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Bernie Wins Black Support Without Being Overly Dependent Upon African Americans

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.

Black Voters Won’t Deny Bloomberg the Nomination; Sanders and Biden Voters Will

This is the third in a series of posts about the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential contest and the black vote. We previously examined Joe Biden’s prospects and Pete Buttigieg’s challenges. Here we consider former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s chances.

So, can Michael Bloomberg win the black vote? Well, that depends on what you mean by “win the black vote.” Can he get a majority of black votes in a Democratic primary election contest that has a fractured electorate and multiple candidates?

No, he cannot. But then, no candidate—including Joe Biden, the candidate who polls strongest among black voters—seems poised or able to do that.

The real question is: can Bloomberg win a sufficient share of the black vote to deny Sanders and Biden the nomination short of a contested political convention in July? And the answer to that question, surprisingly, is: yes. At least that’s what his surging poll numbers suggest.

A Feb. 10, 2020, Quinnipiac University national poll, for instance, shows Bloomberg with an impressive 22 percent share of the black vote, behind Biden (27 percent), but ahead of Bernie Sanders (19 percent).

An NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll released today (Feb. 18) shows Bloomberg winning 16 percent of the black vote nationally to Biden’s 31 percent and Sanders’ 28 percent.

Bloomberg chose not to compete in Iowa (Feb. 3) or New Hampshire (Feb. 11); and he won’t be on the ballot in Nevada (Feb. 22) or South Carolina (Feb. 29) either. Instead, he has opted to focus all of his time, money, and resources on the 14 “Super Tuesday” states that have primaries March 3.

No successful presidential candidate in American history has ever done this; but as FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich notes, “a handful of state polls that suggest that investment may pay off” for Bloomberg.

In Virginia, for instance, a new Monmouth University poll shows that Bloomberg is tied for first place with Sanders (they both have 22 percent of the overall vote) and holding his own among black voters, with a respectable 18 percent.

That puts Bloomberg in a tie with Sanders and behind only Biden, who is preferred by 37 percent of Virginia’s likely black voters.

Similarly, in North Carolina, a new WRAL News poll shows that Bloomberg has 25 percent of the black vote, second only to Biden’s 35 percent. That leaves him tied for first place overall with Sanders. They both have 22 percent of the overall vote versus Biden’s 20 percent.

Left-Wing Ire. A similar story is playing out more or less in other states with large numbers of black voters—Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, et al. Bloomberg is doing surprisingly well, and, as a result, is now a serious electoral force in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign.

This despite arousing the ire and opposition of the more progressive or “woke” elements of the Democratic Party. Leftists angrily denounce Bloomberg for what they say are his “racist” remarks and his “racist” record as Mayor of New York City.

Such vitriolic criticism has caused Bloomberg to backpedal politically, and to renounce some of his previous positions, while apologizing for some of his past remarks. Most notably, Bloomberg has disowned his previous support of “stop and frisk” police tactics, which helped to dramatically reduce violent crime in New York City.

But as Jason Riley observes in the Wall Street Journal, “if black lives matter, then New York’s former mayor has nothing to apologize for… If anything close to the crime rates of the early 1990s had persisted for another quarter-century,” he writes, then “tens of thousands more black men might be dead or incarcerated.”

Moreover, as Fox News’ Brit Hume and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board explain, Bloomberg’s so-called racially insensitive remarks are factually true but politically incorrect. Big deal. Or at least they may be a big deal to “woke,” left-wing progressives; but as the polls suggest, ordinary black voters don’t seem overly alarmed or concerned.

“I don’t think his problem is that he’s racist,” says the New York Times Bret Stephens. “If he [Bloomberg] were, he wouldn’t have won nearly 50 percent of the African-American vote when he ran for re-election as New York’s mayor in 2005, or be drawing considerable African-American support today. “

Genuine grassroots black support, in fact, helps to explain why a significant number of elected black officials—including four members of the Congressional black caucus and former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter—have endorsed Bloomberg.

Big Money. Critics charge Bloomberg, a billionaire worth an estimated $62 billion, with trying to “buy the election.” He’s already spent, after all, an unprecedented amount of money (more than $338 million thus far) on television, radio, and digital advertising.

As Business Insider’s Eliza Relman reports, that’s more than Obama spent on advertising in his entire 2012 reelection campaign, and we still have eight months to go before the Nov, 3, 2020, general election. 

