Lafayette Square, DC, the day before the police attack. Photo by Geoff Livingston. White House, 5.30.20. Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This is a companion to another article on “Why Sanders Lost,” which looks at the role of the party establishment, why “moderate” voters preferred Sanders’ policies but chose Biden, and misconceptions about voter “ideology” and polarization. This piece aims at a more fundamental problem:  Why the most progressive presidential campaign since the thirties was unable to win over Black voters, and what the centrality of the African American struggle means for the white left.

Soon after Bernie Sanders’ loss in the primary, Black Lives Matter exploded in a wave of rebellion set off by the police murder of George Floyd, a protest movement far surpassing any confrontation with the American system since the sixties. What a disconnect here for progressives:  a cataclysmic multiracial uprising led by Black people in the most profound challenge to white supremacy, and a progressive presidential campaign which rocked the system but then failed first of all because it could not win over Black voters.

In the years following the financial crisis, we saw the rise of one social movement after another, coming together to peak in two extraordinary campaigns. In the first, the Sanders campaign forced the Democratic Party dramatically to the left, mainstreaming progressive demands which were only recently marginal and eccentric. And then in the second, the police murder of George Floyd was like the breach of a dam, a wave of rebellion sweeping over the country unlike any in our history. It is huge, it is sustained, and it is multiracial. It speaks for millions, in a challenge to white supremacy and state violence that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Our mass movements have been segregated, even when they have shared objectives. The ability of ruling elites to keep us separate has been one of their most powerful weapons. So it is a deep shock to the system when our movements come together in a rebellion against racism, a rebellion led by Black people but with a majority of whites in some of the largest demonstrations, and in some of the smallest in the most white neighborhoods.

The unprecedented multiracial character of the upsurge makes it the more troubling that the Sanders campaign fell so far short in its efforts to unite white and Black voters.

The unprecedented multiracial character of the upsurge makes it the more troubling that the Sanders campaign fell so far short in its efforts to unite white and Black voters. He was a frontrunner — but only until the first primary that had a critical number — indeed a majority — of Black voters. Then he was crushed by the establishment candidate who stood for everything his socialist campaign was built to reject.

In some of the most insightful analyses, two stories were missing: Black voters and social movements. Some of the mainstream reporting was penetrating about Sanders’ failure with Black voters, but ignored or misunderstood the movement character of the campaign. For this you had to go to the post-mortems on the left  — but many of them hardly talked about Black voters, or left them out entirely.

There were many reasons Biden crushed Sanders among Black voters. You can put it down to the schedule of the primaries, which gave decisive influence to South Carolina and Southern states. You can put it down to the power of the Democratic establishment, or Biden’s role serving the first Black president, or the media framing that Sanders was “unelectable” and would turn off moderate voters. Then there are the many generalizations about Black voters, with some Sanders supporters seeming to blame the voters for the campaign’s failures.

A mistake in strategy
But if you want to look at campaign strategy, to explain the magnitude of the defeat you have to look first and most at the campaign’s inability to convince Southern Black voters that he was their best candidate and could win. There are many reasons Sanders lost to Biden, but there was this one precipitating strategic error that shifted the momentum to Biden when Sanders was the emerging frontrunner: Sanders didn’t understand that Black voters were the most important constituency in the primary. Biden did.

By the time the primaries were over, Biden was winning two, three, four … eight times as many votes from Black people. The staggering numbers have been hard for progressives to understand. Black voters had the most to gain from Medicare for All and Sanders’ other transformative programs, yet voted overwhelmingly for Biden. Doesn’t there have to be something deeply wrong with a progressive movement that can’t win the support of Black people?

Doesn’t there have to be something deeply wrong with a progressive movement that can’t win the support of Black people?

This isn’t only a question about an election. Black people have been the most critical and powerful challengers to the ruling elites, at the center both of the historic protest movements since the abolitionists and since the sixties the progressive spine of the Democratic Party. Their absence limits or dooms any progressive movement and any hope for fundamental social change. So the left had better come to terms with what went wrong.

