Democrats look to woo black voters at South Carolina forum

ROCK HILL, S.C. — The Democratic presidential contenders opened a televised forum in the early voting state of South Carolina on Friday night with an attack on front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who’s seen her numbers rise after a summer slump.

With just a week before the second Democratic primary debate, both Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Gov. Martin O’Malley have escalated their attacks, casting themselves as the party’s liberal standard-bearers as they attempt to resurrect questions about Clinton’s trustworthiness.

O’Malley, who’s struggling to break double digits in national polls, criticized Clinton’s opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, a project rejected by President Barack Obama earlier on Friday after a yearslong campaign by liberal activists.

“Secretary Clinton got there just last week, and I was against it a year ago,” O’Malley said during the event sponsored by MSNBC. “I think leadership isn’t about following polls. I think leadership is about being clear about your principles.”

In an effort to break into what’s shaping up to be a two-person primary race, O’Malley also took aim at Sanders, suggesting that the self-identified democratic socialist is not a loyal member of the party.

“I think that when President Obama was running for re-election, I was glad to step up and work very hard for him while Sen. Sanders was trying to find someone to primary him,” O’Malley said. “I’m a Democrat. I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’m not an independent. I’m not a former Republican. I believe in the party of Franklin Roosevelt.”

The forum marked the start of a weekend of wooing African-American voters in South Carolina. Clinton used the campaign swing to expand on her criminal justice policy, rolling out a series of new proposals that would reduce mandatory minimum sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders, grant greater discretion to judges and retroactively eliminate the five-year minimum sentence for possession of crack cocaine.

Sanders, meanwhile, was trying to introduce himself to Latino and African-American voters, who make up a crucial segment of the Democratic party. He was rolling out a new series of radio ads aimed at black voters in South Carolina and Spanish-language spots targeting Hispanics in Nevada.

A recent poll released by CNN showed Clinton winning 80 percent of black voters in South Carolina and 71 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters overall. Black voters make up more than half of the primary vote in the state — a far larger segment in than in Iowa or New Hampshire.

The Clinton family has a long relationship with minority voters. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was called the country’s first black president during his time in the White House. And Hillary Clinton won Latino voters by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in her 2008 primary race against the man who actually became the country’s first black president.

In contrast, Sanders acknowledges that he has little experience wooing minority voters as an elected official from a state that’s 95 percent white.

“I’m just not well known in the African-American community,” he told NPR this week. “That’s just simply the truth.”