This is a public information message.
Donald Trump’s supporters are not primarily the demographic of poor whites. Where he gets disproportionate support is from the upper working class and lower middle class.
Yes, his supporters aren’t well educated. They don’t have high rates of higher education, but then again neither do most Americans. This is not an insult, just an observation (I’m one of those lesser educated Americans).
If you are wondering who the poor are supporting, you’d have to look to Bernie Sanders. Even among minorities, you see his strongest support among the poor. This relates to his having the youth support, as the youth have been hit the hardest by economic problems.
* * *
Young People of Color in the South Bronx Tell Us Why They’re Backing Bernie Sanders
by John Surico
“If you think Bernie’s supporters are only white,” Habeeb added, “come to the Bronx.”
We Asked These Young Latinos Why They Support Bernie Sanders. Here’s What They Had To Say.
by Barbara Calderón-Douglass
Sanders is winning the young Latino vote 2 to 1, according to a recent report from NPR, and also has majority support among young black voters.
Young Latinos convert parents into supporting Bernie Sanders
by Amanda Sakuma
The clear enthusiasm among young people for the Sanders campaign is slowly having a double return within the Latino community— fired-up millennials with immigrant roots are going home to their families and convincing them to buy into Sanders’ revolution.
Young and Black in South Carolina: How Will They Vote?
by Josh Dawsey and Valerie Bauerlein
Mr. Sanders has gained a deep following among black college students, according to more than three dozen interviews across five universities with students, professors, university administrators and longtime political observers.
Is 538 in the Bag for Hillary?
by Peter White
If you’re not mathematically inclined, Hatlem’s analysis gets into the weeds but his critique explains a lot of things that 538 and the MSM have gotten wrong or misinterpreted about the Democratic race. For example, the low-voter turnout in the Southern primaries perpetuated the idea that Sanders lacks support among minorities even though, as Hatlem points out, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington (as well as Colorado and Michigan) have significant numbers of non-white voters and Sanders won all of them. There is also the recent hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhite and in a recent Dornsife/LA Times poll, Sanders scored a higher favorability rating in California than Clinton amongst racial minorities where he is supposed to be down 23% in the Latino vote, according to other polls.
“The race hasn’t anywhere near begun in earnest in California, but Sanders seems to be doing okay with his supposed greatest weakness,” writes Hatlem.
In Nevada, Sanders lost to Clinton on February 20 not because his message didn’t appeal to minorities but because Nevada’s Democratic Party, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union, and the Clinton campaign got casino owners to give workers time off in Las Vegas so they could vote on the job. In Arizona they waited in line for hours and didn’t get to. Clinton beat Sanders there by 10 points. But in a surprise development over the weekend, Sanders pulled off an upset at the Clark County Democratic Convention in Las Vegas and flipped Nevada into his win column.
Sanders, Not Trump, Is Winning over the ‘White Working Class’
by Charles Davis
Writing for In These Times, author Jack Metzgar notes that the basis for this assumed white working-class support for Trump is his popularity among Republican voters who lack a college degree, who have indeed preferred him to the other Republicans in the race. “Among all adult whites,” however, “nearly 70 percent do not have bachelor’s degrees,” the definition of working class used by pundits. One recent survey found that 55 percent of this group support Trump, meaning “the white working-class is under-represented among Trump supporters,” Metzgar observes, which means “his supporters are disproportionately college-educated whites.”
This becomes clear when one takes a step back from the tiny weird world of the U.S. right and looks at the electorate as a whole. In a general election, polls Sanders would not only beat Trump but destroy him: Reuters currently has him up by nearly 10 per cent overall, and that with far less media coverage. Among white voters in particular, Sanders’ margin of victory in the most recent poll does drop to just under 5 per cent — but among white voters who make less than US$25,000 a year, his margin of victory actually grows to 15 per cent. Among unemployed white voters, that number rises to 16 per cent. Practically no one who isn’t white is voting for Donald Trump.
Commentators are right, then, to believe the Trump phenomenon is a white people problem — it’s just the data shows it’s not working-class whites who are the heart of this problem. […]
Writing in the New York Times last November, ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis cited data from the Pew Research Center showing that a majority of “likely nonvoters,” the majority of whom are white, are both less wealthy and more liberal than voters, thinking “aid to the poor” does more good than bad, for instance, while the average voter thinks the opposite.
That non-voters are non-voters speaks to the fact that the U.S. political system of representative democracy does not represent a good number of the people ostensibly being represented. The encouraging news is that most of these people have not turned to Donald Trump’s brand of revanchist proto-fascism; the question is whether, beyond pandering, there will come a time when the U.S.’s two-party democracy offers 120-some million U.S. citizens an option more enticing than a night in.
In the meantime, solace: The ugly, dumb xenophobes and actual Nazis supporting Trump are older than the U.S. population as a whole — the demographic threat, in other words, will soon take care of itself. By 2045 mega-racist whites will, one hopes, be a minority of what for sure will no longer be the racial majority in the United States, border wall or not. May we all live to see it.
