend the human lifespan. Even “young blood” transfusion, despite seeming too Elizabeth Báthory to be a real medical procedure, has some legitimate science behind it — research has shown that parabiosis (the scientific term for blood and plasma transfer) in mice can have regenerative effects on some cells. The trouble is that longevity startups often go too far with claims about what new evidence might mean for the future of human aging.
“I’ve called the anti-aging industry the second-oldest profession,” says Olshansky. “People made the same claims 2,000 years ago about some magical elixir that’s going to make you live longer and healthier.” The difference is that the fountain of youth is now being “pushed by a lot of people who have a lot of money — to make more money.”
Johnson, who made his hundreds of millions after selling a payments platform he developed to eBay in 2013, has become renowned not for what he’s invented, sold, or designed, as is the case for many other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for the unimaginably strict lifestyle he leads. According to his website and the many interviews he has given, he exerts constant vigilance over the 78 organs of the human body, consistently tracking everything from BMI to brain white matter. Johnson is often described as the “most measured man in human history.”
The point isn’t merely being healthy. It’s laser-precision optimization of his health.
Johnson, for example, never eats pizza or drinks alcohol. It’s simply not a part of his algorithm. “I was just a slave to myself and my passions and my emotions and my next desire,” he said in an interview with Vice Motherboard. That doesn’t mean he never stumbles, but when he does, he calls it an “infraction,” as though he has committed a minor crime.
Johnson tops the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard; he created the game along with Oliver Zolman — who leads Johnson’s team of 30-plus doctors and other health experts — and TruDiagnostic, an epigenetics lab based in Kentucky that provides the biological age test kits that participants in the Olympics must submit. The cheaper version costs $229. The more expensive one, at $499, provides more data on your results, including how habits like smoking or drinking alcohol have impacted a person’s aging speed.
Hannah Went, director of operations at TruDiagnostic, tells Vox the company is hopeful that, eventually, a wider swath of consumers will join in on epigenetic testing. But right now, their clients tend to be wealthy — the kind of people who can dedicate money and time to de-aging. To date, almost 30,000 people have measured their biological age with Went’s lab, and a little more than 1,700 of them have consented to submit their results to the Rejuvenation Olympics. Only the top 25 are posted on the homepage rankings.
Lustgarten, the Olympics competitor, believes he’ll move into the top 10 the next time the leaderboard is updated. Like other longevity chasers, he constantly monitors his biomarkers and makes tweaks to his diet or exercise regimen as needed.
It’s a contest that participants hope never ends — the most ultra of ultramarathons. The most dedicated members in the longevity community are, in essence, spending their lives obsessing over living. Says Lustgarten: “I plan on doing this for at least the next 70-plus years.”
Phenylephrine and other medications that contain it, like Sudafed PE, don’t work.
On September 12, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel agreed unanimously that phenylephrine, a common decongestant that’s part of many over-the-counter cough and cold medications, is ineffective as an oral medication.
That means name-brand medicines like Sudafed PE and Dayquil, which contain the drug, aren’t working as advertised. If you have a runny nose, these medications likely aren’t doing anything to clear it up.
(The FDA’s opinion did not include phenylephrine preparations administered through the nose, like drops and sprays. These are more likely to actually reduce congestion because they’re not metabolized by the body before getting to their point of action.)
It’s not yet clear exactly what this will mean for pharmacy shelves — but it’s highly likely that in the near future, the FDA will decide to ban the ingredient from over-the-counter sales. That would mean a big change in the range of medications available to consumers: The other commercially available (and more effective) decongestant, pseudoephedrine, is more complicated to obtain. Because of its illicit use in producing methamphetamine, that medication is held behind counters and sold in only limited quantities to consumers.
The latest on phenylephrine makes for confusing news with a long backstory. Scientists have been publishing studies suggesting the drug is ineffective since the early 1970s. In 2007, after researchers from the University of Florida brought questions about the drug’s utility to the FDA, the agency convened a panel to address phenylephrine’s effectiveness. Among many of the researchers’ concerns was the fact that the relatively ancient studies of the drug had used a problematic and outdated measure as a primary indicator that it worked. Still, the FDA urged more research, and the drug has remained on shelves.
