This is the fourth is a series of posts that examines how the Democratic presidential contenders are faring with black voters. Thus far we’ve considered Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg. Here we consider Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders is a self-avowed democratic socialist who wants to outlaw private-sector health insurance, ban hydraulic fracking, eliminate nuclear power, abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agencies, impose national rent control, nationalize electrical power production, and make corporations quasi-public entities that are increasingly accountable not to shareholders and the market, but to politicians and the state.
In short, if Bernie were to secure the Democratic presidential nomination, he would be, without question, the most radical and left-wing major party presidential nominee in all of American history.
Most black Democrats, by contrast, reject his ideas—or at least there is no great groundswell of support among African Americans for such a radical restructuring of American society and the U.S. market economy.
To the contrary, most black Democrats are moderates or center-left liberals who seek greater government support and protection within a broader market economy.
And yet: Bernie is doing very well with African American voters. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows him just three points behind Biden (31-28) in black support.
Since January, reports the Post, Sanders “has more than doubled his support among black voters and has gained among whites without college degrees.”
State Polls. In South Carolina, Sanders is losing the black vote to Biden 43-20 according to a new UMass Lowell poll. But South Carolina is just one state, and it is the one state where Biden has cashed in all of his chips, so to speak, because it is truly a do-or-die state for him, politically.
Still, for Sanders, 20 percent of the black vote in a state where he hasn’t been especially active and where the electorate is fractured among several competing candidates ain’t bad. In North Carolina, Virginia, and other southern states with large black populations, Sanders is holding his own, with roughly 17-20 percent of the black vote.
That may be more than enough black support for Sanders to win his share of states with large African American populations.
At the very least, it will be more than enough black support for Sanders to amass a large share of the delegates, since the Democrats award their delegates proportionately in accordance with a candidate’s share of the overall vote tally vice a winner-take-all approach.
Moreover, as the primary race moves further north and west, into New York, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, and California, Sanders is poised to do even better with black voters.
That’s because he polls better nationally among black voters than he does statewide in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and other southern states. This suggests that Sanders has greater black support outside of the south in the cities and in other urban and industrial areas.
Sanders Connects. In any case, what accounts for Sanders success with black voters, given the ideological divide between him, a self-avowed socialist, and them, more moderate, center-left types?
Two things: First, as David Frum has observed, although he is a socialist, Bernie is not especially “woke” or politically correct. In fact, he tends to eschew or avoid identity politics, focusing instead on bread-and-butter economic issues—jobs, healthcare, education, student debt relief, the social-safety net, et al.
These are the types of everyday, “meat-and-potato” concerns that resonate with ordinary voters, black and white.
Democratic primary voters thus tend not to see Sanders as the radical or socialist that he genuinely is. Instead, they see him as a pragmatic liberal politician eager to use the power of the state to extend economic opportunity to people who’ve been left behind, while interjecting greater fairness back into a system that, in their view, has been skewed and corrupted to favor the wealthy.
Second, Sanders support is heavily tilted toward younger voters, and his African American supporters are no different: They are conspicuously younger than, say, Joe Biden’s African American supporters.
Indeed, today’s Washington Post/ABC News poll shows Sanders with a commanding 50-12 lead over Biden among Democratic-leaning votes who are less than 50 years old. Among Democratic-leaning voters older than 50, by contrast, Biden bests Sanders 20-14.
This matters because younger voters today are far more left-wing and open to socialism than older voters, who actually remember the Soviet Union and 1970s era of domestic stagflation caused by an overweening and stifling government.
The bottom line: Bernie may be a self-avowed socialist; but he is also a smart politician who has been able to connect with an increasingly large swath of the Democratic Party primary electorate, black and white.
This puts him in a unique and enviable political position. Sanders is not desperately scrambling for black votes like, say, Pete Buttigieg; but neither is he utterly and completely dependent on black votes like, say, Joe Biden.
Instead, Sanders’ winning coalition occupies a middle ground between these two extremes of political need and political dependency. And that is why he is the undisputed—and perhaps unbeatable—frontrunner in this Democratic presidential primary race.
Feature photo credit: NBC News.