Marmalade 
The issue is that the math is very unfavorable right now and even if this could go on, the Democratic super delegates would be used against him.
Sadly this contest was rigged before it even begun or Sanders would have won decisively.
Maybe so. My support for Sanders was never about whether he could win or not. I’ve always been about changing the frame and focus of public debate. Sanders has succeeded in this.
Beyond that, even if an establishment candidate like Clinton wins, the political establishment will still lose. The whole charade has been pushed too far at this point and the damage is permanent. If popular will is denied, the consequences could be devastating for the political establishment.
It’s the youth who are supporting Sanders and they are the most pissed off right now, as the economy has hit them the hardest. If both parties lose the youth vote, the youth might either vote for third party or turn to more direct action politics.
There is that. A lot of people are struggling.
I just hope that this leads to changes that make us a better society.
I added something to my post. It’s an article about biased data. The author shows that the demographics of support is different than what has been reported. There is change going on and support for that change that isn’t being accurately reported, when it makes it into the MSM at all.
The MSM has a vested interest in portraying it in a biased manner to try to discredit Bernie supporters.
They are not so much trying to report news objectively as much as trying to keep the Establishment in power.
It is getting ugly in other ways. Bernie won the popular vote in Wyoming, but Clinton gets more delegates. I think that it is very probable that Bernie could win the popular vote and lose the delegate count.
The political and media elite love nothing better than to play demographic groups against each other. They create these narratives and repeat them endlessly. After hearing these narratives their entire lives, ordinary Americans accept them as true and play their role in the script. It’s the saddest thing in the world to watch.
No broad demographic is actually monolithic. Various races, ethnicities, classes, religions, genders, etc aren’t monolithic.
Wealthy people vote differently depending on the states they live in, partly based on regional culture but also strongly related to economic inequality. Poor people vote differently depending on many factors as well—e.g., poor whites are supposed to be anti-communist conservatives and yet they are most strongly supporting the ‘socialist’ candidate. Young women and young minorities vote differently than older women and older minorities, the division presently dividing the two Democratic candidates. An Islamic African immigrant will vote differently than a Christian African-American whose ancestry goes back centuries. Et cetera.
This is what intersectionality is about. Yet this kind of basic data is usually only something one hears from the more radical intellectuals and activists. I rarely see the overlapping demographics broken down anywhere in the media, not often even most of the alternative media.
It’s amazing the number of times I’ll hear an individual black speak about some mythical notion of ‘blacks’. There is no ‘blacks’ who all think, speak, act, and vote in the same way… any more than there is a singular, coherent demographic of ‘whites’.
If a white person generalized about all black people, that would be called racism. It’s no different when a black person does it. Nor would it be any different if a white person stated such a thing about all white people. In either case, it is racial stereotyping.
I always try to be careful about the language I use. And I always try to be careful in basing my opinions on the best data I can find. I often will speak of most people in a particular demographic, but I tend to only do that when I’ve seen the numbers that actually show a majority. If I don’t have precise numbers, I’d instead state it with a qualification: probably, likely, maybe, it seems, it might be the case, I think, I suspect, I get the sense, etc.
This problem of generalization and stereotyping becomes obvious when one does some web searches on various demographics. Most of the reporting makes sweeping generalizations. And it’s hard to find good data that breaks it down into the component segments of precise demographics. Detailed analysis of how data intersects and overlaps is nearly non-existent.
http://www.politicususa.com/2016/04/18/sanders-gains-women-minorities-national-poll-shows-2-point-clinton-lead.html
“Bernie Sanders is making gains with women and minorities as Hillary Clinton’s national lead has been shaved to two points (50%-48%) in the Democratic primary.”
That lead entirely disappears with the young, especially Millennials and young GenXers as well. That includes not just young white men but also women and minorities on the younger end of the scale.
Also, consider that young GenXers are middle aged now, not exactly spring chickens. In losing the young and the poor, Clinton New Democrats haven’t just lost a large part of the population. It’s specifically the voters who represent the future of America.
“The caveat is that national polls have proven themselves to be completely meaningless because the Democratic presidential primary is not a national election. However, the poll does illustrate the substantial gains that Sen. Sanders has made with core Democratic constituencies.”
The young and the poor are the most disenfranchised. They also are the most likely to identify as Independents. They don’t always vote in high numbers, except when they feel inspired and when they think the stakes are high. The primaries hide the strength of this part of the population. As largely Independents, they were excluded from some primaries such as in New York. If Independents had been included, Sanders’ support among the young would likely have given him a victory in New York.
That is problematic for Clinton. There is no evidence that Clinton actually has the support of most minorities. She simply has had strong support among older, wealthier minorities who are the most politically active. The people who are most disenfranchised from politics are also the very people who are the hardest to get polling data about.
Much gets hidden in mainstream news reporting and mainstream politics.
