Bernie Has Broken Through With African American Voters In A Way He Couldn't In 2016

While Bernie was being arrested fighting for integration, Biden was building a career based on backing segregation

African-American voters were extremely loyal to Clinton in 2016. I'm not implying that Debbie Wasserman Schultz didn't work her corporate fingers to the bone stealing the primaries for Hillary-- she clearly did-- but I am saying that any legitimacy in Clinton's win was due as much to African American voters' good feelings about the family legacy (or myth) than to her corporate donors and the odious Wasserman Schultz. Where African American voters turned out in strength, they saved Clinton, not just across the South, where it was most apparent, but in the big vote-rich states that Bernie would have otherwise won, like New York, Illinois and California. African American turnout was depressed in Milwaukee and Detroit and Bernie carried Wisconsin and Michigan. Bernie won big Hispanic-majority districts in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles but was clobbered in the black-majority districts in the same cities.

Bernie has worked hard to grow is African American support across the country and-- to a great extent-- he has been succeeding, although Biden-- despite a shockingly and reprehensibly racist political biography-- is so identified with Obama that many black voters look no further.

Ryan Grim reported that Bernie is leading all other announced candidates in support from black voters, according to a new poll from Morning Consult. finds. Only Status Quo Joe Biden, who hasn't announced yet and hasn't been subjected to any real scrutiny, leads him.

Despite a persistent notion that his supporters are disproportionately white male “bros,” the new survey suggests that Sanders is actually slightly more popular among black Democratic voters than white ones, indicating that the narrative that developed during the 2016 campaign may no longer hold, if it ever did.

Sanders’s support among black voters, at 28 percent, puts him in second place among that demographic, behind Biden, at 32 percent. He trailed Biden 31-25 among whites.

There appears to be a strong class element at play in the finding. The same poll found that the demographics Sanders is least popular with-- at 19 and 17 percent, respectively--  are Democrats who make more than $100,000 per year and Democrats who have post-graduate degrees (two qualities that typically, if not always, overlap). Because of structural wealth and income gaps, that population is heavily white.

Sanders, meanwhile, receives his strongest support support from those making less than $50,000-- a group that is, for the same reasons, much more diverse. The poll found that 30 percent of those with the lowest incomes backed Sanders.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), meanwhile, has half as much support, at 14 percent, among black voters as Sanders, according to supplementary polling data provided to The Intercept by Morning Consult. The findings are drawn from a sample of 2,587 black, likely Democratic primary voters.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker comes in fourth at 6 percent among black voters. Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke both registered 4 percent, while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Attorney General Eric Holder, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and others all clocked in at 1 percent. (Holder and Bloomberg have said they’re not running.)

...The preference for Sanders among black voters might be better explained by ideology than identity. February’s Harvard-Harris poll found that 56 percent of black voters preferred a “mostly socialist” economic system, against 44 percent who want a “mostly capitalist” one.

The findings pose both challenges and opportunities for Sanders. Wealthy and middle-class Democrats tend to be more likely to vote than the working class and poor, but Sanders is running a 50-state field and digital program that aims to unleash over a million Sanders volunteers to register and turn out voters who have stayed home in the past. That work could then pay dividends in the general election, which was decided in three states by just tens of thousands of votes in 2016.

Registering and turning out new voters has long been the vision of progressive campaigns. But because it’s extraordinarily difficult, most campaigns stick to the traditional approach of raising big money to pay for television ads that persuade undecided but dependable voters. The upside of the Sanders strategy is that it could reshape the political electorate, creating new possibilities for his agenda in Washington.

Yesterday, Gallup reported on the favorability of the presidential hopefuls among American adults. Among those describing themselves as Democrats or independents leaning Democratic:

Meanwhile, Trump is busy too... working to delegitimize the results of the 2020 election in advance. (Don't forget what Michael Cohen said about Trump's probable unwillingness to allow a peaceful transition of power.) "All of that rhetoric," reported Chris Cillizza for CNN, "fits into a very clear pattern: Convince the Trump base that it is not possible for him to lose a fair and legitimate election in 2020. Thus, if he loses, it must be, by definition, illegitimate."