WATCH: SNL Audience Taken Aback After Michael Che Mocks Biden’s Struggles With Black Voters

Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che threw the audience for a loop this week when he mocked President Joe Biden’s connection to Black voters.

During Weekend Update, Che compared Biden to the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Maryland that collapsed last week — as part of a segment which began with co-host Colin Jost making a joke about the contents of the cargo ship that hit the bridge.

“This week, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after it was hit by a cargo ship that was carrying — you won’t believe it — Boeing airplanes,” Jost said, to audience laughter.

Che followed up with a jab about Biden’s plan to visit the bridge.

“President Biden said Friday that he would visit the site of the Baltimore bridge collapse because, like that bridge, Biden is no longer connecting with Black communities,” he said.

The comment elicited a chorus of “Woah!” interspersed with tentative laughter from the audience.

Recent polls bear out the premise of Che’s joke — that Biden is, in fact, struggling to win over Black voters. According to Reuters, “some Black voters now feel disillusioned by a surge in the cost of living and racial justice priorities they feel Biden’s Democrats have yet to deliver on as promised.”

In the 2020 election, Biden received a whopping 87 percent of the Black vote. A recent Roper Center poll published in USA Today showed that just 63 percent of Black voters said they would vote for Biden in 2024. Biden fared better in a recent CBS News poll — but even that survey put him at 76 percent, an 11 point drop from 2020.

The Roper Center poll showed Trump with 12% of the Black vote, although Trump has claimed, “the Black people like me” because of his extensive rap sheet.

The Biden-Harris campaign has been working on its strategy to reach out to Black voters. According to NBC News:

This Black History Month, President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is making a big push to publicize the Black history made under the Biden-Harris administration.

The question is how much that message matters to those Black voters who are wavering on the edges of the Biden coalition right now.

 

Watch the clip above via NBC.