[Part I of this article discussed some reasons Sanders lost the South Carolina primary, questions raised by polling, perceptions of the campaign in the Black press, and the role of the Democratic establishment.]

 Sanders ad shown in Midwest, March 4, 2020.

Could different campaign decisions have made a difference?
Black critics, including campaign staff, criticized the South Carolina campaign’s whiteness. Some complained that the national leadership ignored their pleas for more resources; the campaign was focused on winning the first three primaries, all in states without large Black populations.

The ad push on South Carolina TV and Black radio came late, just weeks before the primary, and when you compare ad expenses there to Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, the emphasis is very clear. FiveThirtyEight found 16 ads costing $6.42M in Iowa, 12 ads costing $1.13M in New Hampshire, 7 ads costing $990K in Nevada, but only 3 ads costing $540K in South Carolina (Fivethirtyeight’s estimated amounts). The South Carolina ads focused on issues of special concern to Black voters, but the others — the overall messaging – was on class exploitation and solidarity. Looking at the ads which come up in a YouTube search, the videos which had the most intense emotional content told stories about rustbelt decline and healthcare, or had inspiring messaging about solidarity (“us, not me”; “are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know, as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?”).

Local staffers also said Sanders didn’t give enough “face time” to community leaders; efforts to merge ground work with local campaigns were vetoed; and there weren’t even enough yard signs to give the campaign visibility, so important in rural areas. Ja’Mal Green, who ran for mayor in Chicago and was a Sanders surrogate, criticized the “top aides” carried over from 2016 for making the same wrong decisions. More senior Black staffers were needed, and more money was needed for talking to older Black voters. This all felt like misplaced emphasis, especially when Sanders, rushing to campaign in California, missed the commemoration of the 1965 “Bloody Selma” march he had made a point of attending in 2019, missed a convention of Baptist ministers, and left before the voting results, without thanking his volunteers.

In defense, Nina Turner, national campaign co-chair who had come to direct state efforts, said that these criticisms were from state staff with “the luxury to be singularly focused” while campaign leadership “had to focus on the nation.” State leadership pointed out that Sanders attended some 70 local events and volunteers “knocked on a door a minute” and the field operation was staffed mostly by people of color. The impeachment trial, also, called Sanders to the Senate when he was needed in South Carolina.

“Only one candidate has consistently opposed every disastrous trade deal. And that candidate is Bernie Sanders.” Sanders ad shown in Midwest, March 4, 2020. Narrated by union autoworker Sean Crawford.

Strategic mistake?
The campaign seemingly underestimated the importance of the South Carolina primary, the first one in which Black voters had a clear voice. Local staff complained to reporters about resources allocated to the first three primaries, Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, in predominantly white states, with so few Black voters in Iowa and New Hampshire that exit polls couldn’t even record their preferences. The gamble may have been that the early victories would establish Sanders’ frontrunner status and establish his “electability,” but it turned out that it was South Carolina and the Black vote that was decisive. And then Sanders rushed to campaign in the west and northeast. Was this a tactical miscalculation, or does it reveal a more fundamental strategic failure?

Clearly, efforts were made. There was no rushing of his podium by Black Lives Matter activists, as there had been in 2015. He  admitted his 2016 campaign was “too white,” and promised that this time it would be different. Black senior staff included campaign co-chair Nina Turner. The day after he kicked off his campaign speaking to a multiracial crowd in Brooklyn on March 2 last year, he was in Selma for the commemoration of “Bloody Sunday.” The day after that, he was on The Breakfast Club fielding questions from Charlamagne tha God.

How much meaning are we to draw from Sanders leaving South Carolina the day before the primary to go to Boston, the next day missing the commemoration of the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, or skipping a rally in Jackson, Mississippi, organized by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba? Political Science Prof. Christina Greer wrote that Sanders may have had policies benefiting Blacks, but he didn’t “work to directly address these groups and work for the vote.”  “Optics matter,” she writes in The Grio. “His absence in the state (and at Selma) was a signal to many that Bernie was attempting a path to the nomination by ignoring much of the backbone of the Democratic Party.”