Since then, researchers have conducted three large clinical trials with stronger measures, which apparently were enough for the latest FDA panel to accept that this drug clearly doesn’t work.
Phenylephrine isn’t alone: Due to some quirks in the agency’s history and policy, the FDA is engaged in an ongoing process of reviewing drugs that came on the market before its current efficacy standards went into effect. That means a variety of older drugs can be sold without proof that they work.
How is this possible?
I recently spoke to Mikkael Sekeres, chief of hematology at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and author of the book Drugs and the FDA, to find out. The FDA has been reviewing the efficacy of older drugs for years, he says, and they’re really far behind, largely because of the agency’s limited resources. And while removing drugs that are familiar to the public might be confusing, he thinks it’s the right thing to do.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Keren Landman
Why do we have drugs on store shelves that are FDA approved without being effective?
Mikkael Sekeres
It’s interesting to think about this in terms of a historical perspective. Before the 1930s, the FDA didn’t require safety in any drugs — it just required that the label accurately describe what’s on the bottle. It was the sulfanilamide tragedy [a spate of more than 100 deaths due to a drug formulation that included diethylene glycol, a toxic compound] that eventually led to the passage of the Food and Drug Act [an updated version of the original 1906 law] in 1938. And that’s the first time that drugs were required to be safe.
Efficacy wasn’t required until the Kefauver-Harris Amendments in the 1960s.
So up until the 1960s, drugs could be on the market, and they had to be safe, but they didn’t have to work — which is really convenient for your marketing folks at pharmaceutical companies.
There needed to be some cleanup of drugs that had already been on the market and were safe but hadn’t been proven to be effective. That started in the 1970s.
Keren Landman
What’s wrong with the science on phenylephrine?
Mikkael Sekeres
Phenylephrine has been over-the-counter in pill form since the 1930s — this is an old drug, and the studies that were done, a lot of them were before the 1990s. And the endpoints for those trials weren’t necessarily the most rigorous and may not have been consistent from one study to the next. For example, [in some studies] you’re looking at nasal air resistance, or [in others] you’re looking at self-reporting from patients that they feel better.
A better endpoint would be something standardized. If you wanted a patient-reported outcome, you could develop a validated and reliable instrument that accurately reflects when patients have a stuffy nose and when they don’t.
Keren Landman
A group of researchers from the University of Florida first brought concerns about phenylephrine’s ineffectiveness to the FDA back in 2007. Why did it take so long for the FDA to seriously consider taking this drug off the over-the-counter market? And why is this happening now?
Mikkael Sekeres
If I had to speculate, I would say go back to the FDA history.
The FDA is primarily going to be concerned about the safety of drugs. So they’re going to be focused on removing drugs that are unsafe from the market.
A classic example of that, as I wrote about in my book, is Avastin [generic name, bevacizumab] for breast cancer — a drug that was shown to be ineffective and also toxic. They took that drug off the market.
You can imagine the conversations they had. Are they going to focus on, “Oh my god, we’ve got to get this cancer drug off the market that isn’t helping people and people are dying,” or, “We really need to deal with this placebo”?
The FDA has limited resources and is also under a lot of pressure to bring new drugs to the market for patients who have serious diagnoses. And I just think that’s going to be their focus.
So I don’t think there’s anything magical about 2023 to explain why this is happening now. I just think it took 16 years for the FDA to gather the resources and to deal with other drugs that had more serious safety signals before they could now address this drug — which even they’ve said is relatively safe, it just doesn’t work.
Keren Landman
Does the FDA still sometimes approve drugs when they are unsure how well they work?
Mikkael Sekeres
When Scott Gottlieb headed the FDA [between 2017 and 2019], he said quite clearly that he was in favor of having free market forces influence the prescription of drugs. He wanted to get more drugs out there and let the doctors and patients decide which ones were going to be used.