If all Americans were fully informed and politically engaged with a functioning democratic system that represented majority public opinion, the entire country would be ruled by what the present ruling elite would consider progressive liberalism or even radical leftism. If all potential voters voted, the South would be solid Blue. If ex-cons were given back their voting rights and if other forms of disenfranchisement were ended, many elections would turn out entirely different. If there wasn’t a two party stranglehold, third party candidates would regularly win large percentages of voters and sometimes win major elections. It’s even possible that, if all minorities could and did vote, Sanders would easily win both the nomination and election.
But we’ll never know what could otherwise be as long as this corrupt rigged system continues.
Also, like in other states, there was a lot of funny business going on in New York:
https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/ny-democratic-primary-more-frustration/
“Momentum was on Bernie’s side. He had just won a solid victory in Wisconsin. Now he was coming home. A Brooklyn native, he was drawing great crowds. The following entertainers gave speeches on his behalf: Harry Belafonte, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Spike Lee, Rosario Dawson.
“Pre-election polls showed that Hillary was a likely winner. But Bernie had the Big Mo; he would overcome the systemic fraud which plagued his campaign in the primaries.
“NYC was a natural for Bernie, despite the fact that Hillary Clinton was a senator for eight years. But it was Arizona all over again. Thousands of voters reported their registrations were changed or dropped.
“Only 22% of approximately 8 million registered voters turned out. Clinton won by 57.9-42.1%.”
Even with the Independent supporters of Sanders excluded from voting and even though many Democratic voters had their status falsely switched to Independent, Sanders still won more counties in New York.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/276936-sanders-wins-majority-of-ny-counties-despite-clinton
“Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton had a decisive victory in Tuesday’s New York presidential primary, but rival Bernie Sanders won a majority of the counties in the state.
“The Vermont senator won most of the counties, including Albany County, where the capital is located.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/276879-nyc-comptroller-to-audit-board-of-elections-amid-voter
“Media reports from across the state indicate that some polling stations failed to open on time, leaving voters waiting in line for hours. Other polling places reportedly had faulty or broken polling machines.
“In addition, the Comptroller’s office said about 125,000 voters in Brooklyn alone had turned up to cast ballots only to be informed they were never on the voter rolls, had been removed from the voter rolls or were registered under a different party.
“In a letter to Board of Elections director Michael Ryan, Stringer asked for information on polling site operations, voter communication processes, poll worker training and “voter disenfranchisement” related to the voter rolls.”
It’s not accidental that most Americans are uninformed and disinformed. There has been plenty of data showing the MSM has been biased in favor of Hillary Clinton.
This is unsurprising. Establishment corporate media will tend to have their interests in line with establishment corporatist politicians. This is the nature of big money politics in a plutocracy. It doesn’t even remain limited to mainstream media.
There is big money even hiring paid trolls to manipulate public opinion on social media. Have you wondered why and how such things as the “Bernie Bros” label gets pushed so hard and so quickly? Well, wonder no longer.
Do you think these kinds of anti-democratic tactics are ever used to target specific demographics such as blacks? You’d be a fool to think otherwise.
http://usuncut.com/politics/clinton-super-pac-busted/
“A Super PAC headed by a longtime Clinton operative is spending $1 million to hire online trolls to “correct” Bernie Sanders’ supporters on social media.
“Correct The Record (CTR), which is operated by Clinton attack dog and new owner of Blue Nation Review David Brock, launched a new initiative this week called “Barrier Breakers 2016” for the purpose of debating supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders — or “Bernie Bros,” as they’re referred to in Correct the Record’s press official release — on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other social media platforms.
“The “Barrier Breakers” will also publicly thank Hillary Clinton’s superdelegates and fans for supporting her campaign. The paid trolls are professional communicators, coming from public relations and media backgrounds.
““The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize,” CTR stated.”
http://fusion.net/story/287743/young-voters-poll-race-2016-candidates/
“Lots of young people want a candidate who will appoint more minorities to top positions, and many of them think Bernie Sanders is the candidate to do it, according to a new Fusion poll about race and the election.
“When asked which of the presidential candidates would be most likely to appoint minorities to high ranking positions, 35% of young people chose Bernie Sanders while 22% chose Hillary Clinton. Republican candidates were far less likely to be chosen, with each of them registering in the low single digits, while 26% of young people had no opinion about the question. Among those young adults who chose a candidate, 60% said that appointing minorities to important positions is a good reason to support someone’s candidacy.
“By similar margins, both white and Hispanic respondents thought Sanders was more likely to appoint minorities to top jobs than Clinton. Among black respondents, however, 38% chose Sanders and 37% chose Clinton, a difference within the poll’s margin of error.
“The results are consistent with the generally high levels of support that Sanders enjoys among younger voters. Though Sanders struggles with African American support against Clinton, he often performs better with younger black voters than with older ones.”