First, for some perspective. The post-mortems often end up casting the campaign in a negative light. But looked at in another way, the Sanders movement was not simply a defeat, but also a victory, an inspiring achievement — electoral success for a left-progressive presidential campaign on a scale hardly imaginable ten years ago. For all its problems, it catalyzed already building momentum for a dramatic shift to the left not only in the Democratic Party, but in the national conversation. It gave voice to working people, their struggles and aspirations; it reshaped the mainstream with demands for free health care and college and a Green New Deal that had seemed unrealistic but now are widely popular.

But while it put radical restructuring of the economy on the agenda, it didn’t play much of a role in the national conversation about white supremacy. That came first of all, as it always does, from the actions, demands, and sacrifices of Black people and people of color.

Was Sanders’ loss in South Carolina foreordained?
Many of the explanations, with the arrogance and simplicity of hindsight, cast Sanders’ loss as foreordained. But was it? Even his harshest critics were less sanguine and imagined the apocalypse in the days before the South Carolina primary, after Sanders had closed in on Biden in some of the polls, both nationally and in South Carolina. But then the campaign stalled, and Biden flattened Sanders, winning by almost 30 points, and winning the Black vote by almost 40  (61%-17%).

And this despite the popularity of Sanders’ policies.  Data for Progress’s polling showed Medicare for All and Green New Deal not only had majority support in South Carolina, support was even higher among Black voters (80% support for Medicare for All, 54% strong support; 83% support for Green New Deal, 62% strong support). In every exit and entrance poll, majorities — often large majorities — supported “a government plan for all instead of private insurance.”  National opinion polls showed similar support for Sanders’ key programs. What, then, accounts for his crushing loss?

Only one candidate marched and got busted in a civil rights struggle. Image from one of three Sanders campaign videos shown in South Carolina.

“The” Black voter— complex and diverse
There are some often-heard explanations for the Black vote. Biden was Obama’s vice president; endorsements by Rep. Jim Clyburn and Black community leaders; Blacks are conservative; Blacks are “pragmatic” voters; Sanders didn’t know how to talk to Black people — or to older Black voters; the Sanders campaign talked class and not race; or they misdirected resources and neglected the South. Journalists can unpack any of these, to find simplification … or complexity.

The many reasons given for Biden’s success show how complex the electorate is, how voting has to be interpreted in a rich context, and how we can’t stop with simple answers. Understanding this matters both for the general election and as well for movement strategy more generally.

What do the South Carolina results say about Black Democrats? Maybe only one weak conclusion is obvious — that in the particular context of one campaign, in one state, in an election that was more about defeating Trump than about social policy, Black voters chose Biden. We can too easily forget that Biden’s support among Black primary voters was overwhelming in the South, but not so much in other parts of the country. Biden won only 38% of Black voters in California, 36% in Massachusetts, only a few points more than Sanders in Minnesota (47%-43%). When people extrapolate from South Carolina to generalize about Black voters, they miss a lot.

As is well known, Sanders does better among younger voters, and from the accounts of journalists, participants and the limited evidence of polling, age is a leading predictor among Black voters as well. Opinion polls showed him winning the support of younger Blacks — in some polls, older Blacks as well. In the few exit polls which broke out Black voting by age under 30, the youth vote went to Sanders in South Carolina (38% – 36%) and Texas (41% – 31%). Sanders won the 18-44 vote in Florida and Illinois, but — again showing Biden’s Southern advantage — not in Mississippi (76% – 23%). (In most of the exit polls, there weren’t enough Black voters for an age breakdown.)

Progressives want to rely on young voters, but there are always far more older voters, and the older voters always turn out at far higher levels. The youth are the driving force in the protest movement, but it’s always been a challenge to move the activism and energy from the streets to the voting booth.

Looking at an interesting and less attended difference, Ibram X Kendi tweets about how “divided Black politicians are from Black intellectuals and activists,” with the politicians endorsing Biden or Bloomberg, the others endorsing Sanders or Warren. Responses to his tweet connected this to another division: “The activist/intellectual community has to revisit its relationships with Black voters” and the disaffected (Clarence Okoh), and “do some of the hard work organizing and talking to real folks and not ‘the woke’ ” (Denise Oliver-Velez).