Bloomberg, though, has been able to turn this criticism on its head by noting that he has the money and resources needed to defeat Trump and will spend freely to ensure that Trump isn’t reelected.

Bloomberg’s desire to beat Trump and to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, has clearly resonated with Democratic primary voters, black and white, brown and Asian.

Limited Appeal. Still, we shouldn’t overstate Bloomberg’s appeal. For the most part, he still trails Biden and Sanders and will have trouble getting more than 25-30 percent of the primary vote, black and white, in any state.

That’s in part because the Democratic Party is now fractured with multiple presidential candidates; but it’s also in part because, even with his embrace of new left-wing positions, Bloomberg is still well to the right of most Democratic primary voters.

Woke, left-wing progressives view him with tremendous scorn and suspicion. His embrace of school choice, for instance, is anathema to them.

Plus: Bloomberg hasn’t yet been tested in the crucible of political combat. As we’ve noted, he sat out the first two primary contests and hasn’t appeared in any of the Democratic Party debates. Thus how he performs in his first debate tomorrow in Las Vegas will be telling and instructive.

I seriously doubt Bloomberg can win the Democratic presidential nomination, but if he fails, it won’t be because of a lack of black support. Bloomberg, as I point out, is holding his own there. Instead, it will be because he is a bridge too far ideologically for a party that has become increasingly woke and “progressive.”

Indeed, FiveThirtyEight gives Bloomberg just an eight percent chance of winning a majority of the pledged delegates. Sanders, by contrast, has a 40 percent chance of doing that; Biden a 10 percent chance.

Bloomberg’s only plausible path to the nomination is to do well enough to deny Sanders and Biden a majority of the delegates and thereby create a contested convention.

If he can do that, then he has a sim chance of winning the nomination—especially if, before the convention, he can get a dynamic and appealing African American woman (Stacey Abrams, say) to serve as his running mate.

But that’s a very big and unlikely if.

Next up, we’ll review how Bernie Sanders is faring with black voters, and we’ll examine his success—and failure.

Feature photo credit: NBC News.

Buttigieg’s Inability to Win Black Support Probably Spells His Doom in 2020

This is the second in a series of posts about the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential contest and the black vote. As Joe Biden has observed, it is impossible for any Democratic presidential candidate to win that party’s nomination without significant support from black voters.

We examined Biden’s prospects in our last post. Here we consider the prospects of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Pete Buttigieg may be a once-in-a-generation political talent; but he has a huge political achilles heel: black voters don’t seem to like him much. As the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel and Richard A. Oppel Jr. report, Buttigieg’s problem with black voters

came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.

In addition, there are legitimate concerns about Buttigieg’s record as mayor and the disproportionately adverse impact his policies may have had on African Americans. Again, the New York Times:

Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size.

More recently, adds Michelle R. Smith in the Associated Press:

Buttigieg, who spent eight years as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has tripped up in recent days as he was grilled about his record, including the racial disparity in marijuana arrests in South Bend and decisions that led to him having no African American leaders in his administration during a crucial stretch of his tenure in a city where more than a quarter of residents are black.

Finally, political analysts note that black Democrats are more religious and socially conservative than the Democratic Party as a whole. Thus they may be less inclined to support Buttigieg because he is a gay man who is fully committed to the LGBT political agenda and its corresponding infringement upon religious liberty.

This would explain why, last week, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh explicitly observed that Buttigieg is gay: Limbaugh seems to sense that, within certain segments of the Democratic Party, Buttigieg’s homosexuality and commitment to the LGBT political agenda may be an electoral vulnerability.  

Regardless, the bottom line is this: a Feb. 10, 2020, Quinnipiac University poll shows Buttigieg with just four percent of the black vote nationwide versus 27 percent for Biden; and unless and until that number increases dramatically to at least 20 percent or more, Buttigieg doesn’t have a chance at winning the nomination.

What Buttigieg can do, and to some extent has done already, is listen to his black critics, show empathy and understanding, and forthrightly address their concerns with specific and concrete policy proposals.

His record as mayor, after all, is not all that different from other mayors, black and white, who have had to confront vexing problems surrounding police and public safety, drug use, and economic inequality in predominantly black and minority communities.

