When Will Rural And Small Town Elderly African American Voters Embrace Bernie?

Tulchin Research is best known as the pollsters for the Blue Dogs but, that said, they don't skewer data the way Rasmussen does. Their new poll for California is certainly not a Blue Dog poll! Bernie, in fact, has overtaken Status Quo Joe.

• Bernie- 28%
• Status Quo Joe- 24%
• Elizabeth Warren 12%
• Mayo 8%
• Bloomberg 6%
• Yang 5%
• Steyer 3%
• Klobuchar 2%

But what about South Carolina, snear the Biden fans. What about it? Trump's going to win it in November, just like he did in 2016, when he beat Hillary 1,155,389 (54.94%) to 855,373 (40.67%), even if Trump was the first Republican to worm his way into the White House without winning in Charleston County since Herbert Hoover in 1928. The state PVI is R+8. Before a Democrat wins in South Carolina, he or she will probably be concentrating on Florida (R+2), Ohio (R+3), North Carolina (R+3) and Georgia (R+5) first. After that, it will be time to investing the millions dollars it will take to win the two R+8 states, South Carolina and Texas.

But the DNC chose South Carolina as an early state for a different reason that to win it. They wanted to give Africa-American voters a say in the early states, although not the left-leaning African-American voters in many states, but the conservative, rural, religious African-American voters who make up much the South Carolina Democratic base. In 2016 the establishment exactly what they were looking for:

Hillary Clinton- 272,379 (73.44%)
Bernie- 96,498 (26.02%)

Where else can the establishment expect to find an outcome like that? Hillary won every single county in the state. In two-- Clarendon and Allendale-- Bernie didn't even break into double digits. Perfect for Biden. And, in fact, the RealClearPolitics polling average shows him ahead 32.0% to 15.0%.

Richland County (Columbia), the second most populous county in the state, is almost half black-- and overwhelmingly blue. Hillary beat Trump there 108,401 (64.0%) to 52,753 (31.1%). Dalhi Myers is a moderate county council member for the 10th district. On Wednesday, according to the associated Press she unendorsed Status Quo Joe and switched her allegiance to Bernie. She said she decided to make the change because she values what she sees as Bernie's ability to go toe-to-toe with Trumpanzee.

“I looked at that, and I thought, ‘He’s right,’” said Myers, a black woman first elected to the Richland County Council in 2016. “He’s unafraid and he’s unapologetic. ... I like the fact that he is willing to fight for a better America-- for the least, the fallen, the left behind.”

...In December, Myers, a corporate lawyer in Columbia, was among more than a dozen South Carolina elected officials to endorse Biden, saying at the time in a release from the Biden campaign that he was “the only candidate with the broad and diverse coalition of support we need to win” against Trump in the general election. Initially, Myers said she backed Biden because she saw him as a candidate who could possibly appeal to Republican voters disenfranchised by the president.

“It was a compromise choice,” she said. “I didn’t find anybody’s candidacy electrifying, but I did find Joe Biden’s candidacy to be reassuring in a sort of normal, American kind of way.”

But over the ensuing weeks, Myers said she started to feel that Biden’s candidacy, while familiar and perhaps comfortable, wasn’t going to be enough to inspire the young voters whom she sees as necessary to a Democratic general election win.

When questioned how someone who considered herself a conservative Democrat could support a candidate like Sanders, whose proposals including “Medicare for All” suggest government growth on an as-yet unknown scale, Myers said she did have some concerns but expressed doubt that such measures would ever become law without changes.

“Medicare for All will have to go through Congress,” she said. “He’s not going to pull a Donald Trump.”

Ultimately, Myers said her decision wasn’t necessarily about her personal preferences.

“I’m a 50-year-old-black woman, and I tend to be middle of the road,” Myers said. “I’m voting what I think is best for all of us, not just me... I’m not a left-wing liberal. I’m not even a left-wing Democrat. But I am a realist.”

