Poverty + Inequality — Can Bernie Bash #Obama’s Record and Win Black Votes?

THE ROOT.COM. Poverty + Inequality — Can Bernie Bash #Obama’s Record and Win Black Votes? Can Sen. Bernie Sanders do it? Can he cascade into South Carolina and win Black votes when his central message is an indictment of the current economy.  Right now, 38 percent of Black children and 28 percent of Blacks overall live in poverty. Can Sanders win with this strategy? READ IT IN THE ROOT.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) arrived at the February 11, 2016 debate in Milwaukee with a stump speech that treated the Obama economy as broken. After his 22-point win in New Hampshire three days earlier, the Sanders campaign pivoted to South Carolina, where Black voters were expected to cast roughly 55 percent of the Democratic primary vote on February 27. The problem: most of those voters approved of President Barack Obama. A Gallup tracking poll that week put Obama’s approval with Black Americans at 91 percent.

Sanders’ indictment had data behind it. The Black-white wealth gap had widened under Obama, not narrowed. Median Black household wealth sat at roughly $11,000 in 2013 according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, compared with about $141,900 for white households. Black homeownership had fallen from 46.1 percent in 2009 to 41.9 percent in late 2015, the lowest mark since 1993. The 2008 foreclosure crisis had stripped hundreds of billions of dollars of Black household wealth, and the recovery had not restored it.

Where Obama did have numbers was on jobs. Black unemployment had fallen from 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 8.8 percent in January 2016. The uninsured rate for Black Americans under 65 had dropped from 20.9 percent to 11.5 percent under the Affordable Care Act. Those are the numbers Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) and CBC Chairman G.K. Butterfield (D-NC) cited when asked about the Sanders pitch.

The political math was brutal for Sanders. To win South Carolina he needed to peel off enough older Black voters who, for decades, had treated the Clinton family as allies. Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsed Hillary Clinton on February 19, eight days before the primary, citing gun control and the Supreme Court as his top concerns. The endorsement mattered. Clinton won South Carolina with 73 percent of the Black vote, a 76 to 16 split that effectively ended the primary as a contest.

The deeper question, which this Root column raises, is whether Sanders’ indictment of the Obama economy was correct regardless of whether it won votes. On poverty, the numbers were blunt. The Census Bureau’s 2014 Current Population Survey put the Black poverty rate at 26.2 percent, compared with 10.1 percent for whites. Black child poverty stood at 38 percent. Those are Obama-era numbers. A candidate who wanted to tell Black voters the system was working had a hard chart to defend.

The politics of loyalty and the politics of material conditions pulled in opposite directions in 2016. Sanders lost the argument in the primary but the data he cited on the wealth gap did not disappear on the morning of February 28. It is one of the open arguments the Democratic Party has carried forward into every election since.