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-polls-missed-bernie-sanders-michigan-upset/
“If Bernie Sanders were to defeat Hillary Clinton in Michigan’s Democratic primary, it would be “among the greatest polling errors in primary history,” our editor in chief, Nate Silver, wrote Tuesday evening when results started to come in. Sanders pulled it off, and now we’re left wondering how it happened. How did Sanders win by 1.5 percentage points when our polling average showed Clinton ahead by 21 points and our forecasts showed that Sanders had less than a 1 percent chance of winning? […]
“Pollsters underestimated youth turnout. Voters under 30 made up 19 percent of Democratic primary voters, nearly as large a share as voters 65 or older, according to exit polls. Mitchell Research and Communications, which showed a 37 percentage point Clinton lead in a poll conducted Sunday, found that people younger than 50 would make up less than a quarter of all voters; they made up more than half instead. Mitchell was one of the only pollsters in the state to poll using only calls to landlines, and most Americans younger than 45 live in households without landlines. But even Monmouth, which dialed cellphones, too, underestimated the turnout among younger voters. Perhaps all the polls showing a big Clinton lead sowed complacency among Clinton supporters, who skew older — though big leads in polls in Southern states didn’t stop her supporters from helping her romp to big victories.
“Pollsters underestimated Sanders’s dominance among young voters. Not only did more young voters turn out than expected, but Sanders won 81 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. A YouGov poll showed him winning 66 percent.1
“Pollsters underestimated the number of independent voters who would participate in the primary. YouGov expected Sanders to beat Clinton by 38 percentage points among independent voters participating in the open Democratic primary. He won those voters by 43 percentage points. But no one expected independents to make up 27 percent of voters; YouGov expected about 12 percent. “There were too many Democrats in the poll,” said Will Jordan, elections editor at YouGov.
“Pollsters underestimated Sanders’s support among black voters. Sanders had won less than 20 percent of black voters in most states with large black populations, and Mitchell and YouGov both showed Sanders winning less than 20 percent of them in Michigan. Instead he won 28 percent.”
Below is an explanation of one important aspect. But it still leaves out so much.
What caused crime originally wasn’t just that more people were morally bad. Poverty and inequality, lessening opportunity and shrinking mobility, economic segregation and ghettoization, unemployment and underemployment, homelessness and welfare cuts, a growing black market employing the desperate and loss of hope of the young generation, generations of redlining isolating black communities and closing of factories in the inner cities, underfunding of schools and school-to-prison pipeline, bypasses built to further isolate poor minorities and high rates of lead toxicity, and on and on.
These people were royally fucked. And the youngest among them were hit the hardest. Even older blacks were utterly ignorant and absolutely clueless about what was going on. Yes, they wanted crime to go down, as any person would. But they were being disinformed and deceived with a mass scapegoating of an entire generation of victims. It was reactionary politics gone ugly with even minorities turning on one another. They were played for fools by a white ruling elite.
Those like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. would never have fallen for such callous manipulations through fear-mongering. But unfortunately too many great leaders had been lost. There weren’t enough wise voices to speak out against oppression and see clearly what was needed. The worst instincts of humanity took hold.
Tough-on-crime policies and mass incarceration didn’t do jack squat to solve any of these problems. In fact, they made them all worse. Families were destroyed and entire communities decimated. One of the only things that finally made a difference was federal regulation of lead pollution, which took decades to show results.
Yet here we are. Most Americans remain ignorant and disinformed. Even most older blacks who should know better remain as clueless as ever with continued support of the very politicians who were part of the problem. Entire older generations of both whites and minorities will have to die for change to happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/us/politics/hillary-bill-clinton-crime-bill.html
“”Young and energized African-Americans this election cycle are aggressively challenging longstanding ideas and policies, especially those carried out during the Clinton administration in areas like crime and welfare. But the activism is also laying bare a striking generation gap between younger and older African-Americans, whose experience, views of the former president and notions of how they should push for change diverge dramatically.
“The parents and grandparents of today’s young black protesters largely waged the battle for civil rights in courtrooms and churches. They carefully chose people who were viewed as upstanding citizens, like Rosa Parks, to be the face of their movement, and dressed in their Sunday best as they sought to gain broader acceptance. Mr. Clinton endeared himself to these generations by campaigning in black churches and appointing more blacks to the cabinet than any previous president had.
“But many of today’s activists — whose political consciousness has been shaped by the high-profile killings of black people by the police — do not believe that acting respectfully will protect them from being harassed or shot. They aspire not to become a part of the political system, but to upend it.
““You do have older generations of church folk who believe that marching and singing is the best way to bring about change,” Mr. Farmer said. “We’ll march, too, but we’ll do what we need to do to communicate our message, if it happens to be yelling, or blocking an intersection. And we don’t care if people — particularly white people — believe it is respectable.”
“The gulf between young black people and their elders surfaced repeatedly in more than two dozen interviews conducted in the days after Mr. Clinton’s clash with the protesters.
“To young activists like Mr. Farmer, Mr. Clinton’s legacy on crime is paternalistic and damaging. But many older black voters who raised families during the crack epidemic — an era many young people do not remember — remain steadfastly loyal to the Clintons.”
