Don't Tell Cable Pundits That Bernie Sanders Is Leading Nationally Among Black Voters

02 March 20

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02 March 20

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Don't Tell Cable Pundits That Bernie Sanders Is Leading Nationally Among Black Voters

Nausicaa Renner, Aída Chávez and Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Excerpt: "MSNBC viewers would be left to conclude that the same minority-voter problem that hobbled Sanders's 2016 campaign remains a major obstacle. It simply isn't true."


EXCERPTS:

t 7 p.m. sharp, multiple networks called South Carolina for Joe Biden, breathing a collective sigh of relief.

The results, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said, called the viability of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign into question. “If anybody knows anything about winning the Democratic nomination and about what it takes for a Democratic nominee to win a general election, it is black voters,” Maddow said. “And if Sen. Sanders continues to underperform systematically with black voters, and if we see him get shellacked — not just beaten but shellacked tonight in South Carolina — because of his performance with black voters, that’s an existential question about that nomination.”

“I want every Democrat in the country to see what that looked like tonight: That is what winning looks like,” celebrated James Carville, an old-time political operative MSNBC brings on to panic its viewers. “That is the job of a political party. Not utopian fantasies, but winning elections.”

“The single most important demographic in the Democratic Party spoke up tonight,” said Carville on MSNBC, wearing a U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap. He said Sanders needs to answer for his lack of support in the state: “We get all enamored, and tonight we were reminded of what and who the Democratic Party is.”

“We cannot win unless we prove there’s excitement in the African American community,” said former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an ex-head of the Democratic National Committee, on CNN, going on to endorse Biden officially on air.

Maddow’s, McAuliffe’s, and Carville’s point — which became a major theme of cable coverage for the night — is, in the abstract, undeniable: A Democratic presidential candidate who can’t win the black vote can’t win the nomination. But the cable analysis carried on as if the only available information on the preferences of black voters came from South Carolina. In fact, black voters nationally have regularly been surveyed and, recently, Sanders has taken the lead among the demographic — a fact that was, at best, only mentioned in passing.

Last week, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found Sanders besting Biden by 3 percentage points nationally among black voters — certainly a relevant data point when considering whether Sanders can win among black voters. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Biden up 2 percentage points among black voters, while the Hill/HarrisX poll had Sanders up by 9. A Morning Consult survey recently found Sanders beating Biden by 5 points among all black primary voters, and thumping him by a 3-1 margin among black voters under 45.

In other words, the national picture does not exactly portend a “shellacking” among black voters — important context that was kept from MSNBC viewers, who would be left to conclude that the same minority-voter problem that hobbled Sanders’s campaign in 2016 remains a major obstacle. It simply isn’t true.

A handful of commentators, including former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a vituperative opponent of Sanders, acknowledged that South Carolina’s results may not necessarily translate into victory for Biden nationwide. “Unfortunately,” said McCaskill on MSNBC, “there aren’t a lot of Jim Clyburns.” Clyburn, an iconic civil rights leader and the uncontested party leader in South Carolina, as well as the number three Democrat in the House, endorsed Biden last week, giving his campaign the kind of boost that can’t be replicated elsewhere.

There are other reasons to suspect that Biden’s campaign won’t be able to sustain its high note after South Carolina. The state is one of the demographically oldest. According to CNN exit polls, 6 percent of voters were between the ages of 17 and 24, and 5 percent were between the ages of 25 and 29. Around 28 percent of voters in South Carolina were under age 45, compared to 45 percent in Iowa, 35 percent in New Hampshire, and 36 percent in Nevada.

What’s more, Biden spent an enormous proportion of his resources in South Carolina, which he hasn’t done in Super Tuesday states or beyond, and is running low on cash.

In 2016, Sanders was truly shellacked in South Carolina, losing a two-way race to Hillary Clinton by nearly 50 points. She beat him among black voters 86-14, according to exit polls. This year’s exit survey found black voters making up 57 percent of the electorate, with Biden winning 64 percent of that vote to Sanders’s 15 and Tom Steyer’s 13. (Steyer, who only performed as well as he did thanks to the millions he poured into the state, dropped out of the race as the totals came in.)

Everybody else was shellacked: Sen. Elizabeth Warren won 5 percent of the black vote, Pete Buttigieg 3, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar zero. Fortunately for them, they were barely mentioned during the TV coverage.

While MSNBC more or less omitted the forward-looking picture of the race, Fox News was more sanguine about Biden’s chances. Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, played down what the win could mean for Biden in other states. Only one of the 14 races Biden will compete in on Super Tuesday have a demographic similar to South Carolina: Alabama. “If he cannot win anywhere without huge numbers of African American votes, the upcoming battlefield is not favorable to him still,” Fleischer said.

Former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile told Fox News that Biden and other candidates now needed to show they could build a diverse coalition and bring the resources to compete in large and small states to amass delegates they need heading into the July convention. “The name of the game is delegates,” Brazile said. “For Joe Biden, clearly this was a victory that he desperately needed today in South Carolina.”

Overall, Biden is trailing Sanders in a number of recent national polls from Morning Consult, Fox News, and Yahoo/YouGov. The same is true in California, the state with the most delegates, where a Monmouth University poll released last week showed Sanders with support from 24 percent of likely California primary voters, and Biden with 17 percent. A Los Angeles Times/Berkeley poll released this week showed Sanders leading with 34 percent of likely California primary voters, with Warren at 17 percent and Biden, who had led the poll in June, at 8 percent. “Based on his 34% support in the poll, this state alone likely will give him well over 10% of the 1,991 delegates he would need to win the nomination at the national convention this summer,” the LA Times reported.