His town hall in Flint, just before the Michigan primary, flew Black surrogates in to share the stage with him. But he decided to drop the speech he had worked on most of the day, written specifically to address Black voters. He left it to Cornel West and other Black surrogates to deliver its message, instead giving his thirty-minute stump speech.

It’s the “optics” again. Sanders speaking to an almost all-white crowd in mostly Black Flint, using Black surrogates “instead of speaking to black people on his own.” When Sanders asked Cornel West to explain why Biden had been winning Black votes, West blamed it on neoliberal Black leadership. But to The Root’s Terrell Jermaine Starr, this was blaming Black voters instead of Sanders own failings: “If you can’t convince black folks not to support the walking dead in favor or you, I’d be looking in the mirror. … My godmother isn’t backing Biden because she is in love with neoliberalism. She is doing so because the Democratic Socialist isn’t doing enough to prove he cares about her as much as he does the white working-class man in Iowa that he, interestingly enough, doesn’t have to ask his white friend to speak to about race.” Sanders, Starr writes, is comfortable talking to racist whites but not to Black people.

Unfair? You can find far worse in Black media, which may have been no less hostile to Sanders than corporate media in general. Still, it’s important to remember that Sanders has a significant base of support among people of color. Votes and polls show he has far more support among Latinx voters than Biden, and sizable percentages of Blacks outside of the South and among Blacks under 39. Polling also shows a sudden shift in Black opinion after the Democratic establishment coalesced around Biden in the few days before and after the South Carolina primary — Biden had been gifted the aura of electability, and exit polls showed how much that mattered to voters. We need also to remember that primaries bring out a small and unrepresentative segment of voters. Perhaps the turnout in the general election would have favored Sanders, but a strategy designed for the general election risks failure in the primaries.

Steadfast Democratic establishment
Could Sanders have won if the campaign had committed more resources in the South? His position was that the Democratic establishment was fixed in its opposition, and that included Southern Black political leaders like Jim Clyburn. In an insightful post-mortem from the left, Paul Heideman and Hadas Thier in Jacobin argue that Sanders’ strategy wasn’t the problem. Other analyses from the left agree that the campaign underestimated the Democratic establishment — so powerful that no change in strategy would have led to victory. This is apparently the view of Bernie Sanders, as well.

The account by Heideman and Thier points out the other side of this, the weakness of the progressives and the left. We don’t have the institutional infrastructure to compete with the party, media and corporate establishments. We need stronger unions and progressive media with a mass audience, they wrote. But more than this, the progressive infrastructure we need is not just the “alternative political institutions” Heideman and Thier name.  The descriptions of Black local leadership and institutions by Michael Harriot, discussed in Part I of this article,  suggest a somewhat different take. We need not only alternative institutions, but, rather, a critical mass of activists and supporters within established institutions: All kinds of community organization matter — schools, places of worship, NAACP, sports teams, block clubs, Little League or Girl Scouts, places of worship, and local Democratic Party organizations and political action groups. These networks were enmeshed in the Democratic ecosystem, where Sanders and his campaign were outsiders. Biden was different, because of his long standing in the Democratic Party and his support from people like Clyburn.

I wonder at a puzzling implication of this left institutional weakness as Heideman and Thier describe it. If, as they say, for the foreseeable future we won’t have the left institutions to challenge the establishment, what does that mean for the future of principled, progressive electoral campaigns? Are they doomed to failure, or only hopeful downballot and doomed on the national or statewide level? That seems to be what this explanation tells us; the Sanders supporters who are saying we aren’t ready to beat the establishment don’t go on to tell us what we should be doing in the meantime. This is not a helpful message if you want to mobilize volunteers for the next left presidential candidate.

