Former Vice President Joe Biden blamed Democrat losses in Florida and Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial races on Republican-driven electoral fraud via “voter ID laws” that “keep people from being able to vote.”

Biden also linked President Donald Trump to “white supremacists” and the “forces of hate” that led to the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968.

Biden made his allegations during Monday’s National Action Network’s annual breakfast in Washington, DC.– an organization founded and run by MSNBC’s Al Sharpton.

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Upon taking the stage, Biden embraced Sharpton.

Biden said:

Years ago, there used to be a poll tax. Now, as our last speaker pointed out, just last year 24 states — 24 states — introduced or enacted at least 70 bills to make it harder for people to vote. They now use the voter ID laws like the poll taxes used to be used. Simply designed to keep people from being able to vote. We saw it in Georgia, in the governor’s race. We saw it in Florida. We saw it in other parts of the country. 2017. These guys never give up. We knew that. They never will give up. It’s like cutting grass, man. You cut it, it looks nice. But you let it go for awhile, it gets a little ugly, and it grows into a forest again. We can’t let this happen.

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Biden’s address came on Martin Luther King Day. He linked King’s murder to what he said were “forces of hate” among “white supremacists” courted by Trump:

Fifty years later, the hate that cut your dad down is still nurtured by those forces of darkness. We saw it in Charlottesville, those Klansmen and white supremacists literally — and neo-Nazis — slunked out of their dark rooms and digital hideaways, their crazed and vicious faces literally contorted, illuminated by torchlight. You couldn’t make up a Hollywood movie like that in a historic city and confronted by decent honorable Americans who said, “This is not us.” Dr. King knew those faces well, those same lost souls who once stood like cowards, hooded behind burning crosses. They have They have been deliberately reawakened again, those forces. It’s not an accident. They have been deliberately reawakened again. Unearthed by loose talk, by direct appeals to prejudice, from the alt-right. Then, something I never thought I’d live to see again, having a President of the United States make a moral equivalence between those who were spreading the hate and those who were opposing it, saying there were — quote — very fine people on both sides. No president since the Civil War had ever, ever, ever uttered words like that. One thing we know for certain. We learned it over and over again through history — in the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Silence is complicity. And so we have to do what you’ve been doing, what everybody’s been doing in this room for a long time. We have to speak out. We have to challenge these forces of hate.

In December of 2018, Biden said, “Anyone from the Democrats can beat [Donald Trump in 2020].”

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.