He has an enthusiastic field
campaign and growing support from black activists and politicians. Will it be
enough?
BY David Moberg
'I knew Bernie because he was
always for the union. He always supported our issues. But it sealed the deal
when I found out that Bernie was in the civil rights movement.'
Speaking in Harlem on Tuesday,
February 16, Hillary Clinton unveiled to the nation her $125 billion plan to
combat systemic racism and revive poor, non-white communities. But the
most important group she was addressing may have been African Americans voting
in the South Carolina primary on February 27. Clinton’s campaign has long seen
them as a political safety net if she stumbled at the start of the nominating
season, as she did with her virtual tie in Iowa and a big loss in New
Hampshire—although she began to regain her footing with her Nevada victory.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has
intensified his own fight for South Carolina and for the black vote. In
November 2015, he trailed Clinton there by 50 points, according to Real Clear
Politics’ poll aggregator. By mid-February,
he had closed the gap to 24 points. While Clinton was speaking in Harlem,
Sanders was speaking to a group of black ministers in Charleston about the need
to reform police, prisons and the entire criminal justice system.
Two days later, he reaffirmed
his plans for addressing black community needs in a Washington meeting with
leaders of nine historic civil rights groups.
Yet two days ahead of the
primary, election analyst Nate Silver gives Sanders a less
than 1 percent chance of winning South Carolina. Brett Bursey, director of
the South Carolina Progressive Network,
sizes up the prospects only a bit more optimistically: “If there were six months
until the primary, I think Bernie could win.”
It’s important to remember,
however, that winning
or losing a specific state isn’t as important as the slow accumulation
of delegates—and because of that, margins matter.
In Silver’s projections, if
Clinton won South Carolina by 11 points, she would be on a path to a tie. To
achieve that, Sanders would need to beat the mid-February polling projections of
24 points by another 13 points.
Stumping for Sanders
If Sanders is able to tighten
the gap in South Carolina further on Election Day, it will be due to a much
larger field operation in South Carolina than Clinton has mustered, and to a
growing roster of black politicians, movement leaders and intellectuals lining
up behind him.
Each candidate has deployed
surrogates to appeal to black voters—for example, civil rights icon and
Congressman John Lewis is stumping for Clinton, and former NAACP president Ben
Jealous for Sanders. But the Sanders campaign has effectively used many
“ordinary” black supporters, politicians, movement leaders and black
intellectuals in ads and in speeches. Former Ohio Democratic state senator Nina
Turner, who once supported Clinton, is now campaigning for Sanders. He also has
the backing of Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner, a victim of a
stranglehold by New York police whose last words—“I can’t breathe”—became a
rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“We are closing the gap,” says
South Carolina state representative Terry Alexander, a Clinton supporter in
2008, now a leading black supporter of Sanders. “We’re making a difference.
It’s his message and how he gives people hope. Clinton is old style, change bit
by bit.”
Sanders’ campaign has 10
offices in South Carolina with 240 staff, 80 percent of them African-American,
compared to two offices with 14 full-time staff for Clinton, backed up by nine
small get-out-the-vote offices.
Beyond recruiting volunteers
from within South Carolina, Sanders is counting on some key backers from across
the country—such as Martese Chism, a nurse for more than 23 years at the John
H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Illinois, and a member of National
Nurses United, the first major national union to endorse Sanders.
While Sanders was speaking,
Chism was riding through South Carolina in National
Nurses United's red
#BernieBus,
drumming up support for him.
Chism is also the
great-granddaughter of a grassroots civil rights leader, Birdia Keglar. In
1966, Keglar was returning home from Jackson, Miss., with four other civil
rights supporters after testifying before Robert F. Kennedy about voting rights
violations. White racists forced them off the road and beat and tortured them,
severely injuring two of the three men and killing the two women in the
car—including Keglar, who was decapitated.
With such a powerful personal
connection, Chism says she’s felt a calling to work for civil rights since she
was 5 years old. That’s what brought her out to campaign for Sanders.
“I knew Bernie because he was always
for the union,” she says. “He always supported our issues. But it sealed the
deal when I found out that Bernie was in the civil rights movement.”
As she knocks on doors, she
says, she’s found that many South Carolinians had not thought about the primary
and knew little about the candidates. “I wouldn’t say they’ve changed their
minds about Hillary,” she said, “but they were looking for a fighter, and they
have one now ”
A debate within the
International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 in Charleston, a major East
Coast port, is one sign that black voters are still in play. The influential,
predominantly African-American local has 600 members. In October, local
president Ken Riley, endorsed Clinton as the practical choice—the candidate who
could win and get things done. But then Charles Brave, Jr., a rank-and-file
member of Local 1422 and vice-president of the state AFL-CIO, began drumming up
support for Sanders within the local. He believes that now, if members were to
take a vote, a clear majority would support Sanders.
The young and the
working-class
There are factors beyond the
black vote that could sway the race. The South Carolina AFL-CIO has taken
no position because it is barred from doing so by national rules (though in
June 2015 they unsuccessfully urged the national AFL-CIO to endorse Sanders).
But state AFL-CIO President Erin McKee says that South Carolina’s small labor
movement has been working hard to make members and other workers aware of the
importance of the primary. State AFL-CIO President Emeritus Donna Dewitt thinks
that turnout will increase among workers who are disengaged from electoral
politics. Some of them may cast their votes for Trump, joining the significant
share of the state’s union members who normally vote Republican. But DeWitt
believes many workers who had given up on politics will be turning to Sanders
because of his pro-union, class-oriented political appeal.
Also, as in other states,
Sanders has a strong, if hard to estimate, appeal with students and other young
people. Young people vote less often than older people, but have been coming
out in near-record numbers this primary season, second only to 2008, when the
huge youth turnout helped propel Obama to office.
Amber Lay, 24, and Ashley
Crawford, 28, show the potential for Sanders to appeal to youth even in the
conservative South. They recently moved to Charleston, S.C., from their small,
rural hometown in Alabama after finishing college. They have bigger career
plans but are getting by with precarious service-sector jobs—dog grooming and
hospitality work. They grew up in conservative Republican, fundamentalist
Christian, “middle class” homes—a middle class they now see as threatened in
their lifetimes.
“They’re ‘Bible thumpers,’ ”
Lay said of her hometown as we chatted at a suburban laundromat in October. “As
long as it can be twisted into being Biblical, they’ll vote for it.”
College life and education
helped them to think more independently, they said, and they grew more
conscious of both racism—the motivation behind much criticism of Obama, whom
they supported—and sexism. Now they favor Sanders because he is a stronger
advocate for issues that mean a lot to them: such as equality (with regard to
race, gender, sexual orientation and economics) and environmental protection.
“There is too much focus on [Clinton] being a woman,” Lay said. “[Sanders is]
for a higher minimum wage,” Crawford said. “He’s been independent. He seems
very proactive on environmental issues. That’s a hot topic for me and Amber.”
A surge in youth votes, if
added to the leftward shift already underway during the Obama years, could add
to the momentum towards Sanders in the final days of the campaign.
Even if he does not win
South Carolina, which would be a remarkably unlikely accomplishment,
Sanders may do well enough to plausibly claim that he has reduced parts of
Clinton’s “firewall” to a pile of rubble that has felt the Bern
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