Some critics say that you have to do movement building and electoral politics differently. Not so fast — we know that we can get socialists and left progressives elected downballot. Still, a left challenge in presidential primaries is something different, something new, and the Sanders campaign, in its successes and failures, poses new and difficult questions.

The original sin of the left
The Democratic establishment behaved as expected, as establishments do. But we should also look to our own establishment, on the left – the organizations, movements, networks of activists. Should we see a connection between Sanders’ failure among Black voters and the original sin of the left, white supremacy? Bernie Sanders may be among the best of us, but he comes out of the white socialist left that has historically prioritized class over race, and which has, most of the time, marginalized or ignored people of color and their struggles. From the 19th century up to the DSA, the left has been as white-dominated as the two parties. Even when serious commitments were made, they have rarely grown and sustained genuinely multiracial organizations and movements.

From the antiracists of the sixties on, what we see is separate movements that occasionally converge around the same goals. So in the sixties we had the emergence of antiracist activism on the white left; but when it came to the broad opposition to the Vietnam War, we saw the civil rights and Black Power movements, Black and Chicano antiwar activism in their separate organizations and revolts, and off in another place white-dominated SDS and the Mobe, with its massive demonstrations.

In the ten years of social movement insurgency since the financial crisis, the pattern persisted. A group of social scientists did crowd-counting with racial breakdowns in the major mass demonstrations of 2017 and 2018 — the Women’s Marches, the March for Science, the People’s Climate March, the March for Racial Justice, the March for Our Lives, and Families Belong Together. In these marches, Black participation was ≤ 9%, Latinx ≤ 6% — except for the March for Racial Justice (18% and 7% respectively) and Families Belong Together (7% and 9%).

Social movement researcher Dana Fisher surveyed protesters at demonstrations in DC. From “The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States,” Science Advances, October 23, 2019.

There is a disconnect here, brought out by a telling example: a white rally against the Iraq War a few hundred feet away from a Black protest against the criminal justice system, on September 20, 2007. This followed a week of antiwar actions and was a day of another national mobilization,  Black people protesting the racist prosecution of the Jena 6.

Before the war began, a poll showed 52.09% of African Americans disapproved of the US invasion of Iraq, while only 26.39% of whites disapproved. Yet protest surveys showed African Americans made up only between 7% and 10% of participants in the massive demonstrations between 2004 and 2010. Social movement researchers Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas observed the almost entirely nonblack antiwar demonstration just a few hundred feet away from an almost entirely Black rally of several thousand people for the Jena 6.*

The Sanders campaign may have had the transformational antiracial program, multiracial staffing and voter support, but it came out of the white left, was often framed as a movement based in progressive white youth, and was heavily criticized in the Black press for the whiteness of its supporters and difficulty understanding or connecting with Black people. (“Aunties don’t go to rallies,” wrote Lawrence Ross.) Sanders made a crucial strategic decision to frame his politics in economic terms when the overriding dynamic is cultural, or, as some critics say, class politics when elections are fought out over identity. Biden understood that; he stood for the Democratic mainstream and spoke its language — and perhaps was more free to prioritize the cultural messaging because he was not interested in serious redistribution.

Standing for the Democratic mainstream and endorsement by Black leadership were what counted most in this election where the stakes were so high that electability overrode other considerations.

I don’t think it would have made a difference if Sanders spoke the language of his youthful antiracist staffers; if he shifted his strategy to prioritize antiracism and outreach to Black voters; if he hadn’t “missed opportunities” to explain his agenda to Black voters; or if he went to those rallies and meetings he skipped in the Black South. Standing for the Democratic mainstream and endorsement by Black leadership were what counted most in this election where the stakes were so high that perceived electability overrode other considerations. And exit polls show that Black voters were no different from the working class and rural whites in their worries about electability. Many younger voters, Black and white, wanted more, but, as usual, their turnout was low.

Go here for this interactive map of George Floyd protests, May 25-6.26, The Count Love project.

 Protests by congressional district. 5.25.20-6.11.20, another map from The Count Love  Project.

