The Nation - What’s Wrong With Bernie Sanders’s Strategy?

Interesting article from the Nation. It does suggest that Bernie's team could adjust for the general election by trying to be more proactive about reaching out to minority communities, which have been a growing constituency of the Democratic party, particularly as the GOP has been going out of its way to alienate people of color during this election cycle.

http://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-bernie-sanderss-strategy/

In the 2008 presidential primary, Democrats chose between a black candidate and a white candidate. Yes, that described the race of the two leading rivals, but also their constituencies: Barack Obama won 82 percent of African-American votes, while Hillary Clinton won most whites, including 62 percent of whites without a college degree.

In 2016, once again, throughout most of the primary campaign, there’s been a black candidate and a white candidate—when it comes to their supporters, anyway. Only this time, it’s Clinton who’s racking up the black vote, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who has been leading among whites, especially the white working class, while losing roughly 4–1 among the African-American voters who are the bedrock of the Democratic Party. In states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Michigan, Sanders beat Clinton among whites without a college degree. And this time, it’s Sanders who is making the political case for the importance of winning back white voters, particularly working-class whites, to the Democratic Party, as Clinton did eight years ago.

And as I did, too. I began the 2008 primary season thinking Clinton’s support from white working-class voters was a sign that Democrats could make inroads there, and win back so-called Reagan Democrats to the party of FDR. I ended the 2008 contests in despair, seeing Clinton’s attempt to win white votes devolve into her using her support from “hard-working Americans, white Americans” against Obama in a way that rightly repelled African Americans, and me too. By 2012, I no longer saw a way for Democrats to win back vast numbers of whites that didn’t involve somehow negating the power, influence, and interests of African Americans, who have become the most reliable Democratic voters. Negating that influence would be politically stupid as well as morally wrong.

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Sanders’s avid supporters haven’t helped him on this score. The sexism of the so-called BernieBro phenomenon has gotten most of the attention, but the racial cluelessness of the Bros has been pretty remarkable too. Many ooze condescension, dismissing Southern blacks as “low-information” voters. As the race moved north, many continued to lament that African Americans don’t seem to know what’s best for them as they vote for Clinton. The Sanders-supporting Progressive Democrats of America dismissed Clinton’s Southern victories as confined to “the Confederacy,” ignoring the fact that descendants of people enslaved by the Confederacy were the ones propelling big Clinton wins. To its credit, the group apologized. But Sanders himself continues to minimize Clinton’s Southern wins, because Democrats are “not going to win those states in the general election.” Media analyst Clay Shirky dubbed Sanders’s frequent racial flubs the “kettledrum effect,” an inverse dog whistle in which African Americans hear slights, insensitivities, and gaffes that voters who aren’t black may not.