New York Times
By Noam Scheiber
March 21, 2016
Asked
during a January debate why he trailed Hillary Clinton so badly among
minority voters, Senator Bernie Sanders said he would gain ground once
those voters became familiar with his track
record and agenda on the economy and criminal justice.
Two
months later and on the eve of another important primary voting day,
Mr. Sanders remains on the wrong side of a yawning gap among
African-Americans even as his performance among whites
has been impressive.
One
important reason for this may be that African-Americans have
experienced somewhat more favorable economic trends in recent years.
While still worse off than whites, African-Americans
have seen their jobless rate fall a little further than whites have,
relative to a prerecession average. Furthermore, the decline has been
faster for African-Americans in the last year.
The
economist Robert J. Shapiro recently measured the income growth that
people experience as they age. He found that, on average in 2013 and
2014 (the most recent data available), incomes
for blacks in their 30s, 40s and 50s grew more rapidly than for whites
in the same age group. Older people, who strongly support Mrs. Clinton,
have also seen income gains relative to other groups since the
recession.
Still, the economic data is sufficiently tentative and murky that it is unlikely to tell the full story.
That
is all the more true given the stark difference between Mr. Sanders’s
performance among working-class whites and African-Americans. Typically
in Democratic primaries, insurgent liberal
candidates fail to make significant inroads in either of these groups.
But Mr. Sanders carried white working-class voters by large margins in
states like Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and New Hampshire. He
nearly tied Mrs. Clinton among white working-class
voters in states where he otherwise lost badly, such as Florida and
Ohio.
Moreover,
Mr. Sanders has done so while facing some of the same disadvantages
that weigh him down with African-Americans: low name recognition and the
group’s longstanding affection for the
Clinton family. Recent polling shows that Bill Clinton’s favorability
rating among working-class white Democrats is roughly equivalent to his
rating among African-Americans.
Perhaps
a better explanation for Mr. Sanders’s divergent performance is that
while African-Americans and white working-class Democrats are
experiencing broadly similar economic trends, they
interpret them differently.
A
New York Times/CBS News poll conducted last week found that
African-Americans rated the economy as good by a ratio of about four to
one, versus about two to one for white Democrats and
an even narrower margin for white Democrats without a college degree. A
Times/CBS News poll in December found that, relative to two years
earlier, roughly three times as many African-Americans said their
family’s financial situation was better as said it was
worse, while Democrats without a college degree were almost evenly
split on this question.
Geoff
Garin, a strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign who currently
polls for Priorities USA Action, a pro-Clinton “super PAC,” posited that
for a more economically marginal group like
African-Americans, the unemployment rate — which has declined
significantly for all racial groups in recent years — carries more
importance than growth in incomes and certain assets, which have been
slower to recover. For whites, even working-class whites,
whose jobless rate is substantially lower than that for
African-Americans, the latter took on comparatively more importance.
“The
major source of economic anxiety for working-class white men is not
whether they have a job tomorrow,” Mr. Garin said, “it’s that they still
haven’t had their personal recovery. Their
recovery is about assets and income.” For African-Americans, on the
other hand, “you don’t take job growth for granted.”
He
cited polling data showing that working-class white Democrats were
roughly as concerned about inequality as they were about job growth and
economic growth, while African-Americans were
overwhelmingly concerned about the latter two. It is no surprise, Mr.
Garin said, that Mrs. Clinton, who has had a similar emphasis in her
campaign, did better among African-Americans, while Mr. Sanders’s
emphasis on inequality resonated more with whites.
In
a similar vein, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that
African-Americans and Hispanic voters are more likely to use the
economy’s recent low point, in 2008 and 2009, as the base line
for their judgment than are whites, who may focus on more recent
performance, where improvement has been less pronounced.
David
Simas, the White House political director, recalled sitting in on focus
groups when he worked for the 2012 Obama campaign for ads that began by
reminding voters how bleak the economy
had been when Barack Obama first took office. “The folks who responded
to it the most were African-Americans and Hispanic voters,” he said.
Willie
Minor, an African-American actor in Dallas, who runs a small theater
company, recalled that in 2009, “I called all my lenders and creditors,
asked for extensions, made partial payments,
things like that.” He said that since then, thanks in part to increased
revenue from the company’s productions, he has “been more secure
financially.”
The
Affordable Care Act may be another aspect of President Obama’s economic
record that minority voters and working-class whites view differently.
“Blacks and Hispanics benefited more from
the A.C.A.,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a policy and
advocacy group. “It was a really dramatic lowering of their uninsured
rate, which was obviously material to their economic health and their
overall comfort in the world.”
Mr.
Minor said that while he received his health care through the
Department of Veterans Affairs, many of his friends “had no insurance
and no possibility of getting insurance.”
“Obamacare has been a boon to them,” he said.
By
contrast, many whites, who were insured at a higher rate than the other
groups before the Affordable Care Act took effect, saw the program as
detrimental to their interests. “The promise
of Obamacare was to make it more affordable for everybody,” said J. J.
Price, a firefighter and union member in Roanoke, Va., who voted for Mr.
Obama in 2008 but Mitt Romney in 2012. “It’s done nothing but make it
more expensive on us, the working class.”
Mrs.
Clinton, of course, has been a dogged defender of the Affordable Care
Act, while Mr. Sanders has dwelled on the program’s not going far
enough. He prefers a single-payer system akin
to expanding Medicare for the entire population.
The
dynamic on the Affordable Care Act suggests a broader difference when
it comes to African-Americans and working-class whites: When Mr. Sanders
implicitly criticizes Mr. Obama from the
left, white working-class Democrats may see it as advocating for their
economic interests, but the claims tend to fall flat with many blacks,
among whom the president is still wildly popular.
Larry
Cohen, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders and past president of the
Communications Workers of America, said that Mrs. Clinton’s perceived
loyalty to the administration, as well as the
nearly uniform support for Mrs. Clinton within the black political
establishment, especially in the South, were key factors in limiting Mr.
Sanders’s support among African-Americans.
Others
largely agree. “I don’t think you can discount how important President
Obama is,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, a former Clinton White House
pollster who recently conducted focus groups
with African-American voters in Philadelphia and Cleveland. “Obama and
his election and re-election is seen as on a scale of what the civil
rights movement achieved.”
He
added that Mrs. Clinton, by way of her service in the administration
and her eagerness to defend the president’s policies on the campaign
trail, “is seen as having a more instinctive identification
with Obama.”
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