Barely 13 months into his term, President Joe Biden’s approval numbers have steadily declined virtually across the board among all sorts of demographic subgroups.

Where the hemorrhaging of support for Biden in the polls has been most stark, however, is among black voters, a key constituency that Democrats like Biden have relied upon for decades to win elections, The Wall Street Journal reported.

To be sure, the level of black voter support for Democrats had already been on the decline since the end of former President Barack Obama’s tenure, but the sudden plummeting of black approval for Biden in recent months suggests that the near-monolithic prior support of the black voting bloc may no longer be taken for granted by the Democratic Party.

Broken promises to black voters

The article from the Journal referred to a recent piece from New York magazine’s Intelligencer that took a deep dive into the issue of “Why Joe Biden Is Bleeding Black Support” and reached a few conclusions to help explain why.

That piece first looked at the stunning decline of support for Biden among black voters and suggested it could, at least in part, be linked to the president’s failure to fulfill his campaign vows of progress on issues like voting rights and criminal justice reform.

Those failures are fairly recent, though, and are only known by the highly engaged voters and activist class, not the average black American.

Vaccine mandates and inflation

Perhaps a bigger reason put forward by the Intelligencer — which matches timewise to an obvious “inflection point” in polling data — was President Biden’s mid-September declaration of COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

A substantial minority of black Americans remain unvaccinated, and Biden’s mandates — at least before most were blocked by the courts — seriously threatened to negatively impact the jobs and livelihoods of many black Americans, to say nothing of Biden’s intensely harsh criticisms of the unvaccinated that was undoubtedly aimed at white conservatives but would have hit home against a portion of his base.

And then, of course, there is the rampant inflation brought about, at least in part, by Biden’s policies and his party’s insistence on spending trillions of dollars the nation simply doesn’t have.

That has resulted in soaring prices at grocery stores, gas stations, and virtually everywhere else, and is having a direct and negative effect on the bank accounts and wallets of black Americans, perhaps even more so than any other demographic group.

COVID and rising crime

The Hill‘s Joe Concha also took a look at the significant decrease in black support for Biden in numerous different polls and reached many of the same conclusions as the Intelligencer did concerning why, such as inflation and the failure to fulfill his many campaign promises.

Concha noted a couple of potential reasons, too, such as Biden’s failure to get the pandemic under control — black Americans have a higher rate of hospitalization and death than other groups — and rising crime in urban areas, and in the end, when the drop in support among black voters is paired with a similar decline among independents, it does not bode well for Democrats in November or Biden himself if he chooses to run again in 2024.