Why Bernie Sanders Is Winning Black and Brown Voters This Time
This week, as Democratic presidential frontrunner Bernie Sanders turns to South Carolina’s primary, where around 60 percent of the Democratic electorate is black, his campaign is flanked by high hopes for 2020 and the long shadow of 2016. Not only did a weak performance among black voters lead to Sanders 47 point loss in South Carolina in the last primary, but the 7 percent dip in national turnout among black voters also hindered Hillary Clinton’s hopes in the general election.
This time around things are different. Sanders just surpassed Joe Biden with a plurality of black voters nationwide at 26 percent in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Aiming to redeem his performance from last cycle and to wipe any lingering doubts about his candidacy, Sanders rebooted team stands armed with a strategy leveraging peer-to-peer organizing and a message of economic uplift aiming to fulfill generations of broken promises.
“I think that people are right to look at our political system and be skeptical and frustrated,” says Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders's national press secretary. “I think that people of color feel that if not as much more than white voters, in part because of the way that inequities have heaped on us disproportionately. I think that there is a culture of skepticism within the black community, which is justified by the way we've been treated in this country.”
Gearing up for the 2020 election, the Sanders campaign—like other campaigns jockeying to reach voters of color—prioritized recruiting a multiracial staff to tailor its populist message to the particular plights of the Democratic party's diverse base. Joy Gray, who is black, says that the swift and unsuspected ascent in the 2016 campaign, made it difficult for Sanders’s then shoestring staff to reach out and organize the coalition necessary to win the nomination (In 2016, Sanders, who hails from the 94-percent-white state of Vermont, was starting off in the hole, campaigning against the Clintons who had built decades long relationship with Democratic black voters through the presidency.) His leadership team in the last cycle was initially all-white, lagged minority support in states like South Carolina, and was caricatured as monolithically supported by white male “Bernie Bros."
“This time around is very different. We’re obviously a serious campaign,” says Joy Gray. “We’re front runners, and from top to bottom, the staff is both robust and incredibly diverse.”
In addition to Joy Gray, campaign co-chair Nina Turner and deputy campaign manager René Spellman are also black women. And with co-chair Ro Khanna, who is of South Asian descent; co-chair Yulín Cruz, who is of Putero Rican descent; campaign manager Faiz Shakir who is of Pakistani descent; and teams of Latino organizers advocating for “Tío Bernie” in California and Texas, the campaign has built multiracial juggernaut. In the early states, Sanders’s team has been buoyed by a multi-platform effort: high-profile endorsements including that of New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a California concert with hip-hop icons Public Enemy, and viral videos with surrogates of color like the rapper Killer Mike and criminal justice reform activist Philip Agnew. Politico even posited the Bronx rapper Cardi B, who promoted her nail salon interview with Sanders to her 59 million Instagram followers, “might be one of Bernie's most powerful 2020 allies.”
While this new squad has worked to organize around keynote issues that disproportionately impact minorities like mass incarceration and family separation, much of the outreach has centered around the same kitchen table issues that plague all working families. “There is this perception that voters of color care about these very specific issues exclusively to other issues, so Latinos, only care about immigration and black people are supposed to only care about criminal justice reform, but what we found, and we found this in Nevada, is that [like] so many voters there, Latino voters care enormously about health care,” says Joy Gray. “Is that surprising when you look at the fact that Latinos are the most underinsured group in this country? No, it shouldn't be. And it's the same thing when you talk about black voters.”
According to a 2019 Essence Magazine poll of black women, healthcare was the second most important political issue of the 2020 presidential election. Likewise, according to a 2019 poll of black voters conducted by the Black Census Project, “the most important issues for respondents were also the most important issues facing the rest of the country—low wages, lack of quality health care, substandard housing, rising college costs and different sets of rules for the wealthy and the poor.” Furthermore, a 2019 UnidosUS poll found “jobs and the economy, health care, immigration, education, and gun violence were the top five most important issues that Latino voters would like a candidate to address.”
Running on these issues, Joy Gray notes that the campaign is looking to hyper-local organizing to win over communities of color, which has yielded preliminary success in early states so far. Key to a popular vote win in Iowa was working to organize the satellite caucuses where voters of color who typically were not able to make the caucuses could vote at their place of work or university—Sanders outperformed at these sites. In Ottumwa, Adom Getachew, an Ethiopian-American volunteer, helped translate for Ethiopian immigrants working at a satellite caucus site at the JBS pork packing plant where the Sanders campaign won 14 of the 15 votes. “I called folks, I guess some time in January, who all worked at the slaughterhouse, who are Amharic speakers, Ethiopian immigrants, going out to the plant that these folks work at and standing outside the door in the middle of the night, being like, ‘Hey, we have folks who can speak in Amharic if that's necessary’,” Getachew said on the campaign's podcast.