Maybe revisit the relationship with white voters as well.

From a  Bernie Sanders campaign video, shown in South Carolina. The video sped through unequal “justice,” Sanders’ civil rights activism, mass incarceration, jobs and education. Narrated by Danny Glover.

Explaining the voters … or blaming the voters?
Democrats have a history of taking the Black vote for granted, but in primaries they are courted. Sanders staffers claim they made a far greater effort than Biden in South Carolina. Sanders made 70 campaign appearances there, they had an extensive field operation with the most door-knocking, a majority were people of color and Blacks were in senior positions, with campaign co-chair Nina Turner in charge of strategy.

And yet …

Maybe Black voters just weren’t going to vote for Sanders, and many explanations look at the voters rather than the campaign. Some critics say these explanations blame the voters instead of holding the campaign itself up for scrutiny. Even if this is true, it is still useful to examine the explanations.

Did Biden win the Black vote because he was Obama’s vice president? This explanation was common in news reporting, and also foregrounded by Sanders and by Bill de Blasio, but also in a different tone by Black academics (e.g., Theodore R. Johnson or Christina Greer). This explanation can be expressed disrespectfully. But it makes sense that if Obama trusted Biden, many Black voters would, or that Biden’s eight years of loyalty serving the first Black president could outweigh his opposition in the years before to desegregating schools, support for “welfare reform” and mass incarceration.

But Biden’s ties to Obama were just one ingredient in a richer mix. After all, if the Obama connection alone was such a compelling explanation, opinion polls would never have shown Black people preferring Sanders, as some polls did in the runup to South Carolina.

Are Black voters really centrists?
Another simplification: Black voters are “moderate,” “conservative” or centrist, so naturally they will vote for the “moderate” candidate over the “socialist.” According to the Brennan Center’s Theodore Johnson, only about a quarter of Black voters identify as liberal, the rest as moderate or conservative. (Black primary voters, according to the exit polls, are far more liberal — in Mississippi, for example, close to half.) Political scientists Ismail K
White and Chryl N. Laird also say that “African Americans are actually one of the most conservative blocs of Democratic supporters.”

It’s easy to think, if you vote for a centrist, that defines your “ideology.” But in this election, and many, the “very liberal” might vote tactically, for a centrist.

And there are other reasons to be skeptical about the “ideology” category in political polling, which sorts people as “liberals,” “moderates,” and “conservatives.” Voting in Mississippi shows how clunky these categories are. There Biden obliterated Sanders among Black voters, 87% to 10%, and 76%-23% among Black voters under 30. According to the exit poll, 54% of the voters (all the voters, not just the 2/3 who were Black) are moderate or conservative,  but 46% are liberal and only 23% are “very liberal.”  Yet 60% support the very liberal “government plan for all instead of private insurance,” opposed by Biden and advanced by those “extremists” Sanders and Warren. People with very liberal economic views are answering “moderate” or “conservative” to the ideology question while preferring left economic policies, and this is true of Black voters generally. There are some cultural issues on which Black voters may be on the moderate or conservative part of the spectrum, but, as Thomas Edsall writes, they remain “decisively liberal, even radical, on economic issues.” (And, of course, on racial issues.)

The “moderate” category does not define a coherent group sharing the same political values and positions, not only because people with “moderate,” or “socially conservative,” views on cultural issues can be quite radical on economic issues. Many people identify as “moderate” in polls because they don’t like the labels “liberal” or “conservative,” or because we’re told by the media that America is moderate and centrist, and so it’s normal to be moderate. Some pollsters unhelpfully classify people who might hold both liberal and conservative positions as “moderate.” These categories have been challenged by political scientists from the sixties on (I discuss the conventional wisdom that the U.S. is center-right ideologically, and Donald Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe’s “Neither Liberal nor Conservative,” here).

