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Joe Biden Makes Surprise Appearance On Oprah Winfrey’s Get-Out-The-Vote Zoom Conversation

Ted Johnson
·2-min read

Joe Biden made a surprise appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s Zoom conversations aimed at empowering Black women to vote.

“I want to know what is sitting well with your soul right now? What is strengthening you?” Winfrey asked Biden.

“What is strengthening me now is my faith, my family and what I know about America,” Biden said.

They appeared with a 94-year-old woman voter, Mildred Madison, who has her son drive her 300 miles from Illinois, where she has been living during the pandemic, to Michigan so she could vote in her home state.

“God love ya…You know, I have said we are in a battle for the soul of America,” Biden said to Madison. “You are the soul of America. You are everything we stand for.”

Winfrey has been hosting regular town hall Zoom conversations as part of an OWN Your Vote initiative, a bipartisan campaign aimed at getting out the vote among Black women. A host of groups, including the NAACP, are partnering with OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, on the effort.

When she was still hosting her syndicated daytime talk show, Winfrey campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008, and later supported the general election campaign when Obama picked Biden as his running mate. She also campaigned in 2018 for Stacey Abrams in her bid for governor of Georgia.

In his appearance with Winfrey, Biden recalled the time when Obama asked him to consider joining the ticket.

“I told him I didn’t want to do it,” Biden said. “This is public knowledge now. I thought I could help him more as a U.S. senator.” Obama convinced him to go home and talk to his family about it, and Biden said it was his 92-year-old mother who told him a long story of why he should accept.

“She said, ‘Joey, first man in history who’s able to be elected president as an African American. He says that he needs you to win Pennsylvania and other states and you told him ‘No’?”

“I said, ‘Oh Mom, what are you doing to me?’ I said yes I will, and so I picked up the phone and called Barack, because my Mom, like you, wasn’t about to take no for an answer. It was about an obligation, about what you are supposed to do.”

Madison told Biden that she was voting for him because he has “had the experience and you have had the heart, and the main thing is you have a wonderful vice president, Kamala Harris.”

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