What we saw as a result was a tsunami of drug approvals, and a lot of those under the accelerated approval mechanism. That mechanism was created by an act of Congress in 1992. It was born out of the need for HIV medicines — it was meant to address health care needs in people who are desperate for treatments.
For a drug to qualify for accelerated approval, it needs to meet a need that isn’t already being met — something that HIV drugs definitely did. But the big asterisk with that is that these drugs are approved based on preliminary data showing a clinically meaningful benefit: A follow up trial has to at least confirm that initial benefit, if not extended to something that is clinically meaningful, like an improvement in overall survival.
Now, we’re starting to see the comeuppance of the wave of drugs approved under accelerated approval during Gottlieb’s leadership, as the so-called confirmatory trials aren’t confirming those initial signs of efficacy and safety. And we’re seeing more cancer drugs in particular being removed.
[A 2022 report from the Office of the Inspector General found that 104 of 278 drugs approved under the accelerated approval mechanism haven’t yet had their effectiveness confirmed by a trial.]
Keren Landman
In a New York Times article about the latest phenylephrine news, an industry representative said that if this drug is removed from store shelves, “the burdens created from decreased choice and availability of these products would be placed directly onto consumers.” How do you respond to that?
Mikkael Sekeres
It’s ludicrous. To say that consumers would be strained because we’re taking a placebo away from them is silly. I won’t say anything stronger than that because you’re quoting me.
I wouldn’t say it’s a strain on consumers. We’re empowering consumers to take the right drug.
Keren Landman
But if these medications don’t have side effects, what’s the harm of keeping them as ingredients in medicines?
Mikkael Sekeres
By keeping these ingredients in drugs and telling patients that they’re going to help them, we’re lying to people.
It used to be acceptable for hospital formularies to carry the drug “obecalp.” If you type it on your computer and read it backward, you’ll see what it is: placebo.
That’s not ethical! It’s not ethical to lie to patients. And it’s not ethical to lie to patients by giving them obecalp in a hospital, just like it’s not ethical to lie to patients and say that phenylephrine is going to help them with a cold.
For consumers, it’s a hard sell when the FDA allows a drug to be on the market and then takes it away from us. We feel as if we’re missing something. But it’s actually a demonstration of how the FDA works: When the FDA removes a drug from the market, they’re protecting the health of the public — and they’re protecting truth in medicine.
A recent spate of polling paints a bad picture of declining support for the president from voters of color. But just how worrisome is it?
Though we’re still more than a year out from the 2024 presidential election, the season for Democratic “bedwetting” has come early this cycle. Leading the apparent panic this month are a series of polls and accompanying analysis showing something that’s been pretty obvious for some time: Joe Biden is a really unpopular president — and that dissatisfaction will make a 2024 showdown with a Republican opponent pretty competitive.
Those recent surveys, from CNN and the Wall Street Journal, have shown Biden and his likely Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, essentially tied or with a narrow Trump lead. Polling averages reflect the same dynamic. None of it should be surprising — though Democrats have openly or anonymously been torn about just how much to be worried by these polls. Some longtime Democratic operatives have dismissed the fears from insiders and donors: Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, for example, has been quick to tell fellow Democrats to relax and “just take a step back,” while others have argued that it’s too early, or attacked the polls themselves.
But there is value in looking at the polls because they reveal something else: At this point in the campaign, it’s unarguable that Democrats, especially Biden, are facing a problem with voters of color. And that weaker standing with Black and Latino voters specifically seems to be fueling those tight national polling numbers.
That lower level of support for Biden is distinct from previous election cycles. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, who has been tracking this for some time, analyzed last year and this year’s New York Times/Siena polls of over 1,500 nonwhite respondents. He reports that Biden leads Trump 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters — a sharp drop off from the 70 percent support Biden garnered from voters of color in the 2020 election. Those numbers aren’t exclusive to the Times, either, but show up across surveys. That’s a much worse position than a Democratic candidate has been in for the last few election cycles.
