How Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Are Breaking with Past Democratic Outreach to Black Voters
Last month at Clark Atlanta University, presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren pitched black voters on her plan to acknowledge the discrimination of the past and to ameliorate the disparities of the present. At the historically black college where W. E. B. Du Bois once taught, Warren recounted the exacting consequences of Jim Crow, slavery, redlining, employment discrimination, crime bills, and more. “Don’t talk about race-neutral laws,” Warren bellowed between the crowd’s cheers. “The federal government helped create the racial divide in this country through decades of active, state-sponsored discrimination, and that means the federal government has an obligation to fix it.”
The speech was one of the many campaign events flexing black voters' power in the Democratic primary. From Andrew Yang’s breakfast with Al Sharpton to Julián Castro’s interview at a soul food restaurant to Cory Booker’s visits to black churches, everyone's been making their pitch. Beyond photo-ops at black venues, two of the top candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are counting on more novel strategies to win over black voters. Defying years of one-size-fits-all policies, Warren who polls at 6 percent with black voters, is vocally embracing race-conscious rhetoric and legislation explicitly designed to close disparities for black Americans. Meanwhile, Sanders, who polls at 11 percent with black voters, is leaning into his pitch for democratic socialism, echoing the radicalism of the Civil Rights era. In the Democratic primary where no candidate in the last 30 years has won the nomination without winning a majority of African-American voters, these two candidates hope their policy and rhetorical appeals will wrest support away from front-runner Joe Biden, who is leading the pack with 43 percent of black voters, and forge a path to the general election.
Unlike Michael Bloomberg's conveniently timed stop-and-frisk apology, Warren's interest in black folks' welfare began long before her presidential campaign. “I think that Elizabeth Warren is probably serious,” Ta-Nehisi Coates said of the Massachusetts senator's support for reparations to the New Yorker last May. “I think she means it.” Coates first spoke with Warren about five years ago. He’d just published his blockbuster Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” Afterward, Warren asked him for an one-on-one meeting. “It was well before she declared anything about running for president,” Coates told the New Yorker. “She had read it. She was deeply serious. She had questions. And it wasn't like, would you do XY&Z for me?” After the start of the campaign, Warren’s longtime curiosity on reparations led her to be one of the first candidates in the 2020 election cycle to support the passage of the House resolution to develop a study and create proposals for black reparations.
But even before her time as a senator, Warren was researching racial inequality. As early as 2000, Warren’s scholarship analyzed how racism made housing more precarious for black homebuyers. In a 2003 book co-authored with her daughter, Warren foreshadowed the discriminatory financial practices that devastated black neighborhoods during the Great Recession, writing that “subprime lending, payday loans, and the host of predatory, high-interest loan products that target minority neighborhoods should be called by their true names: legally sanctioned corporate plans to steal from minorities.”
For decades, Democratic strategists have preferred to support universal policies. Barack Obama distilled this ethos. Ahead of his 2008 campaign, he wrote in The Audacity of Hope that “an emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn't just good policy; it’s also good politics.” (He’s since softened his stance somewhat.) The argument followed that universal policies present a path for minorities to get crucial public goods without inflaming racial tensions among white Americans. But while these programs may help black Americans disproportionately, they do not quell long-standing disparities resulting from generations of racial discrimination. Warren’s proposed race-conscious policies—executive orders designed to address the pay gap for women of color and a housing bill bolstering black home buyers living in redlined neighborhoods—breaks with these long-held practices by the Democratic Party.