In a functioning democracy, the young and minorities wouldn’t feel disenfranchised from the political process and politicians would actually represent all Americans. But alas we live in a plutocracy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/youth-hispanics-vote-bernie-sanders/479328/
“Nevertheless, young Hispanics appear to be much more enthusiastic about Sanders than they are about Clinton. The challenge for Sanders is that voter turnout and registration among young Hispanics is low, confirming their status as the most “civically alienated” group.
“Lidia Rodriguez, for one, supported Clinton until she became convinced otherwise by her 26-year-old daughter Brenda. And college student Ivan Soto became a Sanders supporter after learning about him on Reddit and through Google searches. So it goes: Young Hispanics back Sanders, while their parents support Clinton.
“These attitudes also line up with the demographic that Sanders has appealed to across cultures: voters under the age of 30. Unfortunately for Sanders, even though Hispanic Millennials make up 44 percent of Hispanic eligible voters, with the groups’ low voter turnout, that’s unlikely to be advantageous to him.”
Here is one thing that interests me.
By the nature of American media and politics, most Americans inevitably are low information voters. The system keeps them ignorant and disinformed, minorities and whites alike. So, it’s telling that as more Americans learn about Sanders and his message, the tide of minority votes begins turning toward the Sanders camp.
Those most harmed by the Clinton New Democrats and those most well informed by alternative media are the young who unsurprisingly support Sanders. Some data now shows a majority of young minorities now are backing Sanders, although you will unlikely hear about this in the MSM.
http://mic.com/articles/137416/one-surprising-factor-in-bernie-sanders-huge-upset-in-michigan#.Bvxu5VauQ
“But already at least one data point has emerged from Tuesday’s results that clearly indicate how Sanders’ appeal as a candidate is more complicated than commonly assumed so far: He has finally shown that he can make inroads with black voters. So far during this primary season, Sanders has lost black voters to his rival Hillary Clinton by astonishing margins — in South Carolina in February, he lost them by about 70 points. In Michigan last night, he lost black voters by 40 points. That’s still a real loss, but a significantly smaller one than he’s seen across the Southern states, where he’s been trounced by Clinton.
“The fact that Sanders can improve on his dismal performance among black voters in the South bodes well for his campaign. It’s also a crucial reminder for political analysts that black voters aren’t a monolith.
“Deconstructing “the black voter”
“So far this year, Sanders has lost black voters to Clinton by an average margin of 84% to 16%, according to the Washington Post. In Michigan, he performed almost twice as well as he usually does, nearly hitting the 30% mark in black voter support, while Clinton pulled in 68% of the black vote. Given that black voters made up over a fifth of Michigan’s Democratic electorate and Sanders’ won by less than two percentage points, his stronger-than-usual performance among black voters was crucial to his unexpected success.
“Sanders’ black support in Michigan raises some interesting questions about his appeal to communities of color. There are a number of possible factors that could be contributing to how it differs from in other states so far, but at least one thing is immediately evident — black voters, like white voters, aren’t uniform in their views.
“”We have to break free from the assumption that African-American voters are this monolithic bloc who tend to think similarly and behave politically in a similar fashion,” Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the African-American studies department at Princeton University, told Mic during a conversation about the results.
“So far this primary season, the overwhelming majority of the black electorate that Sanders has faced has been in the South. Michigan marked the first major nominating contest outside of that region where black voters have constituted a significant portion of the electorate — over 20% — and that matters.
“The Rust Belt has a distinct history from the South in a number of respects. Its once booming 20th-century economy has been hollowed out by deindustrialization which bred a regionally specific attitude toward the effects of free trade; it has a unique history of organized labor politics; and the region was hit particularly hard by the recession. Just as these material conditions shape the political values of white voters in the Midwest differently than in other regions, so they do with black voters.
“”The South is a more conservative region — it’s possible that black voters in the South are more centrist, especially given influence of churches,” Glaude told Mic. “If we disrupt this idea that African-Americans are the unthinking creatures of American politics, we can actually see them making decisions that reflect different kinds of ideological commitments and different kinds of political currents.”
“The black political class in the South could also be more moderate than it is in the Midwest, and could therefore tug rank and file black Democratic voters toward more establishment candidates there as well, Glaude said.
“Age, too, could be a factor. While there isn’t detailed data on the breakdown of minority voters by age available yet, past trends suggest it’s playing a role.
“”When you break down those Southern numbers by age, Sanders does better with younger black voters,” Andra Gillespie, a political scientist who specializes in political mobilization and race at Emory University, told Mic. “What we’re probably seeing here is the black electorate in Michigan is probably younger.”
“In Michigan Sanders split black voters under the age of 45 with Clinton, but lost them by a wide margin when they were older.
“Madala Mathurin, a junior at Wayne State University in Detroit, told Mic that he felt that some minority student groups like the Black Student Union on his campus were particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a Sanders nomination. He said that Sanders’ consistency in his message and stories of his antiracist activism were a theme in political conversations he had in the run up to the primary.
