Sanders struggles with new minorities strategy
JACKSON, Miss. — As Bernie Sanders contemplates making another president bid in 2020, the Vermont senator still is searching for the right way to attract more black voters who backed Hillary Clinton and effectively denied him the Democratic nomination in 2016.
His challenge was on display last week in Mississippi, where he traveled to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination but along the way managed a clumsy critique of the Democratic Party under the nation’s first black president
Former President Barack Obama, Sanders said, was a “charismatic individual, an extraordinary candidate, a brilliant man.”
But “behind that reality,” Sanders said, Obama led a party whose “business model” has been a “failure” for more than a decade.
It served as the latest confirmation that Sanders, even as he tries for new footholds in the black community, hasn’t mastered his precarious relationship with a key Democratic Party constituency that he will need if he hopes to reshape the party going forward, much less make another presidential run.
Sanders, who is elected in Vermont as an independent but caucuses in Washington with Democrats, has been spending more time in places dominated by black voters, including Southern states where AfricanAmericans shape Democratic primaries.
He went to Memphis last week to remember King’s assassination alongside Martin Luther King III; then he moved on to Jackson to join the first-term mayor whose candidacy he endorsed last year.
Sanders and Chokwe Antar Lumumba have become a sort of political odd couple: the white 76-year-old democratic socialist with his rumpled suit and untamed hair, preaching in his Brooklyn vernacular, and an impeccably clad 35-yearold black attorney-turnedpolitician smiling his way through calm expositions sprinkled with the occasional “y’all.” But they share a vision. Lumumba expresses hopes to make Jackson “the most radical” of U.S. cities.
Besides campaigning for Lumumba, Sanders came to Mississippi last year to lobby workers to unionize a Nissan auto plant.
The senator backed another black millennial in neighboring Alabama, helping Randall Woodfin to the mayor’s office in Birmingham. In New Orleans, Our Revolution, the spinoff of Sanders’ presidential campaign, tapped the eventual winner of a crowded mayoral race. LaToya Cantrell will be sworn in May 7.
On Capitol Hill, Sanders aides say he huddles more with black lawmakers to discuss shared priorities.
In an interview in Mississippi, Sanders brushed back “the myth” that he has little black support, noting 2016 primary exit polls showing he won voters under 30 across racial lines. But he mostly shuns most racebased analysis and casts his post-2016 maneuvering as ideological: He wants to move public policy leftward on everything from health care and college access to criminal justice and labor policy, and he argues the way to do that is increase voter turnout across demographic groups. “My goal is to bring forth progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working people, whether they are black, white or Latino, and get people involved in the political process in a way we have not seen in a very long time,” he said before his event with Lumumba.
His mentions of the civil rights movement still don’t include his own activism as a white college student in Chicago.
His travel itinerary has been void of state and local party galas where lowerlevel party players are accustomed to welcoming would-be presidents.
Clinton attended such events for decades, and by her presidential campaigns often could call several attendees by name.
“We haven’t heard from him at all,” said Alabama’s Joe Reed, who leads an influential black caucus within his state’s party.
Sanders answered that he doesn’t need “the establishment,” regardless of race, and said most voters are “estranged” from the two-party system anyway.
Exit polling from the 2008 and 2016 Democratic presidential primaries showed that the eventual nominee — Obama, then Clinton — lost the white vote, but prevailed on the strength of nonwhites, particularly black voters.
Those trends may not apply in 2020, when the Democratic field is expected to include more than two competitive candidates. There could be multiple credible black candidates, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey.
But Clay Middleton, who ran Clinton’s South Carolina campaign in 2016, said the takeaway remains: “You want to get elected president, you want to win the nomination, you cannot take the African-American vote for granted.”