Haight, a former journalist,
thinks the media focuses too much on Biden’s polls, and his age, and other perceived weaknesses. She said, “I’m tired of hearing Democrats wring their hands and clutch their pearls and [say], ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’” And she believes that on everything from local concerns, like gentrification, to more national ones, like childcare, Democrats are better for Black voters.

But she wasn’t ignoring the polling, either.

“Somehow,” she said, “we have to make that more clear.”

When I reached one of the six pastors, Curtis Johnson, by phone, he told me the pastors plunged into the council race for entirely local reasons. The Republican candidate they endorsed, Randall Fowler, “is not — I repeat not — a Trump-lican,” he said. The letter was “not about us endorsing the Republican Party at all.”

However, he said, “We stand by the fact that in many instances, the Black vote has just been automatically expected to be Democratic when there are some concerns that several of us have.”

When it came to Biden, Johnson, the senior pastor at Valley Brook Outreach Baptist Church in Pelzer, S.C., told me, “I do feel that Biden and the Democratic Party as a whole are aware of the importance of the Black vote. I do feel, and I do understand, that they’re fighting an uphill battle with the far-right Republican agenda.”