“”There’s a couple pictures of him doing activist work for blacks in the community he was in back in the day,” Mathurin told Mic. “And there were an instance where an African-American lady got on a stage [to disrupt Sanders’ event as part of a Black Lives Matter protest] and Bernie did not deny her access to his stage — that was a big deal here.”
“Just as among voters overall, there are constant signs of a generational gap between younger and older black voters in their preference for Sanders or Clinton.
“As the primary season continues to unfold across states outside of the South, it will be important for political analysts to seek more nuance in assessing “the black vote.” Statistically speaking, race can be a useful predictor of political behavior, but it does not excuse pundits from ignoring the complex ways it intersects with all the other demographic characteristics of a voter.”
“Peeling back the layers of these numbers, however, reveals a level of complexity and nuance that’s worth exploring. More than 90 percent of voters over the age of 65, for example, voted for Clinton. Young black voters under the age of 30 also supported Clinton in high numbers – 56 percent. But what does it mean that 43 percent of young African-Americans supported Bernie Sanders?
“One important takeaway is that there’s something generational at work here. In looking at this slice of the black electorate, as with other segments of Democratic voters, there’s a group of young black men and women for whom Bernie Sanders’s message of inequality resonated. They were willing to excuse his clumsiness on matters of race because of his more radical assessment of American political power. In some respects, this reflects those pockets of black activism that we witnessed in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary (think Rep. James Clyburn endorsing Hillary Clinton at the historically black Allen University, in a room full of black Bernie Sanders supporters). […]
“In addition to Bernie Sanders’s young black supporters, there are also young people who shun two-party politics altogether, critical of a flawed system that all too often marginalizes black voices and needs. There are also young black millennials who support Hillary Clinton, but whose reasons for doing so are often different from their older counterparts. In fact, many imagine themselves as part of a broad, abstract Black Lives Matter movement, while also embracing a kind of pragmatic radicalism. So while they recognize Clinton’s troubling role in mass incarceration, welfare reform and racial and economic inequality during her husband’s presidency, they believe that they can critique and influence her best from within a strong Democratic coalition. Proponents of this approach often point to Secretary Clinton’s sudden use of the word “intersectionality” or her new interest in eliminating systemic racism, to make this point, but it’s worth noting that this turn of events came about as part of collective pressure from a younger generation of black radicals, activists and voters.
“The idea of a monolithic black politics is a false one, as far removed from the historical reality of the modern civil rights movement and Black Power Movement as it is from the political reality of today’s black movements. And like those historical movements, it is clear that young people, in particular, understand the need for a radical reimagining of black political activism, while diverging on the best vehicle for creating that political change.”
Now here is mind-blowing data. Blacks vote at an extremely rate (so do poor whites; as for Hispanics, they vote at even lower rates). Only about a quarter of blacks end up supporting Democrats.
With Sanders winning some of the black voters, this would mean that Clinton is getting less than a quarter of the black vote. Among young minorities, Clinton’s support is probably down in the single digit percentages.
This article is mostly crappy. I only bring it up because it does offer a useful analysis of data at the beginning of the piece. The author then asks a good question. Unfortunately, she doesn’t offer a good answer. The rest of the article is right-wing rhetoric.
http://townhall.com/columnists/ninamay/2008/05/13/are_black_americans_monolithic
“Democrats want everyone to think that blacks are monolithic.
“Take, for example, that little statistic of the voting habits of black Americans. It ranges anywhere from 90% to 96% of the vote going to the Democratic candidate, depending upon the race, the region of the country and the contest. One small detail is missing though . . . less than 30% of blacks even vote. So if you take 90% of 29%, you will get about 26% or about one quarter of the black population that actually votes for the Democratic candidate.
“What about that other 74%? Why don’t they vote?”
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11265114/black-voters-midwest-south-sanders
“There is a noticeable generational difference between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters: Sanders appeals to Democratic voters under 30. And University of Chicago political science professor Michael Dawson said he believes the generational divide is also apparent in the regional differences among black voters.
“It’s “very clear that it’s playing out along generational lines,” he said. “Not just in terms of Sanders and Clinton, but we’ve seen for a long while that younger black voters do not feel the same ties to the established Democratic Party. And much like a generation ago, younger African Americans are generally more suspicious, and more skeptical, about the system than their older cousins tend to be.”
“To be honest, I’m one of those skeptical millennial black voters, as I’ve written in the past. And polls might suggest I’m not an outlier.
“According to NBC News polls, Clinton won 92 percent of black voters age 60 and over in the Super Tuesday Democratic primaries. But that margin of victory wasn’t mirrored for younger black voters: 61 percent of black voters 18 to 29 voted for Clinton.
“One possible explanation for this could be turnout. But Dawson told me that another story the polls may be missing about black voters is the role of activism among younger people today.
“”One way to perhaps think about the regional differences is not so much a South/North or South/non-South difference, but where have young activists been most organized?” Dawson said. “And generally we’ve seen young activists most organized either in the border states — I’m thinking primarily of Maryland/Baltimore, and Missouri/Ferguson, and the St. Louis area more generally — and outside of the Deep South.”