Learning from the George Floyd protests
There is another lesson in the Black Lives Matter protest movement, still strong nationwide after a month of daily protests. This is something new in progressive and radical politics — a genuinely multiracial movement, with over half the participants, in some of the major demonstrations, white in a Black-led protest. Black participation in white-dominated movements has almost always been low, even when, as in some recent movement organizations, Blacks and other people of color are in the collective leadership.

Perception counts. It didn’t matter so much that Biden is as white as Sanders, or that he came out of another white political lineage — centrist liberals ready to betray Black interests. What did matter was Biden’s adoption by Obama, by the party’s Black leadership and by the Democratic establishment, in contrast to Sanders’ place in white progressive and socialist politics. Sanders was an outsider not only to the party, but also to its Black base.

Many drew the generic lessons from a progressive electoral defeat: Sanders’ loss shows that progressives had better move to the center, or that you can’t expand the electorate in an election campaign and need your party’s traditional coalition, or that the election was a test of left programs or of class politics vs. identity politics. But this election was about none of those things; for most voters, it was a referendum about Trump. Elections aren’t controlled experiments, every election is different. But what the commentary about the Sanders and Warren campaigns mostly shows is that for many pundits, every election confirms their bias.

Still, there are some things we can conclude when we look at the protest movement and the Sanders campaign together. Detailed narratives can help us get beyond generalities about multiracial unity to see what it looks like, what multiracial unity and its failure can look like in this historical moment.

The multiracial unity we see in the George Floyd protests came out of the convergence of distinct and intersecting movement dynamics. Movements coming out of years of resistance to a right-wing economic and cultural offensive came together with movements coming out of years of focused Black activism in response to police violence; multiple streams came together and broadened into expansive, visionary opposition and profound social critique. It is telling that today’s multiracial mass movement was initiated and led by the networks of Black activists that matured over these many years of struggle and sacrifice.

The Sanders campaign, for all its achievement in focusing the country on a visionary socialist alternative, also shows us what a failure of multiracial unity looks like. On one level, we see how the campaign prioritized the first three primaries over South Carolina and the South; or how Sanders missed meetings with Black ministers, the Selma commemoration, and an important rally in Mississippi. But on another level, the problem looks deeper and structural. A progressive electoral campaign coming out of the white left could offer no alternative to the “Democratic establishment”  in many Black communities — the networks of local Black activists and leadership that were part of the Democratic Party ecosystem and loyal to its standard-bearers.

If this is right, it wouldn’t have been enough if Sanders had prioritized his appeals to Black voters, shifted resources to the South and shown in his stump speeches and ads that he understood the centrality of racism to the capitalist order he wanted to transform. What mattered more is that, although the campaign had many staffers and a base among people of color, it came out of the white left and had the stamp of the white left. Another way of looking at this: The campaign needed the extensive networks and roots in Black communities that the Democratic Party has, and broad sections of Black leadership would have had to actively support it. Campaigns seeking the Black vote need to come out of Black communities, not just into them; they have to take shape out of the work of Black activists and movements. This is work that can’t be done in the course of an election campaign — campaigns have to build on and connect with pre-existing networks, organizations and movements. We see the fruits of this work in the many progressives successful in local elections.

We can expect Black activists to play increasing leadership roles in multiracial organizations and movements, but Black movements will continue to be autonomous and separate from the white-dominated left. More and more we see white supporters come out for the struggles of people of color, and we see the historic question always there for us — how to ally our movements and organizations, how to develop the solidarity so that we are there for each others’ struggles, always.
—Paul Elitzik

*Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, “The Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11,” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 168.

Acknowledgements:
John M. Hagedorn as often was a help in challenging me to think through and clarify my ideas. The details are based on excellent reporting in major publications and thoughtful analysis especially in Black, progressive and left media; the many links to their articles shows my debt to them. But I want to single out as especially helpful Barbara Ransby’s “The White Left Needs to Embrace Black Leadership.”