Likewise, in Nevada, where 28 percent of the population is Hispanic, the campaign spent months hosting barbecues, soccer matches, leveraging bilingual staff and volunteers, and reaching out to Spanish speakers through native texting apps.
“We really tapped into people's personal networks through relational organizing,” says Jose Mariscal-Cruz, a field staffer from Reno, Nevada. “I think that was massive for us within the Latino community. ” He notes that this is particularly true of families, who would help bring along brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and grandparents once they were onboard with support Bernie.
Mariscal-Cruz spent nine months knocking doors in East Las Vegas, organizing in rural areas of the state, and even driving one recently naturalized woman to the polls who had no other way to caucus. Despite contentious coverage around Medicare for All and union support, Mariscal-Cruz said many of the Nevada residents were eager to talk about healthcare regardless of their coverage. “Something that was really big for me in the East Los Vegas community was Medicare for all. Whether someone has good insurance or not, people care about their relatives who have insurance that doesn't cover all the costs that they may have incurred at some point.”
Last week, after months of organizing, the entrance polls to the caucuses found Sanders with 51 percent of the Latino vote in the state.
“You can't buy that,” says Joy Gray. “You can't Bloomberg your way into that kind of trust and those kinds of relationships.” While Michael Bloomberg, who's taken many swipes at Sanders in debates, isn’t on the ballot until Super Tuesday, his hundreds of millions of dollars in national advertising still loom over the race.
In South Carolina, Sanders is employing similar relational organizing techniques. According to the campaign, more than 80 percent of South Carolina’s campaign staff are people of color, and nearly 90 percent of them are from the state. Four years ago, Sanders only won 14 percent of the state’s black vote. The local ground game has multiplied Sanders's support since the previous election, moving from only five endorsements in 2016 to 35 this year, with nods from former Biden endorser and Richland County council vice-chairwoman Dahli Myers and the first African-American mayor of Georgetown, SC Brendon Barber. “Endorsements matter in South Carolina,” says College of Charleston political scientist Jordan Ragusa, who conducted case studies of the 1992 and 2016 races along with H. Gibbs Knotts and found that state endorsement advantage in the state was positively correlated with primary victory.
Ragusa, coauthor of First in the South: Why South Carolina's Presidential Primary Matters, says the Sanders campaign is benefiting from the national press coverage from winning previous state primaries, and he has invested in organizing more aggressively than he did in 2015, enlisting national black political figures and activists like Harvard professor Cornel West and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison. Yet, he argued that Sanders will have a big challenge, with billionaire Tom Steyer spending heavily in the state, and former vice president Joe Biden pulling on a decade of relationships and who this week won the endorsement of the state’s biggest player, representative James Clyburn. A recent Data for Progress poll shows Biden in the lead with 35 percent, Sanders following with 25 percent, and then Steyer with 13 percent. South Carolina presents the Sanders campaign with its first significant test to win over black voters at scale, and could be a crucial bellwether for Super Tuesday.
As “southern states have similar demographics and a shared identity, those who do well in South Carolina can translate that success into the other southern states on Super Tuesday, and quickly amass an insurmountable delegate advantage,” Ragusa says, evoking candidates like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton who both went on to clinch the nomination after strong showings in South Carolina. Hoping to join them stands Bernie Sanders. Thus far the senator's political revolution—free college, free healthcare, free childcare, a Green New Deal, and more—have been rolling like a freight train towards the nomination, racking up popular vote wins in the first three early states. On Saturday, we’ll get glimpse of whether black voters intend to fuel Sanders the rest of the way.
Aaron Ross Coleman covers race and economics. His previous work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Buzzfeed, CNBC, Vox, and elsewhere. He is an Ida B. Wells Fellow at Type Media Center.
He went from the rumpled bit player of the progressive movement to a legit presidential candidate and liberal kingmaker. But now that Sanders wields such enormous power in Democratic politics, the question is, what’s he going to do with it? Jason Zengerle hit the road with Sanders as the senator grapples with what to do next.
Originally Appeared on GQ