“Based on his observations in Chicago, Dawson also noted that Sanders has benefited from the organizing efforts of the local young black and brown progressive movement built by organizations like Black Lives Matter Chicago, BYP 100, Assata’s Daughters, and We Charge Genocide, even if they do not directly associate themselves with Sanders’s campaign.
“The recent Trump rally protest is one example. While there were Sanders supporters present, local activists — led by black, queer women — coordinated the Trump protest alongside organizing efforts against Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who was ousted during the Wednesday primary.
“”It’s a combination of the issues playing out somewhat differently in the Rust Belt,” Dawson said, “as well as some networks of activists aligning themselves [but] not necessarily actively campaigning on behalf of Sanders.””
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/clinton-sanders-and-the-myth-of-a-monolithic-black-vote
“When black men were enfranchised, in 1870, with the Fifteenth Amendment, the group became a voting bloc known as “the negro vote,” Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, told me. Almost a century later, the term morphed into “the black vote” as the word “negro” became gauche in the country’s liberal corners. The idea of the black vote persists among pundits, journalists, pollsters, and politically engaged dinner-party attendees to describe the electoral preferences of millions of voters. Once loyal to the party of Lincoln, blacks shifted their support almost completely to the Democratic Party with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in 1964. But if you look at state-by-state numbers for this year’s Democratic contest, “the black vote” appears more complicated. So far, Sanders has not won a majority of black voters in any contest with a large African-American population. But he has done much better with black voters in Midwestern states and with younger black voters across the country. These variances are one reason to start to unravel the myth of a monolithic black vote.
“In the South, black voters overwhelmingly went for Clinton, but it’s also the case that voters of every race cast more ballots for Clinton than they did for Sanders. In South Carolina, Clinton won eighty-six per cent of the black vote and fifty-four per cent of the white vote. In Georgia, she nabbed eighty-five per cent of the black vote and fifty-eight per cent of the white vote. “Clinton just did better in the South,” Harry Enten, a political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight, said. One reason why her black support may have been particularly strong in the region is that partisan politics in the South have a strong racial element. Hutchings noted that, in general, “black people and white people in the South have never belonged to the same political party since emancipation.” Before 1948, to the extent that blacks were able to vote, they largely voted Republican, and whites voted Democratic. When Democrats shifted to embrace civil rights after the Second World War, Southern whites briefly broke away from the Party to form the short-lived segregationist Dixiecrats. “Because of sharp racial divisions in the South—sharper than they are in the Midwest—blacks have a firm recognition that the Democratic Party is identified with their group, just as whites do with the Republican Party,” Hutchings said. Blacks in the South may have a harder time supporting an avowed socialist from Vermont, who only recently embraced the Democratic Party, in part because their identification with the Party brand historically has reigned supreme.
“The Midwestern Democratic Party of the early twentieth century was “less wedded to segregationist sentiments,” Hutchings said, simply because “there were far fewer blacks in this region.” This may mean that, to this day, Northern black voters are more flexible in their allegiances. Sanders has won the white vote in almost every Midwestern state, and he has also won a larger share of black voters there than in the South: about thirty per cent in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio. “It’s my sisters and brothers who have had their manufacturing jobs taken and pensions cut, who have a perpetual cycle of low wages,” Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and Sanders supporter, said of the black Midwesterners who have been voting for Sanders. “I heard it from the white middle class, too,” who have also been living through the decline of the steel and auto industries, Turner added. “A white working-class man has the same concerns as a black working-class man.”
“Geography is not the only variable peeling away “the black vote.” As of March, forty-three per cent of black Democratic voters under the age of thirty had supported Sanders in this election cycle, according to Leah Wright Rigueur, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who wrote for the Times about the significance of this faction. “There’s a group of young black men and women for whom Bernie Sanders’s message of inequality resonated,” Rigueur wrote. “They were willing to excuse his clumsiness on matters of race because of his more radical assessment of American political power.” Rigueur’s argument on young black support for Sanders echoes Turner’s on Midwestern black support for him.
“Ultimately, the idea of a black vote is getting in the way of a more accurate understanding of where significantly different segments of the population are headed, and obscuring what black people have long known: that black identity is always malleable, and can be fractured as well. While Erica Garner may have failed to convince large numbers of black voters in South Carolina, Turner, a black native daughter of the Midwest, was part of a successful effort to rally many to the candidate in Michigan. The black political establishment, while still a juggernaut, is slowly being challenged. It happened with Barack Obama, who ran for President in 2008 with, at first, little black-establishment support. And it has happened again, to a lesser extent, in 2016, with a Jewish socialist from Vermont.
