By Ben Kamisar, The Hill
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are both highlighting the civil rights movement as they compete for the African-American vote with just two months left before the official start of primary season.
Clinton gave the keynote speech at the commemoration of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama — just one week after Sanders visited The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, where he met with King’s daughter Bernice.
Clinton has a big lead over Sanders with black Democratic voters, and her team is determined to lock up the demographic in order to shorten the Democratic primary.
“I just don’t know how you close that gap,” said Rick Wade, the former senior adviser and national director of the African-American vote for Barack Obama’s campaign, who is unaffiliated in this race.
“I’m not saying it can’t be done … but without a major hiccup or issue with Hillary, I don’t know what the thing is that Bernie can do that so distinguishes him that mass numbers of African-Americans are going to move to his side.”
Minority voters, specifically black Americans, will be a crucial bloc in a series of contests after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, two states with a predominantly white Democratic primary electorate. That’s not the case in South Carolina — where more than half the 2008 primary electorate was black — and for a number of the states that follow March’s Super Tuesday.
More than 70 percent of the states with contests through Super Tuesday on March 1 have a Democratic primary electorate of at least 20 percent nonwhite voters, according to analysis by The University of Virginia Center for Politics’s Geoffrey Skelley.
“If you think about South Carolina and Nevada, the reason why we chose those states was to ensure these candidates didn’t wait late in the game to reach out [to minority voters],” said Donna Brazile, vice chairwoman of voter registration and participation at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), referring to the third and fourth states to hold presidential nominating contests. As a DNC official, Brazile does not endorse a candidate.
Polling outside of early primary states isn’t as consistent, but repeated surveys from South Carolina show Sanders in a deep hole.
Clinton held a 54-point lead in the state and a 71-point lead with black voters in a mid-November Public Policy Polling survey, as well as an overwhelming 85 percent favorability rating among black voters. By comparison, black voters’ positive and negative views on Sanders are split at an even 32 percent, with 36 percent unsure.
Both campaigns have similar tactics as far as wooing African-American voters. Each sees the candidate’s platform as uniquely reflective of the needs of black Americans, including fighting income inequality and pushing for criminal justice and other civil rights reform.
And both campaigns have met with organizers from groups such as Black Lives Matter as well as families who have lost loved ones in incidents involving police, and are working to roll out a robust schedule of events that take the candidate directly to voters in their communities.
Wade, the former Obama senior adviser who is based in South Carolina, said Sanders’s stagnant polling with African-American voters doesn’t amount to a messaging problem, but to the stark disadvantages he has faced from the start.
“Bernie’s core message is right on point, but his message hasn’t committed a movement of people to the polls,” he said.
“Even with Bernie having the right message, I’m not sure he’s going to be able to gain the rank-and-file support to create a movement of people to his side. [Clinton] has just such a strong history and has built such a strong organization.”
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