Surprising numbers of South
Carolinians like Bernie—if they’ve heard of him
BY David Moberg
Charleston, S.C.— Even without
miracles, Sen. Bernie Sanders could be the next American president. But
miracles would help. The Independent/Democrat/democratic socialist from Vermont,
by way of Brooklyn, could plausibly win at least some of the first three
decisions on the path to nomination—in Iowa, New Hampshire (where he’s had a
narrow lead in polls) and Nevada, disrupting any smooth march to victory by
Hillary Clinton.
Should that occur, Clinton
strategists are counting on her winning a “firewall” of Southern states,
starting with South Carolina on February 27 and extending through six of the 11
contests on March 1, aka Super Tuesday.
Even Rand Wilson, a volunteer
with the independent Labor for Bernie
organization and a firm believer in Sanders’ chances, says, “If Bernie
doesn’t break the firewall, it’s game over.”
A Sanders victory in South
Carolina—or even a near-miss—would smash through the firewall and force the
press and voters to pay more attention to him, undermining the self-fulfilling
prophecy of Clinton’s inevitability. But South Carolina will be challenging
terrain for this test. A Dec.
20, 2015, CBS poll showed Clinton with a 36 percent lead among likely
primary voters in the state. The gap stretched even wider, to nearly 60 points,
among African-American voters, who made up 55 percent of South Carolina’s
Democratic primary turnout in 2008.
Conventional wisdom, of
course, can be proven wrong. After all, Clinton was supposed to take South
Carolina in 2008 and lost to a skinny young senator from Illinois with a funny
name.
Sanders has a longer way to go
in a shorter amount of time—by January 2008, Obama and Clinton were tied—
although he can probably count on a last-minute burst of enthusiasm from South
Carolina’s university students and young voters, as in other states. And
momentum is on his side. He narrowed Clinton’s lead by around 15 points in the
last two months of 2015. That’s where key Sanders supporters like Christale
Spain and John Grimsley enter the fray.
Until last September, Spain, a
39-year-old African-American graduate of the University of South Carolina
Aiken, was deputy executive director of the state Democratic Party. Then she
joined the Sanders campaign, where she now serves as the political outreach
director. Like so many of his supporters, she was drawn by “Bernie’s message,
his platform, specifically racial justice,” such as reforms of policing and
criminal-justice policies, which take on grave significance for her as the
mother of a 15-year-old. But she also finds Sanders’ campaign appealing because
it promotes policies that combine both racial and class justice, such as a $15
minimum wage, expanded social security, free tuition at public colleges and
universities, and universal, singlepayer healthcare.
Grimsley, 48, is an
electrician and a member of the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union. With only 2.1 percent of the
workforce in South Carolina represented by unions, he’s a rarity—a white,
working-class union member in the South who is not afraid of Sanders’
“socialistic idea.” As Grimsley sees it, socialism is simply the reasonable
notion “that we’re all in this together, and we tax the rich people to pay for
it.” He played a video of Sanders’ message to his local union hall and convinced
his fellow members, many of whom previously knew little about the candidate, to
endorse Sanders with very little and low-key hesitation.
Respectively, Spain and
Grimsley speak to two constituencies that are key to Sanders’ success but often
at odds politically—black voters and white working-class voters. Sanders
campaigners believe that both groups would greatly benefit from the policies he
advocates, but the campaign has not yet mobilized the overwhelming support of
either. Whether he can win in South Carolina rests in large part on whether he
can break through to them.
Bernie who?
The biggest potential—and
possibly biggest impediment—comes in Sanders’ effort to expand support from
black Democratic voters. Based on the makeup of the 2008 electorate, Sanders
may need more than 50 percent of the black primary vote to win South Carolina.
Judging from In These Times’
interviews with several dozen South Carolinians and from reports by organizers,
many African Americans like Sanders’ concrete proposals and cheer his battle
against the “billionaire class” that is ripping off the 99% through a “rigged
economy.” But Sanders’ problem is how little he’s known among voters—especially
black voters—according to organizers. “Our main goal is to educate people in
the African-American community,” says Chris Covert, the campaign’s state
director.
Hillary Clinton, for her part,
has some big chits in the primary game: She is well known in South Carolina and
benefits from residual affection for Bill Clinton among African-American
voters, despite the harm done by his policies on welfare, mandatory sentencing,
NAFTA and other issues. Pragmatism also works in her favor: Black voters lean
strongly Democratic and have plenty of reason to worry about a Republican in
the White House.
As I walked around a largely
black, low-income neighborhood of North Charleston, the people I talked with
were consistently pro-Clinton and admitted not knowing much about Sanders. But
the commitment often seemed shallow. “I’d go with Hillary Clinton,” says a
63-year-old man who supports himself with Social Security disability payments,
“because she’s going to be the damned president.”
A 36-year-old mother of four
who planned to vote for Clinton says that “all I know is Ben Carson is saying
things that are off the wall. …[Clinton’s] got my vote. The Republicans are
worse than the Democrats. They want to cut all the programs [that help people
like me].” When asked what she thought of Sanders’ support for a $15 minimum
wage, she smiles broadly. “Now you’re talking,” she says. “Oh, I’d like that. I
make $8 an hour cleaning rooms.”
