Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?
Shortly after Senator Bernie Sanders suffered a crushing loss in South Carolina’s Democratic primary in 2016, his campaign’s African-American outreach team sent a memo to top campaign leaders with an urgent warning.
“The margin by which we lost the African-American vote has got to be — at the very least — cut in half or there simply is no path to victory,” the team wrote in the memo, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Sanders had won 14 percent of the black vote there compared with 86 percent for Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls.
Over seven pages, the team outlined a strategy for winning black voters that included using social media influencers and having Mr. Sanders give a major speech on discrimination in a city like St. Louis or Cincinnati.
Mr. Sanders’s inner circle did not respond.
In a campaign in which Mr. Sanders badly needed his message against inequality to catch fire with black voters, the senator from Vermont and his senior leaders struggled to prioritize and execute a winning plan to build their support. Top aides lost faith in their African-American outreach organizers, whose leadership was replaced and whose team members were scattered across the country. Initiatives like a tour of historically black colleges and universities fizzled; Mr. Sanders even missed its kickoff event.
As Mr. Sanders prepares to announce another run for the White House as early as this week, his weak track record with black voters — a vital base in the Democratic Party — could be a potential threat to his candidacy. And his campaign’s experience in 2016, as described in interviews with nearly two dozen current and former advisers and staff members, reveals a strikingly uneven commitment on the part of Mr. Sanders and his top advisers to organize and communicate effectively with black voters and leaders.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-black-voters-outreach.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
When all else fails you will vote for a Democrat, and that's a good thing. 
Link to tweet
“I have spent my career advocating for workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and on behalf of the LBGTQ community because I believe our country is only as great as the opportunities we afford all our communities,” Huerta said. “Senator Kamala Harris is the right leader to expand those opportunities as president, and I am proud to endorse her.”
Huerta also praised Harris, whom she’s supported in the past, for fighting on behalf of and giving a voice to the vulnerable — and singled out her work on criminal justice reform and for immigrants, ranging “from creating innovative programs to help first-time offenders get education and job training to avoid recidivism, to demanding that California and our country protect immigrant communities and afford them the opportunity to fully contribute to the country they love.”
For Harris, who since ascending to the Senate in 2016 has prioritized shielding immigrants — and specifically the Dreamers — from deportation, Huerta is an important validator, and not only in her home state of California — Huerta comes from a Mexican immigrant family and was raised in Stockton — but also neighboring Nevada, which stands to provide its winner a boost of momentum heading into Super Tuesday.
Huerta, a past recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights, has been active in California politics for decades. She was on stage with Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he won the primary and was later assassinated.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=11825120
and Delores Huerta is a renowned political activist, who is actually a national treasure.. I bet they do!
plenty of excellent qualified Dems who will make better candidates than BS.
Link to tweet
“I have spent my career advocating for workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, women’s rights, and on behalf of the LBGTQ community because I believe our country is only as great as the opportunities we afford all our communities,” Huerta said. “Senator Kamala Harris is the right leader to expand those opportunities as president, and I am proud to endorse her.”
Huerta also praised Harris, whom she’s supported in the past, for fighting on behalf of and giving a voice to the vulnerable — and singled out her work on criminal justice reform and for immigrants, ranging “from creating innovative programs to help first-time offenders get education and job training to avoid recidivism, to demanding that California and our country protect immigrant communities and afford them the opportunity to fully contribute to the country they love.”
For Harris, who since ascending to the Senate in 2016 has prioritized shielding immigrants — and specifically the Dreamers — from deportation, Huerta is an important validator, and not only in her home state of California — Huerta comes from a Mexican immigrant family and was raised in Stockton — but also neighboring Nevada, which stands to provide its winner a boost of momentum heading into Super Tuesday.
Huerta, a past recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights, has been active in California politics for decades. She was on stage with Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he won the primary and was later assassinated.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=11825120
Miraculous!
Elizabeth & Bernie 2020!!!
Yes thanks Bernie.
Thank you! That poll is as misleading as the one where Bernie is "the most popular Senator in the United States". The misleading implication is, of course, that he's THE most popular Senator among all Americans. In reality, he's simply popular among the homogeneous and not-diverse state of Vermont.
In fairness, I'm sure he's very pleased with that particular poll. It's nothing to sneeze at. After all, it's quite an accomplishment to be able to rank so highly in a very tiny tiny state with a population less than that of Rhode Island... or even less than Washington DC, or Jacksonville, or Seattle, or Baltimore.
But I think that all reasonable people can agree that it's intellectually dishonest and misleading to word the boast in such a way that it appears that ALL of the voters in the US rank him at the top of ALL senators. It really serves no good purpose to do that or to represent it in that way. In the end, when the truth is known, it calls into question the integrity of those who were making the misleading claims.
greenwald says.
I bet it's just the opposite.
Vermont lacks ethnic diversity. I'm sure it's easy for him to say and do things that the majority find agreeable. It's also a very tiny tiny state with a population less than that of Rhode Island... or even less than Washington DC, or Jacksonville, or Seattle, or Baltimore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont#Demographics
All I'm saying is that Vermont-style politics (and concerns) don't always play well on the national stage. The issues and slogans that work well in Vermont don't necessarily have the same appeal in other states and regions with much different demographics.
Look, here's the thing. After years of experience, I can cook a meatloaf meal that my own family LOVES. Never a complaint... plates are licked clean every time. --- But I can't take that same meatloaf and expect to get the same reaction from everyone on my street. There will be vegans, and vegetarians, and people who can't eat bread, or people who don't like eggs, or people who can't eat spicy food, or people who dislike sweet sauces, or who have a sodium-restricted diet.
However, in my own house, judged by my own family... I'm the BEST CHEF and the MOST LOVED COOK ever! (At least I don't take my success too seriously.)
A new survey suggests most African-American voters were voting against President Donald Trump when they cast their midterm ballots.
Nine out of 10 African-Americans surveyed on the eve of the election said they were voting or had already voted early for a Democrat in the congressional races, up from 77 percent who said so in July, according to the survey by the African American Research Collaborative. And while a number of GOP candidates distanced themselves from their party's controversial leader or just tried to ignore him, polling showed Trump might as well have been on the ballot himself, the survey indicated.
Nearly 8 in 10 African-Americans said Trump made them "angry," while 85 percent of black women and 81 percent of black men said Trump made them feel "disrespected," according to the study. Similar majorities of African-American voters – 89 percent of women and 83 percent of men – said Trump's statements and policies will cause "a major setback to racial progress."
...
African-Americans have long been a reliable Democratic vote. But turnout has been uneven, arguably making the difference in the 2008, 2012 and the 2016 elections. A record two-thirds of African-American voters showed up at the polls in 2012 to re-elect the nation's first black president, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2016, African-American turnout declined for the first time in a presidential election in 20 years, to 59.6. Political analysts and pollsters attributed the drop to Obama's absence from the ballot – and the decline may well have made the difference for losing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, whom critics charge had taken the African-American vote for granted.
Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, said the nation will not be a true democracy until both political parties engage and value the votes of African-Americans and other minority populations. But those communities have work to do as well, he said.
"It's not incumbent on politicians to appeal to a community," Johnson said in the conference call. "It's incumbent on the communities to define the agenda of the party."
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-11-19/trump-drove-black-voters-to-the-polls-to-choose-democrats