With the votes nearly all counted, Biden was heading for roughly a 29-point win in South Carolina, with only Biden and Sanders claiming delegates to the national convention; none of the rest seemed likely to meet the 15 percent threshold.

For Biden, it was a big first win of his presidential race — of any of his three presidential races, in fact: He had never won a primary or caucus victory before. “This is leap day, and he needed to leap back into this race,” said former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod on CNN. “This could narrow down very quickly to a race between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.”

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Texas Closes Hundreds of Polling Sites, Making It Harder for Minorities to Vote
Richard Salame, Guardian UK
Salame writes: "Last year, Texas led the US south in an unenviable statistic: closing down the most polling stations, making it more difficult for people to vote and arguably benefiting Republicans."

Guardian analysis finds that places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers experienced the majority of closures and could benefit Republicans

A report by civil rights group The Leadership Conference Education Fund found that 750 polls had been closed statewide since 2012.

Long considered a Republican bastion, changing racial demographics in the state have caused leading Democrats to recast Texas as a potential swing state. Texas Democratic party official Manny Garcia has called it “the biggest battleground state in the country”.

The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs.

“The fact of the matter is that Texas is not a red state,” said Antonio Arellano of Jolt, a progressive Latino political organization. “Texas is a nonvoting state.”

Last year, Texas led the US south in polling station closures. 

On a local level, the changes can be stark. McLennan county, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places from 2012 to 2018, despite the fact that its population grew by more than 15,000 people during the same time period, with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from Black and Latinx residents.

In 2012, there was one polling place for every 4,000 residents. By 2018 that figure had dropped to one polling place per 7,700 residents. A 2019 paper by University of Houston political scientists found that after the county’s transition to vote centers, more voting locations were closed in Latinx neighborhoods than in non-Latinx neighborhoods, and that Latinx people had to travel farther to vote than non-Hispanic whites. 

Some counties closed enough polling locations to violate Texas state law. Brazoria county, south of Houston, closed almost 60% of its polling locations between 2012 and 2018, causing it to fall below the statutory minimum, along with another county. In a statement, Brazoria county clerk Joyce Hudman said the closures were inadvertent, and that this would not happen again in 2020.

A Guardian analysis based on that report confirms what many activists have suspected: the places where the black and Latinx population is growing by the largest numbers have experienced the vast majority of the state’s poll site closures.

The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents. This is despite the fact that the population in the former group of counties has risen by 2.5 million people, whereas in the latter category the total population has fallen by over 13,000.

‘Turned out to be a nightmare’

Until 2013, hundreds of counties and nine states, including Texas, with a history of severe voter suppression had to submit any changes they wanted to make to their election systems to the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act. The department sought to ensure that the changes did not hurt minority voters. But seven years ago, a supreme court ruling gutted this law and allowed these jurisdictions to operate without oversight, and now the previously mandatory racial-impact analysis is no longer performed.

The rush of poll closures in Texas cannot be attributed to any one policy. Just over half of the closures are part of a push toward centralized, countywide polling places, called “vote centers”, which exist in almost a third of US states. Under countywide voting schemes, voters are no longer assigned to a polling place in their local precinct and can instead cast their ballot at any polling location in the county.

Voting rights advocates and both Republican and Democratic leaders have largely been in favor of vote centers because they can make it more convenient to vote – by allowing people to vote near work, for instance – and because they can reduce the number of people whose votes are thrown out because they went to the wrong polling place.

But Texas state law allows a county that transitions to vote centers to operate with half as many locations as they would otherwise have needed under a traditional precinct-based system.

When deciding whether to close a polling station, elected officials typically consider how many people used it, as well as factors like public transportation accessibility. Some elections administrators who agree on the importance of protecting minority voters warn against assuming that closures are automatically a bad thing.

“I’d be curious to know how many of the consolidation efforts were good faith efforts [to] … increase the number of options for a voter but also improve the kind of polling place that a particular voter may have voted in,” said Chris Davis, the Williamson County elections administrator and former president of the Texas Association of Election Administrators. He pointed out that some precinct polling places were ADA-inaccessible.

McLennan county GOP chair Jon Ker called concerns about closures impacting turnout “hogwash,” saying that turnout was actually higher in his county after the number of voting locations dropped from 59 to 33. The 2018 midterm elections did indeed have higher turnout than the 2014 midterms in McLennan county, though voting also surged more broadly across the state and nation.

Mary Duty, chair of the McLennan County Democratic party, has soured on the centralization program since the county entered it in 2014. “It turned out to be kind of a nightmare,” she said, pointing to large areas of the county without a voting location. And activists argue that low turnout at a particular polling place is not a reason to close it – it is a sign that the turnout itself, which is typically lower in Latinx neighborhoods, must be addressed. Closing a polling station for reasons of low turnout can have a discriminatory impact, activists say.

The 334 poll closures between 2012 and 2018 that took place outside the vote center program would by themselves still rank Texas among the biggest poll closers in the country, ahead of Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Elections officials have cited tight budgets and difficulty recruiting poll workers as among the reasons for the reductions.

The upshot is that for many Texas voters, the ballot box is ever further away.

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