The white, financially comfortable progressives of Park Slope, where the median listed home price is $1.5 million, are hardly representative of Biden’s urban base, so I next headed farther out in Brooklyn, to East Flatbush, a predominantly Black neighborhood where many precincts voted overwhelmingly for the president. There, too, Democrats remained supportive of Biden overall. “I like Joe. At least he’s trying,” Michelle Lynch, a 54-year-old nurse, told me. But they were quicker to voice ambivalence or dissatisfaction in his performance. Few people were paying close attention to the legislative wrangling on Capitol Hill—none mentioned the Build Back Better Act by name, and only one cited the Senate filibuster as something she wanted Biden to tackle. But multiple Democrats in East Flatbush brought up student loans, saying they were disappointed that the president had not acted to forgive them, as progressives like Warren have lobbied him to.
Lisa Ellison, 48 and a home-health aide, described her opinion of Biden as “borderline.” “Everything he said he was going to do for us he hasn’t done,” she told me as she headed into a Target. Ellison, a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant, recalled feeling better about Biden earlier in the year after receiving a stimulus check. “We need more of those,” she said, “especially with food and prices going up.”
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