If Warren's appeal to black voters is premised in part on her agenda’s specificity, Sanders's pitch relies on its boldness. Before Thanksgiving, Sanders held a rally at Morehouse College, a historically black college and the alma mater of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. whose economic populism served as a precursor to that of Sanders. During a 1966 speech connecting his critique of racism to capitalism, King told his staff, that there is something “wrong” with capitalism and that “there must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
King’s calls for full employment and universal housing advocated for in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here resounds in the campaign speeches printed in Bernie Sanders’s last book Where We Go From Here. The Vermont senator’s rationale for these programs acknowledges that black people disproportionately suffer even during growing economies. For example, even at current historic lows, black unemployment continues to double the white rate at 6 percent, according to EPI analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics. That doesn't include the swathes of black Americans who still remain outside of the labor force altogether. The job guarantee programs endorsed by Bernie Sanders's campaign would help dislocated black workers in the current tight labor market. During downturns, economists like Michelle Holder note full employment programs become even more critical for black job seekers because racial discrimination in the labor market actually increases during seasons of high unemployment.
Sanders's connection to the Civil Rights movement, participating in the March on Washington and protesting school segregation in 1960’s Chicago, has long been part of his appeals to black voters. His radicalism and support of racial justice has earned endorsements from Harvard professor Cornel West, and glowing praise from scholars like Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who argues Sanders's political vision exists in solidarity with millions of working-class black people.
The unprecedented tone and tenor of Sanders’s and Warren's campaigns are heavily influenced by recent macroeconomic shocks and advocacy for racial justice. During the 2016 campaign, Black Lives Matter activists helped usher in the current era of policies aimed explicitly at deconstructing systemic racism. And as the country continues to digest a legacy of the Great Recession, mainstream economic opinions have shifted left away from the laissez-faire worldview of economists like Milton Friedman, who famously argued racism was incompatible with capitalism because “there is an economic incentive in a free-market to separate economic efficiency from other characteristics of the individual” like race. However, meta-studies on employment discrimination and journalistic exposés on housing discrimination continue to show the pervasiveness of racism in America's markets.
Beyond how their policies impact racial inequality, polling from the Black Census Project shows Warren’s and Sanders’s broadly progressive views overlap with the concerns of most voters. According to the Black Census Project which polled over 31,000 black voters, “the most important issues for respondents were also the most important issues facing the rest of the country—low wages, lack of quality health care, substandard housing, rising college costs and different sets of rules for the wealthy and the poor.”
In presidential elections, candidate’s proposals for addressing racial inequality often double as their campaigns outreach strategy to black voters. On the merits, both Warren’s and Sanders’s policies would greatly reduce racial inequality. Plans like Sanders’s federal job guarantee, would prevent employment discrimination from continuing to ravage the United States, particularly during recessions. Moreover, Warren’s backing of reparations and race-conscious policies are the type of proposals that policy experts like Richard Rothstein say offer the only opportunity to close gaps between African Americans and the rest of the United States. However, high-impact policies might not be enough this election season. Joe Biden, who has been roundly criticized by pundits and activists for his vocal support of segregationists and harsh criminal justice policies, currently leads by double digits among African-American voters. Whether this support is rooted in “electability” debates, name recognition, or association with America’s first black president, remains to be seen. However thus far, all of the technical precision and bold legislation proposed by Warren and Sanders has yet to erode Biden's black base.
In 2016, Sanders showed how competitively he can campaign in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and Warren's high polling numbers in those states currently indicate she might be capable of doing the same. But for either of these candidates who are both tied for second place behind Biden in national polls to ascend to win the primary, they will likely have to expand their coalition. To be a Democratic presidential candidate moving into 2020 is to be dependent on tens of millions of black voters—citizens confronting voter suppression, mass incarceration, police brutality, employment discrimination, a maternal healthcare crisis, and a yawning wealth gap. When the votes in Iowa are finished, after polls have closed in New Hampshire, when the primary turns past Nevada and toward South Carolina and the deep south, the concerns of citizens plagued by racism will take center stage, and whether Biden, Sanders, Warren or someone else, the candidate who can best win the confidence of black voters will be the candidate poised to clinch the nomination of the Democratic Party and Office of President of the United States.
Aaron Ross Coleman covers race and economics. His previous work appears in The New York Times, The Nation, Buzzfeed, CNBC, Vox, and elsewhere. He is an Ida B. Wells Fellow at Type Media Center.
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