Reporting for Politico yesterday, Laura Barrón-López wrote about a touchy subject, why his rivals have been unable to break Biden's hold on black voters. The hold is particularly strong among elderly black women. She started, though by writing about an old (74) black male, Julius Stephens, who identifies as a "liberal," although he isn't, in Greenville, South Carolina. Stephens was more enthusiastic about Elizabeth and Bernie from a policy perspective, but then told Barrón-López that the country "would never vote for a woman and a liberal that’s been branded a socialist." He told her he was going to vote for Biden. Many older black voters in South Carolina doubt Bernie and Elizabeth can deliver the sweeping remake of the government they’re campaigning on.

The reluctance to consider candidates other than Biden was borne out in interviews with dozens of black voters in South Carolina over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, and is confirmed in polling. Time and again, African American voters said it isn’t that they don’t like Sanders or Warren. But they know what they’re getting with Biden, who has a relationship and familiarity with black voters, especially older black voters, that extend beyond his time as Barack Obama’s No. 2.

That's word-for-word the line from the Status Quo Joe team. They repeat it by rote every time they see a reporter. And many reporters have begun repeating it too. Apparently though, these voters who are supposed to remember Biden before he was the guy Obama picked to balance his ticket, must have liked... what? Biden's bankruptcy bill? His treatment of Anita Hill? His role in starting the Iraq War? His making common cause with the KKK caucus in the Senate? His years and years spent opposing integration? What exactly is it that older black voters remember about Biden pre-Obama that they like? There's no indication that Barrón-López bothered to ask anyone outside of Biden headquarters.

“Black people are rightfully suspicious of things they don’t know, so that’s why name recognition becomes critical,” [Elizabeth Warren surrogate Leslie] Mac said... So she asks people: “Do you want more of the same or do you want to dream bigger than what we have?”

But battling Biden’s name ID isn’t easy. And the air of inevitability around Biden is based largely on the collective knowledge that he is far and away the leading candidate with black South Carolinians.

Antonio Robinson, 42, who works in education and lives in Goose Creek, wants to vote for Andrew Yang, but he’s come to accept that Biden is a foregone conclusion in South Carolina.

“[People] don’t know Elizabeth Warren, they don’t know Yang,” said Robinson.

“In South Carolina we were taught to vote straight party. You see black people [on the ballot], you see Democrat, you vote straight party. You’re not used to seeing 10 damn candidates in the first place,” added Robinson. The menu of choices plays to Biden’s benefit because he’s a known commodity, Robinson said.

It’s a situation that irritates JA Moore, a Democratic state lawmaker who previously backed Kamala Harris and is now being courted by other hopefuls. Moore said Biden's supporters have perpetuated the narrative that he’s unbeatable in the state, so voters should just get on board.

“It’s a disservice to all South Carolinians for elected officials, especially African American elected officials,” Moore said, adding that if South Carolina is seen as being in the bag for Biden it makes the state less relevant in the battle for the nomination.

Moore said he has a hard time relating to inevitability after overcoming what appeared to be insurmountable odds to defeat the Republican state House majority whip in 2018. He relayed his discomfort to Biden during a phone call last weekend, and the former vice president responded by citing polls that show him ahead in the first four states and Super Tuesday states.

...Warren isn’t alone in her battle to win over black voters in South Carolina. Sanders’ surrogates also made stops in the state over the weekend. At an NAACP banquet in Laurens, S.C., last weekend, a top Sanders’ surrogate, Nina Turner, delivered a rousing speech that took subtle jabs at Warren and Biden.

And during his speech in front of Columbia’s statehouse, Sanders said of King: “This was a man who stood up to the entire establishment of his time.”

