When Bernie Sanders first jumped into the presidential race, I wrote that he would need to do well with minority voters to stand a chance of toppling Hillary Clinton.
Attracting diverse support, as opposed to just educated upscale liberal whites, is the difference between successful progressive Democratic campaigns, like Barack Obama’s, and failed ones like Sanders’ fellow Vermonter Howard Dean’s.
The early results don’t look good for Sanders. According to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Clinton is leading among white Democrats with 56 percent of the vote to Sanders’ 14 percent. Among self-described liberals, Sanders does a little better (17 percent), but so does Clinton (63 percent).
Yet Clinton is trouncing Sanders among non-white Democrats, winning 72 percent to just 5 percent for the Vermont democratic socialist. (The poll doesn’t break the non-white Democrats down into categories like black, Latino or Asian.)
This is consistent with other earlier polls. A CNN poll found Sanders with 14 percent support among white Democrats but just 5 percent among non-whites. A March Pew poll found that 74 percent of black Democrats said there was a “good chance” they’d vote for Clinton, while only 54 percent of white Democrats said the same.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 53 percent of white Democrats think Clinton should face a primary challenger, but 68 percent of non-white Democrats disagree. Eighty-one percent of non-white Democrats think Hillary represents “real change,” while only 56 percent of white Democrats feel the same.
None of this is written in stone. Clinton led Obama among black primary voters much later into 2007, but the Illinois senator ultimately won large majorities of the black vote once the primaries rolled around. But it does suggest a.) there isn’t much lingering bad blood against Clinton in communities of color after the 2008 primary fight and b.) right now the coalition supporting Clinton primary challengers looks more like failed progressive candidates than successful ones.
The Vermont senator represents one of the whitest states in the country. Other potential challengers include Lincoln Chafee, whose home state of Rhode Island is more diverse than Vermont but less so than the country as a whole, and Jim Webb, who has suggested he will try to appeal to working-class whites. Only Martin O’Malley had a large number of non-white constituents, and his record in Baltimore is under renewed scrutiny.
