Interesting piece in the NYT explaining why southern voters went for Biden. It is not the whole explanation, but a big part of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/joe-biden-southern-democrats.html
My friends in New York, many of them Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders supporters who see Mr. Biden as deeply uninspiring, were mystified. But after traveling through the South this past week though, I began to understand. Through Southern eyes, this election is not about policy or personality. It’s about something much darker.
Not long ago, these Americans lived under violent, anti-democratic governments. Now, many there say they see in President Trump and his supporters the same hostility and zeal for authoritarianism that marked life under Jim Crow.
For those who lived through the trauma of racial terrorism and segregation, or grew up in its long shadow, this history haunts the campaign trail. And Mr. Trump has summoned old ghosts.
“People are prideful of being racist again,” said Bobby Caradine, 47, who is black and has lived in Memphis all his life. “It’s right back out in the open.”
In Tennessee and Alabama, in Arkansas and Oklahoma and Mississippi, Democrats, black and white, told me they were united by a single, urgent goal: defeating Mr. Trump this November, with any candidate, and at any cost.
“There’s three things I want to happen,” Angela Watson, a 60-year-old black Democrat from Oklahoma City, told me at a campaign event there this week. “One, beat Trump. Two, beat Trump. And three, beat Trump.”
They were deeply skeptical that a democratic socialist like Mr. Sanders could unseat Mr. Trump. They liked Ms. Warren, but, burned by Hillary Clinton’s loss, were worried that too many of their fellow Americans wouldn’t vote for a woman.
Joe Biden is no Barack Obama. But he was somebody they knew. “He was with Obama for all those years,” Mr. Caradine said. "People are comfortable with him.” Faced with the prospect of their children losing the basic rights they won over many generations, these voters, as the old Chicago political saw goes, don’t want nobody that nobody sent.
“The past is never dead,” as the Mississippi novelist William Faulkner wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” “It’s not even past.”
Faulkner was on my mind when I picked up the keys to a rental car in Memphis, for the long drive to Selma, Ala. Along the way, I stopped for breakfast in Olive Branch, Miss., where I met a man named Dave Wright. His grandfather, Leonard Wright, was William Faulkner’s physician. “Faulkner wrote about Granddaddy. Granddaddy didn’t like what he said, but it was all true,” Mr. Wright told me. He stopped there.
On Sunday, I marched across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge with thousands, an annual exercise in remembering that draws Americans from all walks of life. In 1965, police attacked civil rights protesters here in an event that came to be called Bloody Sunday.
This year, the Democratic presidential candidates joined. So did Bob Smith, an older black man, who stood at the edge of the crowds holding a sign. “I was here in 1965, pistol whipped and kicked by police,” it read.
When I asked him about it, Mr. Smith smiled. “Yeah, I was here all right. Got the crap kicked out of me, too!” he told me with an easy laugh.