“People have no idea of who he
is,” says Christale Spain. “That’s the obstacle here in South Carolina. Once
[they] spend 10 minutes finding out what he’s done, they’ve completely turned
our way. Now we’re making inroads.”
Luckily for Sanders, Spain’s
previous post in the Democratic Party taught her the political nitty-gritty
that complements his focus on big ideas. And it helps Sanders to have a
high-profile, local black organizer accompany him on his forays to promote
those ideas in the black community’s barbershops, hair salons, churches and
meeting halls, as well as producing ads for black community radio. Three
jam-packed visits in late fall seem to have generated some energy for the
campaign, converting mid-level black Democrats and boosting his poll numbers.
There are still more prickly
problems. South Carolina’s Democratic establishment is fairly conservative.
According to Adolph Reed, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who
works with both the Sanders and the Labor for Bernie campaigns, many local
black politicians in South Carolina look to candidates like Clinton for future
jobs, contracts and contacts, and often define civil rights in terms of their
special interests. This political climate goes as far back as Bill Clinton’s
1992 campaign, he says: “Clinton people went through the region and had a
powerful message. Our guy is going to get the nomination, and if you want
access, get on board right now.”
South Carolina Democratic
state Rep. Terry Alexander, a prominent African American minister and former
Clinton supporter, is a high-profile convert to Sanders. “I like Sanders,” he
says. “He’s very approachable, a good old country boy from up the road.
[Clinton] is running more on her name than on what are the best policies.
What’s she done for African Americans?” To people concerned about Sanders’
socialism, Alexander responds that the term simply means a government that
actively pursues “what’s good for the people.”
It’s difficult, however, to
pierce Clinton’s protective cloud of inevitability. One of the most influential
progressive labor and African-American community leaders in Charleston, Ken
Riley, president of a union local representing 1,500 longshore workers, will
not be supporting Sanders, despite his close ties to many key Sanders
supporters and his admiration for Sanders’ record in politics. “It’s late in
life to be making statements,” he says in November, sitting in the large, new
and strikingly modern union hall. “I want to win. … I look at who I believe can
win against the Republicans.”
He thinks it’s Clinton who
stirs more excitement as an experienced individual, as someone with whom blacks
feel familiar, and as a woman.
With Sanders, he speculates,
Republicans will “play the socialist game, the age game, the angry old white
guy—Bernie’s talking revolution.”
Engaging the working class
Swaying a third of South
Carolina’s black Democratic voters in a single month is a tall order. Sanders
may not have to pull off quite as miraculous a conversion if he can turn out
new voters who didn’t participate in the Democratic primary in 2008: the
politically disengaged, independents and even Republicans.
Sanders may be best able to
engage disaffected white working-class voters who find that he offers a new way
of making sense of their world—casting the rich and powerful, rather than the
weak and poor, as responsible for the problems of both their country and
themselves.
To bring in significant
numbers of these voters, however, Sanders must reverse the work of the
Republican political operatives who, 50 years ago, launched the party’s
“Southern strategy” in South Carolina and peeled away conservative Democrats,
especially working-class whites. The strategy was based on a potent cultural
brew of coded appeals to racial resentment and issues involving “God, guns and
gays”— all of it wrapped up in country music culture—and it was successful. In
2008, South Carolina’s white electorate voted Republican by the fifth-highest
margin in the country, with 26 percent of white votes in South Carolina going
to Barack Obama and 73 percent to John McCain. Sanders hopes that some of those
culture- and race-related converts to the GOP can be won back if the Democrats
defend workers against greedy bosses.
Steven Auerbach, president of
a United Steelworkers local near Charleston representing AT&T workers, sees
potential among his union brothers and sisters. “Eighty percent of my members
probably vote Republican,” he says. Trump is popular with some, but Sanders
“looks at economic issues from a similar point of view as them,” Auerbach says.
“He thinks employees should get their fair share, which is a big contrast from
a lot of the big procorporate Republican candidates.”
Another advantage is that “he
is not pro-gun control, unlike the other Democrats,” Auerbach says. “All I hear
from them is about Obama wanting to take their guns.”
“Most Democrats don’t so much
support us as much as they try to persuade us to believe they will,” Auerbach
continues. “Bernie doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk, joining the
picket lines.”
But there are also
working-class voters who have dropped out of politics, disillusioned with
conservative Democrats as well as with right-wing Republicans. White
working-class voters have among the lowest voting rates of any group. South
Carolina Federation of Labor President Emeritus Donna DeWitt says that many of
these drop-outs have emerged to work for Sanders.
Sanders may indirectly benefit
from the work that the federation has done in recent years to create a nucleus
of rankand-file progressive activists. Under DeWitt’s leadership, in 2005 and
2006 it helped establish a state branch of the Labor Party, and under her
successor, Erin McKee, it joined the state’s Working Families Party. Both
initiatives have cultivated a network of progressive union members active in
politics.