Whether this is a new problem or not is debatable (as I’ve written before, some Democratic operatives don’t want to concede they have a real problem with nonwhite voters). The causes for this weaker level of support are also up for debate: Some, like the liberal researcher and writer Ruy Teixeira, argue that progressive cultural politics are largely to blame, while other Democratic operatives argue this is a problem with messaging). But the trends in polls over the last year are all pointing at something, even if people disagree on the specific numbers at the margins.
So, to understand these trends, I’ve assembled a few theories, informed by conversations with pollsters, strategists, and Democratic party operatives, for why this polling gap continues. Though there is some disagreement, some of it is due to Biden specifically, to the state of the economy, to differences among voters, and perceptions of the Democratic party. Here are three ways to view Biden’s nonwhite voter problem.
- It’s just too early
No one I spoke with denied that there is something going on with Biden and Black and Latino voters — though it’s taken some time to admit it.
“We can’t bury our head in the sand and give excuses about why the polling is wrong,” Chuck Rocha, the Democratic Latino consultant who has frequently been critical of his party’s work with voters of color, told me. “Times have changed and if we continue to rely on these constituencies to vote at such a high number, I’m afraid Democrats will be disappointed unless we put in the work needed to get them there.”
The go-to explanation among the Democratic establishment, including the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, is that it’s just too early — that most Americans, including voters of color across the country, aren’t tuned into the political process at this point in the year and aren’t yet aware of what the Biden administration has accomplished. They argue that is partially because the reelection campaign, though underway, hasn’t ramped up yet. And they say that they still have a lot of time to ramp up their outreach.
There’s a lot of truth to that feeling: Coming off of the summer season, political news does not tend to be the priority for most Americans, and Biden’s major accomplishments — the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the investments in manufacturing and technology in the CHIPS Act — may not seem to be affecting the lives of the average American.
“There hasn’t been the same kind of linkage between the legislation that Biden has helped pass, his overall agenda, and getting credit for it,” Daniel Cox, a pollster and the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life, told me. “[Voters ask], ‘Okay, he did this thing, it passed. Do I see any evidence in my own community or my own neighborhood? Are any of these things having any impact in my life?’ I think for a lot of voters, the answer is no.”
Campaign and party operatives acknowledge this fact — but time and messaging alone don’t explain what the polling is showing.
- “Voters of color” aren’t monolithic — and have complicated feelings about the Democrats
The term “nonwhite” voter itself hides a lot of complexity — and “Democrat” itself is only partially helpful. Support among Black Americans for Biden, for example, is much higher than among Hispanic or Latino voters. Latino voters tend to be younger than Black voters. Democrats seem to face bigger hurdles to retaining support from Black and Latino men, compared with women, while Biden specifically is underperforming with lower-income voters of color.
Bad feelings about the economy are still the single largest issue affecting Biden’s standing with all voters, including voters of color. Though the state of the economy is objectively improving (there’s no recession in sight, inflation is improving, and unemployment remains low), those material conditions take longer to improve when you’re on the lower end of the economic spectrum.
“This is very similar to 2012 — Barack Obama had the same issues with the economy and dissatisfaction with the economic recovery. But just like then, we have to tell a story, and keep talking about our solutions,” Kristian Ramos, a Democratic Latino consultant, told me. “We have work to do. We have the time to do it. And everything that I’ve seen, when people hear about what we’ve done, they like it. It moves these undecided voters to our side.”
The youth of the average Black or Latino voter also complicates the picture: younger voters tend to be dissatisfied with Biden, but that does not mean they are switching sides to vote for Republicans en masse. Cox argues that distinguishing between Biden and the Democratic Party is important to understand this dynamic: While younger voters of color might not want to say they’re Biden supporters at this point, they still have an affinity for the Democratic Party and its identity as the more progressive force in national politics.
“If you look at the Democratic Party among young people, it tends to be more positive than views of Biden. So it’s possible that Biden has artificially deflated support just because of who he is: his age, his background, his approach to politics, him being an old-school politician in a party that has increasingly become more progressive and wants more dynamism in their leaders,” Cox said. And that dissatisfaction also shows up in polling about Biden’s accomplishments: older voters are more willing to give Biden credit than younger voters.