What is different for Buttigieg is that he is new and unknown. Most black voters don’t know him. The big question is: does he have enough time to build bridges and inroads with the African American community?

Probably not. The South Carolina Primary (Feb. 29) and Super Tuesday (Mar. 3) are both roughly two weeks away. Mayor Pete may be better suited to win in 2024 than in 2020. We’ll see.

Next up, we’ll consider the prospects of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Feature photo credit: Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images via FiveThirtyEight.

Who Among the Dems Will Win the Black Vote? Who Can Win the Black Vote?

African Americans still support Biden; but in lieu of his losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, they’re reconsidering their options.

The American political universe is focused on black voters and whether they will rally to Biden, Sanders, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or Klobuchar in the Democratic Party’s presidential contest.

Black voters are key because, historically, they have voted overwhelmingly Democratic and will represent an increasing share of the party’s primary electorate in the weeks and months to come.

But there is real doubt and uncertainty about how they will vote and what might sway them. Very few African Americans, after all, have thus far voted, since Iowa and New Hampshire are overwhelmingly caucasian.

So it’s not as if we have real-world results by which to gauge or measure whom black voters will support.

Still, no one doubts that black voters will determine the party’s nominee. For numerical reasons alone if nothing else, they are too important a Democratic Party constituency.

Indeed, as Joe Biden put it on the night he badly lost the New Hampshire primary

The fight to end Donald Trump’s presidency is just beginning… because, up til now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency of the Democratic Party: the African-American community…

I want you all to think of a number: 99.9 percent—that’s the percentage of African American voters who have not yet had a chance to vote in America…

You can’t be the Democratic nominee, and you can’t win a general election as a Democrat, unless you have overwhelming support from black and brown voters… It’s just really simple… It’s a natural fact. It’s true. It’s absolutely true…

All those Democrats who won against incumbents, from Jimmy Carter to a guy named Clinton to a guy named Obama, my good friend—guess what? They all had overwhelming African American support. Without it, nobody [in the Democratic Party has] ever won [the presidency]… 

In short, to understand what has happened politically since New Hampshire, and what is to come, you have to understand the challenges and opportunities that exist for each of the candidates re: the black vote. Herewith a status update in a race that is still fluid and uncertain.

In this post, we’ll address Biden’s prospects with African American voters; and, in subsequent posts, we’ll do the same for each of the other Democratic presidential candidates.

Biden. As his aforementioned remarks indicate, and as we’ve explained here at ResCon1, Biden needs to win in South Carolina or his campaign is finished.

The good news for Biden, reports FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich, is that his “firewall in Southern states appears weakened but still standing.” A Feb. 13 East Carolina University poll, for instance, shows him with 28 percent of the vote in South Carolina versus 20 parent for Sanders.

Biden, moreover, “still has a strong lead (16 points over Sanders) among [the state’s] African American voters, a crucial voting bloc that has sided with the eventual nominee in every Democratic primary since 1992,” Rakich notes.

In fact, black voters account for roughly 60 percent of the Democratic Party primary electorate in South Carolina.

The bad news for Biden: he is losing ground in the Palmetto State and his rivals are gaining at his expense. “It wouldn’t take much more of a drop to put Sanders in the lead in our polling average ,” Rakich writes. “There are still two weeks until South Carolina votes, remember.”

“Interviews with two dozen South Carolina lawmakers, consultants and voters here suggests there are deep cracks in Joe Biden’s firewall state,” writes Maya King in Politico.

A February 10 Quinnipiac University national poll  she notes, “shows Biden’s support among African-Americans at 27 percent—a 22-point slip from before the Iowa caucus.”

With bad back-to-back losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden has lost the air of inevitability that one surrounded his campaign; and black voters, consequently, seem to be reconsidering their support and looking at other candidates.

The bottom line: Biden is still afloat politically, but he’s taking on water at an alarming rate, and his ship may yet capsize. All hands are on deck in South Carolina, which is do-or-die politically for him. He needs a very strong showing of support from black voters.

Right now, Biden has sufficient support from African Americans to prevail in South Carolina Feb. 29; but Sanders remains a formidable political foe, and billionaire Tom Steyer is “doing an incredible job” attracting the interest of Palmetto State black voters, says the dean of the state’s Congressional delegation and House Majority Whip, Rep. Jim Clyburn.