Yesterday Eric Levitz, in a column for New York Magazine, pointed out that the left-wing realignment of American politics has already begun. Obama, he claims, tried to change the trajectory of politics, as Reagan did-- but in the opposite direction. Obama failed and was soon seeking accomodation with the reactionary right. "Two years into the 'New New Deal,'" wrote Levitz, "with unemployment still near double digits, the Democratic president was struggling to persuade Republicans to help him cut Social Security... Now, 12 years after the financial crisis, and three years into Donald Trump’s post-truth presidency, there are mounting signs that these empirical realities are finally making a dent in political ones-- that Obama’s prophesied realignment may be making its belated arrival."

In the summer of 2012, Mitt Romney told African-Americans that if they wanted “free stuff” from the government, they should “vote for someone else.” Months later, the GOP nominee derided 47 percent of the U.S. public as incurable layabouts, whose sense of “personal responsibility and care for their lives” had eroded so completely, the Republican Party no longer had anything to offer them.

Seven years later, Romney signed onto a bill that would hike inheritance taxes on millionaires and billionaires, and use the revenue to provide unconditional cash assistance to all low-income parents, regardless of their employment status. The Romney-Bennet refundable child tax credit would be the first in American history to provide financial relief to the very poorest families in the U.S. In lending his name to the policy, Romney adopted a position on child welfare to the left of many congressional Democrats.

Romney’s change of heart on the propriety of cajoling indigent parents into the labor force by condemning their children to poverty is idiosyncratic in Washington; no other Republican has signed onto his bill. But it is nevertheless indicative of a broader, leftward current in GOP economic policy thinking.

Earlier this month, GOP state legislators in Kansas agreed to expand its Medicaid program without work requirements, as long as the state also increased subsidies for those purchasing private insurance. Meanwhile, in D.C., House Republicans began work on a conservative alternative to the Green New Deal. According to Axios, the emerging legislation would double “federal investment in basic research and fundamental science”; establish special “lower tax rates for U.S. companies exporting clean energy technology”; expand tax credits for firms that sequester CO2; “redirect foreign aid to help countries that have rivers most polluted with plastic”; and provide unspecified incentives and funding to spur the planting of 1 trillion trees. As a response to the climate crisis, this is comically inept. But as a House Republican policy priority, it is bizarrely constructive. The GOP leadership has tacitly affirmed the need for the U.S. government to increase its investments in scientific research, and pursue a green industrial policy-- which is to say, catalyze growth in the clean-energy and carbon-sequestration sectors through targeted interventions in the market economy. The kind of industrial policy they propose is deeply inadequate to the scale of the ecological problem. But the legislation’s ostensible goals-- encouraging the rapid development and export of clean-energy technologies in order to reduce the carbon intensity of economic growth in the developing world-- are vital ones (and broadly similar to those in Elizabeth Warren’s green industrial policy).

Viewed in isolation, each of these developments could be dismissed as a meaningless gesture. After all, stray messaging bills aside, the Trump-era GOP’s economic policies have been historically reactionary. The party very nearly threw millions of Americans off of public health insurance, slashed taxes on the wealthy, and left corporate foxes guarding each of the regulatory state’s hen houses. On low-visibility matters of executive branch policy, the Trump administration has been almost comically regressive, fighting to expand the liberty of coal companies to dump mining waste in streams, let financial advisers gamble with retirees’ money, and free employers from the burden of logging workplace injuries, among many other things. Meanwhile, on the similarly low-salience subject of federal judicial appointments, Trump has been stacking the courts with plutocracy superfans.

The GOP is not becoming any less interested in taking from the poor (or working class, or environment, or future generations) to give to its top shareholders. The party’s influence peddling remains unconstrained by egalitarian inhibitions. But its economic policy-making is becoming a bit less constrained by Ayn Randian scruples. Romney is alone in supporting refundable child tax credits for the nonworking poor. But a broader swath of the GOP is warming to small-bore, family-based social welfare policies, including refundable child tax credits for working parents and modest forms of paid family leave. Kevin McCarthy’s climate bill may be a mere stunt, but the House Minority Leader is not alone in signaling a heretical interest in (nonmilitary) industrial policy; Republican senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio have made similar noises in recent months, with the Florida senator issuing a report on the harms of neoliberal “financialization” that actually cited the work of socialist economists. In other words, while Republicans remain happy to do the bidding of libertarian billionaires when it suits their political interests, they appear more willing to opportunistically flout the Koch Network’s preferences than they were during the Obama years.