But in June 2015, after the
state federation urged the national AFL-CIO to endorse Sanders, AFL-CIO
President Richard Trumka warned the South Carolina organization that it was
breaking federation rules and could not back Sanders. Even so, the state
federation’s earlier work, along with support from Labor for Bernie, may boost
both the black and white working-class vote for Sanders.
Polls suggest Sanders’ feisty
defense of working-class economic issues can appeal to many blue-collar
independents. Take John Grimsley, the electrical worker. He has never voted and
has no party affiliation, but he plans to vote for Sanders in the Democratic
primary.
Grimsley shares with his
workmates a widespread belief that life in America is going downhill for people
like them. But he does not blame it on the decline of religion in the schools
or the acceptance of gays in the military.
“My granddaddy, he didn’t work
when he was old,” Grimsley says. “He had money in the bank, and when he died he
left money behind. Back in the '50s, everything was made in America, but now
it’s shipped from somebody else. And as the unions go down, every year it gets
worse. How much money do people need before it’s enough? If you don’t put a
stop to this, people will march on Wall Street.”
Although several hundred
electricians are based in Grimsley’s local, many travel to find work, and there
were only about 15 people at the hall when he got up to talk.
“Half of those at the meeting
had never heard of Sanders, and the other half didn’t know much,” Grimsley
says. “I said that I’d never heard of him either, but I like what he has to
say. I never heard any politician doing something for me until I heard this
man. The people in Congress look out for the 1%, not the 99%.”
When he played the video of
one of the senator’s speeches, he worried that some of his fellow union members
would be turned off by Sanders’ self-description as a socialist, although the
word doesn’t bother him. “It’s more ‘for-the-people’ than the capitalist
thing,” Grimsley explains. “I believe in socialism and capitalism. Something in
the middle would be a good thing.”
The members voted unanimously
that day to endorse Sanders. In the next month’s meeting, when Grimsley was
absent and the question came up with the reading of the minutes from June, they
approved the vote with no dissenters.
Beyond a politics of fear
Fear lurks just beneath the
surface of the outwardly comfortable yet insecure lives of many white
working-class men in South Carolina. They sense what a new
report from the Pew Research Center concluded: “the American middle class
is losing ground, no longer the majority and falling behind financially.”
Indeed, the shrinking of the middle class is likely the cause of the disturbing
findings by leading health economist Anne Case and her husband, 2015 Nobel
economics prize winner Angus Deaton, that in recent decades the mortality rate
has sharply increased for middle-aged white working-class men and
women—primarily from suicide or the abuse of alcohol and drugs.
“What I have found is that the
people with the biggest mouths are Republicans,” says electrician Albert
Hurley, as he walks along an oceanfront beach on a pleasant late fall day.
“They’re the most fearful people. As a result, there’s a lot of bigotry among
Republicans. It all comes down to competition for jobs, feeling that there’s
not enough for everyone, and living your life in fear. I have never lived my
life in fear. You won’t make the right decisions and be collaborative with your
fellow workers if you’re always fearful for your job.”
Yet appealing both to an often
angry and culturally conservative group of white workers and to the black
working class can be like walking a tightrope. Bill Fletcher, a prominent black
organizer and writer focused on labor and leftist politics, thinks that
Sanders’ hard focus on inequality of wealth and power downplays the ways in
which both race and class independently define the experience of African
Americans, he says, and risks turning his campaign into a “one-note Samba.”
“Sanders could say to the
white worker, ‘Of course, you’re being screwed, and let’s talk about it, but
let’s understand when the black workers talk about inequality, they’re not
trying to take something from you— they just want not to be treated
differently,’ ” Fletcher says. “Sanders’ message should not be that all are being
screwed, but all are being held in different parts of the Titanic, some in
steerage and some in first class.”
By contrast, Willie Legette,
professor of political science at South Carolina State University, thinks
Sanders is right to pitch his message about inequality more broadly: “If you’re
a white worker getting your ass kicked every day, you’re not impressed with
talk about white privilege. When white workers hear the Democratic Party
talking about inequality, they think of it as talking about people of color,
and they don’t see themselves as beneficiaries.” What’s key, he says, is that
Sanders “continue his grand message about inequality” while specifically
highlighting both white and black workers, “as opposed to only talking about
people of color.”
Can Sanders strike the right
balance and persuade both white and black working-class voters to support his
campaign against the power of the billionaires? “I want to say yes to that
question,” says Christale Spain. “I believe he can. As the campaign progresses,
there are more working-class people for Bernie.”
Sanders makes sense to Hurley
but can’t win, he sadly concludes. However, Sanders may open debate: “He
reminds people that things can be done a different way. He doesn’t seem to be
fearful.”
Yet, if enough South Carolina
voters like Hurley, John Grimsley and Christale Spain set aside their fears and
act on their hopes, the “firewall” of Southern primaries may prove imperfect,
letting Sanders continue on to more fertile territory—or should his candidacy
fail, lay the groundwork for it to be survived by an ongoing citizen crusade
for its ideals: a more democratic country, built on a less corrupt polity and a
more egalitarian economy.
What is there to fear?
