Posted on 03/02/2016 5:43:17 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Sanders scored several Super Tuesday victories, but his demographic base isn't diverse enough to earn the Democratic Party's nomination.
Bernie Sanders will live to fight another day. The senator was expected to win overwhelmingly on Super Tuesday in his home state of Vermont, and his campaign would have stalled if that were the extent of his victory. But he won in Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Colorado, and ran a tight race in Massachusetts, giving his political revolution a new lease on life. His rival Hillary Clinton won overwhelming majorities, as expected, in the Southern states: Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas.
In his speech early on Tuesday night, Sanders vowed to continue the fight till all 50 states have spoken. "At the end of tonight 15 states will have voted," he said. "Thirty-five states remain, and let me assure you that we are going to take our fight for economic justice, for social justice, for environmental sanity, and for a world of peace to every one of those states."
It could be argued that both Sanders and Clinton are regional candidates, with Sanders dominating the Northeast and Clinton the South. But there is another way to slice the numbers--one that presents a problem for Sanders not just in terms of winning the primary but also in terms of the logic and legitimacy of his movement. Clinton is winning a multiracial coalition that includes large numbers of whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. Sanders by contrast is winning largely in states which are overwhelmingly white: Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Oklahoma.
There are two exceptions to this rule: Colorado (a state that is 21 percent Latino) and Nevada, where Sanders made significant inroads with Latinos (according to a disputed entrance poll, he won a majority of them). Colorado and Nevada do show Sanders can expand his popularity into the Latino community, although even here much work needs to be done.
To see Sanders's ongoing diversity problem, consider Texas, where Clinton won narrowly on Tuesday among whites (51 percent to 47 percent) but overwhelmingly among both blacks (80-18) and Latinos (67-33), according to exit polls.
These numbers show that Clinton's support much more closely mirrors the Democratic Party's base than Sanders's does. One of the key divisions in American politics is that the Republicans are an overwhelmingly white party, while the Democrats are a multiracial one. In 2012, the Obama coalition consisted of 56 percent white, 24 percent black, 14 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian. By contrast, Mitt Romney's electorate was 89 percent white, 2 percent black, 6 percent Latino, and 2 percent Asian. Clinton's coalition, in both Texas and elsewhere, looks like Obama's; Sanders's looks like Romney's.
The Sanders campaign seems resigned to the whiteness of his support, and reportedly intends to make the most of it. According to Kyle Cheney writing in Politico:
Sanders' goal was to emerge from Super Tuesday with a viable comeback path. But it's unclear how he envisions proceeding from here. His team has sketched a strategy that involves running up margins in the predominantly white states that have responded better to his message. He's hoping to rattle off wins in the weeks ahead in friendlier territory -- Nebraska, Kansas and Maine, which are next on the calendar.
This strategy might be dictated by necessity given Sanders's failure to gain traction among black voters and limited success among Latinos. But whatever the cause, by having such a narrow demographic base, Sanders has a much harder time claiming to represent the Democratic Party than Clinton does.
Photographs of the speeches the candidates gave tell their own story: Clinton was surrounded by a diverse, racially mixed crowd (including a woman in a hijab) while Sanders, speaking from his home state in Vermont, had a largely white crowd behind him.
Sanders remains the underdog in the race. If he wants to win it, he has to find a way to win over more non-white voters. Failing to do so will leave his political revolution fatally unrepresentative of both America and the party he only recently called his own.
Here’s an interesting take on this subject someone put in front of me today.
Why isn’t Bernie Sanders doing well with black voters?
https://np.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/472fj6/why_isnt_bernie_sanders_doing_well_with_black
Note that this site is often extremely PC, to the point where they started banning Global Warming “Deniers”.
or the fact that many blacks have no clue what they vote for and only go for name recognition.
While that may be so, Trump is vibrant, Bernie not so much.
Sorry, I don't agree with that statement or they wouldn't be progressives liberals in the first place.
The best part of this is going to be the irony of Hillary using the black vote to defeat Bernie, and then Trump getting 30% or more to hoist her on her own petard.
Where have I heard that before?
Guess I don't want to go there.
It would make democrats all racist and stuff.
Libtards....
In other words, the RAT party cannot win without the votes of their welfare slaves. Not sure why they would admit this.
Sanders panders to the basket weaving major crowd, Hitlerbeast panders to the MS13/Crips/Bloods crowd. While both groups believe in receiving something for nothing, they are greedy and want to steal from each other.
Since the Hitlerbeast demographics aren’t afraid of guns (using them themselves, that is; of course they fear guns in the hands of conservatives, who are deadly marksmen) and don’t abort all of their kids, they will wipe the curb with the Sanders demographics.
Hillary is sixty-nine. She and Bernie look ten years older than Trump.
They vote for Democrats and in doing so as lemmings have made themselves a non issue in elections. They are not taken seriously by either the Democrats or Republicans. Why should they be? They are a monolithic voting group who act like abused wives, regardless of how many times the Democrats have enslaved them, they still beg and scrape to their masters.
They ACTUALLY are planning to run an explicitly anti-white campaign.
Well, I suppose they know best. After all, why not attack the majority? Why not attack 65% of the electorate? Why not elect 70-75% of the likely voters?
Nothing will happen, right? Whites won’t start voting like blacks, hispanics, and Asians, right?
After all, if whites did THAT, the GOP would never lose another election. Right?
Yes, no doubt Trump looks younger. He can afford it....
I’m not judging either...I’d do it if I could afford it...
I would lay Money In The Bank down on the WWE Hall of Famer, Donald J Trump in a triple threat, steel cage match against both of them.
Actually if it was whiter, it could win. But White Americans are not into Marxism. And Blacks do what they are told.
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