Some of that gap can be explained by the different ways younger people consume political information, Rocha told me. “There’s lots of reasons. There’s more than three TV channels. There’s social media. Younger Black and Latino folks are acting much differently than their mothers and fathers,” Rocha said. “That just means there’s going to be more work needed —most of these campaigns are running broadcast TV commercials, because that’s where older people that are the regular voters are consuming information and you’re not reaching these younger Black and brown voters because they’re consuming all their information on mobile devices and streaming devices.”
And there’s a cultural divide: voters of color tend to be a bit more conservative on social issues than the white college-educated voters that have been growing more Democratic in the Trump era, as reflected in the varied opinions by Black and Latino voters on abortion, immigration, gender identity, and crime. As Cox’s AEI colleague Texeira has written before, those more moderate leanings don’t mean nonwhite voters are running to the GOP, but it does suggest that Democrats have more work to do to overcome the feeling among some nonwhite voters that they are not represented in the Democratic Party’s more progressive identity.
- Black and Latino voters tend to be neglected
Across most of the conversations I had with party insiders one thing was clear: Biden’s campaign and the Democratic apparatus supporting him are off to a good start. They’ve made the right hires of Black and Latino staffers to guide efforts with voters of color, they’ve made huge early investments in advertising to Black and Latino voters in battleground states, launched outreach efforts specifically targeted at Black and Latino men, and hosted engagement events in Mississippi, Florida, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. The next few months will be crucial in seeing whether this engagement begins to pay off, and whether this softer support for Biden bottoms out.
“If you’re asking me about Joe Biden, the first thing I’d say is, well, you need a person of color leading the campaign. Check. Did you start really early? Well, they started early, whether it’s the DNC or the campaign or Building Back Together (a Democratic-aligned outside group),” Rocha told me. “We need to admit that there’s an erosion in these constituencies, but that we have plenty of time to get it back to close where it needs to be.”
Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist working with the DNC to support Biden and reach Black voters, echoed this explanation, and noted that it’s encouraging to see early investment from the Biden campaign and the DNC in specifically reaching Black and Latino men.
“We tend to be called low-propensity voters, but I call them low-priority voters — we’re the number one targets of misinformation and disinformation, intentionally, to suppress our vote or keep us from participating or being motivated to participate,” he said. “We have to work overtime to make certain that we continue to invest in Black voters and invest in Black talent and keep us engaged even in a non-election year.”
Democrats working to elect Biden are also optimistic that voters will begin to see the contest as less of a referendum on the incumbent president and more of a choice between Biden and Trump once the contours of the GOP primary field become clearer. Ramos told me that once that divide becomes clear, it will become easier to pitch Biden to nonwhite voters — but that pitch requires talking about “status threats” — that the betterment of one group of voters isn’t coming at the expense of others, and that a rising tide lifts all boats — as a way to offset potential cultural criticisms of Democrats by the GOP.
Democratic insiders also point to another fact — while support is lagging for Biden and Democrats, there are no clear signs in polling or in real life of a mass exodus of voters of color to the Republican Party.
“We have seen this erosion of support for Democrats, but there hasn’t been a ton of evidence that these folks are flocking to the GOP,” Cox, of AEI, told me. “What we’re talking about is Democrats can no longer rely on these voters to be solid Democrats. That doesn’t mean that they’re not winnable, but that means that both parties seem to be well positioned to capture this increasing bloc of voters.”
Still, these margins matter — though 2024 is not likely to be the year that Republicans win a majority of Black or Latino voters, polling this far out does paint a picture of lower enthusiasm that could turn into lower turnout for Biden and congressional Democrats. As my colleague Andrew Prokop has explained, the polls conducted over the last year have told a consistent story — one of near-even support for Biden and his Republican rivals in battleground states and nationally. The lower numbers among Black and Latino voters are an equally consistent finding. And that makes the mission for the Democrats leading these campaigns even more urgent.