Next up, we’ll consider the prospects of former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Feature photo credit: Demetrius Freeman/New York Times via Redux and published by ABC News.

Bernie Wins New Hampshire and it’s Now His Nomination to Lose

Now that New Hampshire Democrats have voted, it looks like it’s gonna be Bernie, Biden or Bust—with the Bust being a contested political convention in which no candidate has a clear majority of the delegates and all bets are off.

First, Bernie. After finishing in a virtual tie in the Iowa Caucuses, Bernie won the New Hampshire primary.

Critics carp that he won a bare plurality of the vote—far less than the 60 percent he won in 2016 when facing off against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. But it is obviously more difficult to run up vote tallies in fractured field than it is in a two-person race.

What matters is that Sanders won and is the clear frontrunner now, with all of the momentum and sense of destiny that accompany a political winner. He’s also cemented his hold on the party’s progressive, left-wing base; no other candidate comes close.

Sanders, moreover, has raised a boatload of money and has strong political organizations in key states nationwide. If, as the polls suggest, he wins the Nevada Caucuses Feb. 22, he likely will go into Super Tuesday, Mar. 3, as the prohibitive favorite.

Biden didn’t just lose New Hampshire; he lost badly, finishing fifth, with a measly 8.4 percent of the vote.

Of course, he didn’t do much better in Iowa, finishing fourth there, behind Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. Many prominent political analysts say he’s finished. You can’t lose this badly, they say, and remain politically viable.

That’s probably true; but Biden is banking on winning in South Carolina, Feb. 29, to catapult him back into the race. More than 60 percent of Democrats there are African Americans, and polls have shown that they strongly prefer Biden.

But will black voters in South Carolina and elsewhere continue to support Biden even as he decisively loses these early contests? Or will they conclude that he’s a political loser and cast their lot elsewhere?

That really is the critical question for Biden: because if he cannot win in South Carolina, then his presidential campaign is over.

Bust. Unlike the Republicans, who have winner-take-all rules for most of their primaries and caucuses, the Democrats award delegates largely on a proportional basis in accordance with a candidate’s share of the overall vote tally.

In 2016, this meant that Donald Trump could win, and often did win, all of a state’s delegates simply by winning a plurality of the vote in that state.

This is not true for the Democrats. Because they award delegates proportionately, it is much more likely that, at their convention this summer, no candidate will have a clear majority of the delegates, and they’ll have to fight it out to determine who their nominee is.

There hasn’t been a contested major party convention since 1976 if you count the Republican Party battle between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Prior to that, you have to go back to 1952 for the last truly contested convention.

“The chance of there being no pledged delegate majority—which could potentially lead to a contested convention—is high and increasing, reports Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. “New Hampshire,” he writes, “is

good news if you’re hoping for chaos. Our forecast has the chances that no one wins a majority of pledged delegates up to 33 percent, its highest figure yet, and roughly double what it was before Iowa.

Other Candidates. There are other candidates, of course, and, theoretically, they could win the nomination; but, practically speaking, I don’t see how.

Elizabeth Warren, the Senator from Massachusetts, will soon drop out. She finished fourth in New Hampshire after finishing third in Iowa.

If Warren could not win in either Iowa or New Hampshire, then it is difficult to see where she can win—especially given that she doesn’t poll well with blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities.

This is a real problem for her campaign: because starting with Nevada and South Carolina, minorities will become an increasingly prominent part of the Democratic Party primary electorate.

Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg have a similarly fatal political problem: a lack of support from blacks and other minorities.

Again, it’s possible that could change, but I don’t see how. As mayors of their respective cities, New York and South Bend, Bloomberg and Buttigieg alienated key black Democrats and sometimes had chilly and testy political relations with influential African American progressives.

Klobuchar does not appear to have incited opposition among blacks and other minorities, but she hasn’t exactly inspired their loyalty and commitment either. And her political problems extend well beyond this key voting demographic.

Does she, for instance, have the requisite political organization to compete head-to-head with Sanders nationwide and especially in the big and expensive states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida? I rather doubt it, but we’ll see.

The bottom line: the media will do their best to make a race of it. Look for Klobuchar especially to be the beneficiary of glowing press coverage, and even Biden will get a second look. But right now, this is Sanders’ nomination to lose, and it is difficult to see how that changes.

Feature photo credit: the New York Times.