Bernie Sanders' Southern Strategy

“I agreed wholeheartedly with the senator when he said the Democratic Party has abandoned the South.”
Ann Porter

“Global warming, it’s going to be disastrous,” one man at the event explained.

“Is climate change an issue? Is that not talked about here in Louisiana?” Sanders said. It’s not talked about, several people responded.

“We’re all gonna be under water,” one visibly concerned woman said. “No one can afford their flood insurance.”

“Oil and gas owns this state,” another woman shouted indignantly.

“Fracking,” another chimed in as though the word alone was self-explanatory.

The house party was the smallest of four events on the senator’s schedule in a two day swing through the state, which attracted Sanders’s usual sheaf of favorable media coverage. He made “a direct appeal to black voters” at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference gala in Baton Rouge on Saturday according to MSNBC, and “whipped up a thunderous crowd” of 4,500 in Kenner’s Pontchartrain Center according to the Times Picayune. (When I mentioned to Reed that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal only managed to draw 1,000 people to the same venue for his presidential announcement, she quipped “and he probably had to pay them to get them there.”)

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-29/bernie-sanders-southern-strategy