This fact may reflect the changing class composition of the GOP coalition as affluent suburbs defect to blue America, or the increasingly conspicuous tension between cultural conservatism and market fundamentalism, or the trauma of the failed Obamacare repeal effort and ensuing midterm blood bath. Or it may simply reflect the fact that a Republican is currently in the Oval Office; the right has always looked more kindly on deficit spending and social welfare provisions when its people are at the wheel.





The times, they are, uh, changing?

But even if the GOP’s flirtations with a post-Reaganite economic paradigm prove limited and conditional, they could nevertheless be of real consequence. For one thing, Romney and Rubio’s leftward drift helps fortify the Democratic Party’s more robust one. What passes for “centrism” in the 2020 Democratic primary would have been coded as progressivism in 2016, 2008, or any other cycle in my lifetime. Today, Joe Biden’s climate plan is more comprehensive than Bernie Sanders’s was four years, according to the left-wing think tank Data for Progress. Michael Bennet-- whose anemic campaign is sustained by its sheer incredulity at the left’s imprudence-- is nevertheless running on a $6 trillion expansion of the social safety net financed by progressive tax increases.

Given the biases of the Senate, the significance of the Democratic field’s leftward lurch largely hinges on whether the party’s most conservative senators start bending in the same direction. And when Mitt Romney makes unconditional assistance to poor families a bipartisan concept, or House Republicans tacitly affirm the need for Uncle Sam to “pick winners and losers” in the energy market, it becomes a bit easier for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to swim with the progressive tide.

Similarly, if even two or three Republican senators retain their heterodox hobbyhorses when a Democratic president takes power, our government will regain the capacity to meaningfully legislate in times of divided rule. The fundamental obstacle to federal progress on climate or poverty or health-care reform over the past decade has not been the GOP’s stubborn insistence on inadequate solutions, but rather, its fanatical commitment to making our problems worse. There can be no bipartisan compromise on climate if the Republican position is that the government should do everything in its power to maximize carbon emissions-- from subsidizing failing coal plants to rolling back fuel-efficiency standards in defiance of the auto industry’s preferences. And there can be no consensus approach to reducing poverty if the GOP’s prescription is to coerce the unemployed into the labor force by denying their families’ access to health care and housing. By contrast, if the partisan divide on climate and poverty is merely over exactly how much to subsidize green technology, increase foreign aid to climate-vulnerable countries, ramp up federal spending on basic research, and expand cash support to the neediest, then it should be possible for Congress to mount a productive legislative response to America’s most pressing challenges.

To be sure, the ifs in that last paragraph are big. Although the parties may be growing marginally less polarized on some economic issues, the cultural antagonism between red and blue America has rarely been fiercer. The notion that the Democratic Party-- and thus, any elections it wins-- are fundamentally illegitimate appears more widespread in conservative circles than ever before. Just because Marco Rubio’s staffers have read some iconoclastic economists doesn’t mean that the GOP’s “fever” is about to break.

Yet when one puts the GOP’s recent post-Reaganite gestures next to the left turn in mainstream economic thought, the Davos set’s growing interest in shoring up the legitimacy of the order they sit atop with palliative policies on climate and inequality, the British Tories’ recent triangulation on economics in response to its own influx of non-college-educated voters, and the resurgent hegemony of tax-and-spend liberalism within the Democratic Party’s tent, it’s hard not to entertain the possibility that these times are different-- and that the 2020 election just might put America on a “fundamentally different path.”