“For Turner, Sanders’s appeal to Midwestern voters crystallized at a forum on racial justice last month, at the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, in Cleveland. “That was the largest concentration of African-Americans he spoke to,” she told me over the phone, unable to contain the excitement in her voice. “He was able to say, ‘I was arrested as a twenty-one-year-old at the University of Chicago.’ And ‘I was probably the only candidate in this race arrested for civil rights.’ You heard the ‘Amens’ and ‘You better preach, Mr. Sanders.’ ”
“Clinton, for one, has not been taking the support of black voters for granted in the next major primary contest. On Tuesday, the former New York senator visited Medgar Evers College, a predominantly black school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She was flanked by black women, among them Chirlane McCray, the First Lady of New York City, who said, “Hillary does not just talk the talk. She walks the walk, right? So who do we need? Hillary.” If “the black vote” were guaranteed, Clinton wouldn’t be wasting her time courting it.”
http://www.bleausa.org/blacks-in-law-enforcement-of-america-supports-bernie-sanders-for-democratic-presidential-primary/
“It is our duty as peace officers and members of Blacks in Law enforcement of America to continue the fight for freedom, justice, and equality for all citizens. We have always been advocates of law enforcement professionals by establishing continuous training and support for our officers. As black law enforcement professionals, we pledge our time, honor, and talent for the uplifting of our communities.
“In keeping with our mission, it is with great pride that Blacks in Law Enforcement of America, a national organization of Black Law Enforcement Professionals, will support U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on his run to be the Democratic Nominee for President of the United States of America.
“As a national organization of Black Law Enforcement Professionals, US Senator Sanders is the only candidate that has addressed the institutional and social injustices against black, brown and indigenous Americans as violence’s, including, physical, political, legal, economic and environmental are perpetuated.
“As Black Law Enforcement Professionals, we believe that Law Enforcements’ purpose is to protect and serve. Our leaders should not try to contain the poor, the economically disadvantaged or to take advantage of those disenfranchised. We need to have a true voice in the social matters and injustices of today. Senator Sanders has been vocal in the issues of:
“The need of police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities
“Increasing civilian oversight of police departments
“To federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers
“Establishing a new federal model where police training programs are the focus of every local government
“Creating a police culture that allows for good officers to report the actions of bad officers without fear of retaliation and allows for a department to follow through on such reports.
“We support Senator Sanders because his platform is to pursue national policies that value the people of color and the institution of responsible policing in America. We are supporting a candidate that has supported the minority community when it wasn’t popular. We are supporting a man who has a proven history on the front lines in the battle of our civil liberties.”
At the following piece, there is a massive amount of data and other info mentioned:
http://bud-meyers.blogspot.com/2015/11/most-african-americans-prefer-bernie.html
“The problem is, most of them just don’t know it … not yet … because Bernie does not have the same name recognition as Hillary does, who is world famous. But the more the black community gets to know Bernie, it appears the more they like what he has to say.”
The more recent data proves that this is the case.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-harris-jr/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-black-issues_b_9159902.html
“To me, the choice is clear. And the difference now between Hillary and Bernie’s African American support is largely driven by a lack of information. Black people need to know more about Bernie and more about the Clintons’ record. I was surprised when Sanders won every one of Deray Mckesson’s Democratic Primary polls on Twitter.
“The race between Clinton and Sanders is apparently not close when you’re talking about young Black people. The question is: when will older Black people catch up?”
Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have a snow ball’s chance in hell—if the electoral system wasn’t corrupt and rigged, if big money didn’t rule the corporatist government, if so many American voters and potential voters weren’t being disenfranchised and demoralized and suppressed, if we had a fully informed public, which is to say if we had a functioning democracy. In such a democratic society, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t even get elected for the head of a local board of sewage services, much less have accumulated so much wealth and power as professional politician in the federal government.
http://observer.com/2016/02/black-and-latino-voters-sway-from-clinton-to-sanders/
“A poll conducted by Univision in July 2015 found 68 percent of Latinos didn’t know who Bernie Sanders was or weren’t familiar enough with him to form an opinion. When Democratic voters are exposed to Mr. Sanders, they overwhelmingly support him—but connecting his message to voters continues to be one of Mr. Sanders’ main obstacles against Ms. Clinton, who has been in the national spotlight of politics for over two decades. He was able to overcome that obstacle enough to virtually tie in Iowa, where Ms. Clinton went from a commanding lead to nearly losing the state in a matter of a few months. If Mr. Sanders continues to stay on message with a campaign that is resonating with Democratic voters who actually want change, Ms. Clinton may begin to see the nomination dissipate before her eyes like it did in 2008 against Barack Obama, who was a junior senator from Illinois with little name recognition prior to his campaign.”
Check this out:
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/06/hillary-super-pac-draft-oped/
Apparently a lot of the editorials that you see in the mainstream media are being written by pro-Clinton PACs and lobbyists.
Once again, I’m unsurprised. I’ve grown so cynical that I assume that corruption and manipulation, lies and spin in every aspect of society.
Another example:
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03/single-payer-dems-colo/
The HMOs probably have something to do with this.
I wish partisan Democrats would wake up. They are manipulated into voting against their own interests, while thinking poor white Republicans are stupid for voting against their own interests. It’s endless delusion and hypocrisy.