The Root’s Michael Harriot has no patience for Sanders supporters who call Biden voters “centrists”: “What the hell is a black ‘centrist’ anyway? Is ‘moderate’ the nickname you give to people who don’t share your values or do what you say? … Every black person is a centrist because we are always at the center of America’s crosshairs.” I guess that doesn’t count as “political science” discourse, but it’s fit for purpose.

Blaming “the establishment”
It’s not controversial to say that the Democratic establishment opposed Sanders from the start, just as they had in 2016, but only acted after his landslide in Nevada sent them “into panic mode.”  Rep. Jim Clyburn was urged to endorse Biden, and 60% of South Carolina Black voters said his endorsement was “an important factor” in their decision. A slew of endorsements followed, sending the message to voters that Biden was indeed the party’s “electable” champion.

A similar explanation was given by Cornel West. He blamed Black neoliberal elites when he spoke to an overwhelmingly white Sanders rally in majority Black Flint, Michigan (pop: 53.4% African American): “The neoliberalist who all of a sudden now is coming back to life,” he said, “and the catalyst was my own black people. Oh, I’m so disappointed. … What has happened to our black leadership? Some have just sold out.” West was criticized for taking agency away from Black voters, as if they are passive followers of elite leaders, without their own good reasons to vote for Biden.

It’s important to recognize the role of the “establishment” and neoliberal elites in Biden’s victory, but, like many popular explanations, it both obscures and reveals. It can be good political science, but blaming “black neoliberal leadership” can serve as another “blame the voters” rationale, diverting us from self-criticism. The Root’s Lawrence Ross saw blaming the establishment as “not so subtle anti-black racism,” as if “black people in the South are just tools and will vote for whoever their ministers, politicians, barber, etc. tell them.”

The problem for Sanders was not just establishment opposition, but, more serious, voter loyalty to the establishment, and Sanders’ inability to offer an alternative to that loyalty. (More here for some analysis of “electable” and “establishment.”)

Harriot, born and raised in South Carolina, thought Sanders’ attack on the Democratic establishment showed he didn’t understand Black Southern voters. “My grandma would pop u in the mouth if you said anything bad about a Dem. … In a lot of small towns in the South, black people are generally on their own. There is no outside help. The activists, people on the ground doing work, and local political leaders all come from the same pot. There is no real distinction.”

Attacking the Democratic establishment was attacking John Lewis and Jim Clyburn — bad enough, but it was also attacking voters’ church community, teachers, city councilpersons, NAACP leaders, “the people who help them when they are the lowest.” Harriot writes, “All we have is the institutions, organizations and relationships we built. That’s why politicians come to black churches in the South. That’s why a lot of activists down here are also educators and religious leaders.”

The progressive whites and socialists inspired by Sanders’ outsider insurgency are making a fundamental mistake, writes Ross, “pissing off, or alienating, your natural allies. … Recognize that you’re going to need a Democrat running in a Democratic party. And that you can’t think that you’re gonna throw out the term, ‘Democratic establishment’ and not think you’re insulting thousands of black Democratic officials who’ve devoted their lives to the party and ordinary black folks who’ve struggled to create political power for their communities.”

Identity: “Steadfast Democrats”
Political scientists Chryl Laird and Ismail White have a similar take in  “Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior.”  Black voting, not just in the South, they argued, has less to do with particular policies and “ideology” than with in-group identity as Democrats. In one of their examples, they consider voters in the top 5% of black households. They earn $275,000 (in 2016) but they largely still vote Democratic, even though they would benefit from Republican tax cuts for the wealthy or, as business owners, Republican deregulation. But it isn’t economic interests, it is racial solidarity and identity that determine Black voting.

Students on the #BlackVotesMatter bus on their way to vote in North Carolina, signs from Common Cause. Photo via Twitter, @DemocracyNC. The  North Carolina results: Biden 42.9%, Sanders 24.2%.

“The American experience of racial apartheid,” write Laird and White, “made black Americans uniquely socially integrated with and reliant on each other.” Voting as a bloc allows them to leverage power in a white supremacist system. “Identifying with and voting for the Democratic Party and its candidates have come to be understood by most black Americans as in-group expected behaviors,” social norms enforced by “racialized social constraint,” in which “social pressure from other blacks is the key element.” This perspective aligns with the work of Kinder and Kalmoe, who think the better way to understand how most people vote is to look first at party identity, as Democrat or Republican, rather than sorting into the familiar ideological pigeonholes. (More on this here.)

“Steadfast Democrats” was meant to explain the powerful bloc voting of Black people against Republicans in general elections, but it also explains preference for Biden in the primaries. What mattered wasn’t voter support for Medicare for All or Green New Deal — what mattered was that Biden was a standard-bearer for the Democrat Party, perceived as the candidate who could unite the party and defeat Trump. Biden drove the message home: “If the Democrats want a nominee who’s a Democrat, a lifelong Democrat, a proud Democrat, an Obama-Biden Democrat,” he said, “then join us!”

Biden’s electability may have been thrown into question by his poor showing in Nevada, but Sanders was off-brand — not a Democrat so much as an outsider attacking the Democratic establishment and trying to remake the party. Unsurprisingly especially after Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement, South Carolina’s Black voters overwhelmingly chose Biden. He was the Democrat who represented the party they knew, the party of Barack Obama, John Lewis, their own Jim Clyburn, and community leaders and activists. What if Sanders has the vision Biden lacks, what if he has a better program for the Black community? Polling on issues shows that it wasn’t just younger Blacks who thought so. That wasn’t what mattered. Whether or not you agree that his inability to appeal to Southern Black voters shows he was not “electable” and couldn’t unite the party, there is nothing unsophisticated or “low-information” about choosing Biden.

The most pragmatic voting bloc
One of the most common generalizations about Black voters is that they are “pragmatic.” For Theodore R. Johnson, there are two prongs of pragmatism for Black voters, both met by Joe Biden: “Can we trust him to keep our civil rights protections in place? And is he electable?” Or, as Tasha Philpot, author of a book on Black conservatives, tweets: “Black voters supporting @JoeBiden over an openly racially hostile president is ABSOLUTELY a tactical & pragmatic move.”

Maybe the point here is not that Black voters are unlike white voters in this respect. (White voters aren’t pragmatic? WTF is wrong with us?) Rather, “pragmatic” doesn’t mean the same thing for different groups of voters — Black, white, or Latinx; North and South; old and young; rich and poor, homeowners and renters. For most Black voters, as for most Democrats, the election is not about social policy, it’s about defeating Trump, and Biden was seen as more electable once the Democratic establishment coalesced around him. But just as “pragmatic” isn’t the same for all voters, saying Biden is more “electable” isn’t the same. To Black voters, according to the writers I’m quoting here, “electable” doesn’t say something about Biden so much as it says something about white people.

“Electable” doesn’t say something about Biden, so much as it says something about white people.

For some of these Black commentators, saying Black people are voting “tactically” or “strategically” doesn’t imply they have “blind worship of Biden” or they don’t know about his opposition to busing, support for the crime bill, welfare “reform,” or his disgraceful treatment of Anita Hill. Many just think Biden, unlike Sanders, will appeal to white voters — which isn’t praise for Biden so much as disgust or resignation about racist whites.

Political scientist Christina Greer agrees, “pragmatic voting” is a “strategic calculus of the voting behaviors of whites and others.” Dr. Jason Johnson, then political editor of The Root, told Elie Mystal: “Voting for Bernie Sanders requires that black people believe that white people will do something they’ve never done: willingly and openly share the economic bounty of the United States.”  Mystal writes, “Older black people know white people. They’ve suffered because of them more than anybody else. In the first primary of 2020 in which black people had a voice, the message I heard from the elders was “Vote for Biden, because white people gonna white.”
—Paul Elitzik

Continued next week. In part II, how Black critics, including campaign staff, understood the failure to connect with Black voters; the original sin of the white left — privileging class over race and how that took shape in this campaign; and how the George Floyd protests can help us understand the prospects for future campaigns.