COLUMBIA, South Carolina — “Listen to me, black people in South Carolina,” rapper-turned-Bernie Sanders surrogate Killer Mike proclaimed at a Friday rally. “I don’t give a damn what your leaders who were radical 55 years ago have done if they’re not doing it today. … I’m talking to black people in South Carolina: If they’re telling you to wait and hold on, don’t wait and hold on.”
They didn’t listen to him.
Earlier that morning, at Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Leo Frazier, one of those “black people in South Carolina” Killer Mike was addressing, spoke to me and argued against Sanders and his central proposal, “Medicare for all.”
“We saw how difficult it was to get the Affordable Care Act off the ground,” said Frazier, a retired Air Force man, “so why would you want to go totally undo it and try to start from scratch?”
“When you start, you have a seed. You have to allow that seed to grow,” Frazier said, preaching patience. “So let’s take what we have … and make a better product. All right, you don’t need to eradicate it.”
Frazier, like most black voters and most older voters, voted for Joe Biden on Saturday, propelling him to victory.
In these contrasting approaches, radicalism versus incrementalism, you can see why Biden, after losing badly to Sanders in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, finally beat him. It’s not that South Carolina Democrats have a moderate or conservative ideology or policy preferences. It’s that South Carolina Democrats, particularly older black voters, generally possess a conservative disposition.
South Carolina’s Democratic electorate is full of black men and women who have seen segregation and institutional racism slowly and steadily chipped away, who have seen immense economic progress and expanding educational opportunities, and who have seen a black man serve two terms as president of the United States. These men and women still want progress, but they do not want the last few decades uprooted. They do not want Obamacare or President Barack Obama’s other accomplishments overturned, and they do not want to gamble what they have gained chasing after a radical agenda.
That’s why Biden won here and dominated the black vote. He was the least-change candidate.
Biden won 60% of the black vote, according to South Carolina exit polls. He won a majority of voters over age 45.
Again, it’s not that baby boomer black voters are conservative in an ideological or policy sense. (Biden beat Sanders among self-described liberal and very liberal voters.) For instance, the black men and women I asked about abortion at the Biden rally all came down effectively pro-choice.
When opposing “Medicare for all” or student-debt forgiveness, the black Democrats I spoke with didn’t cite the fiscal cost. The only Biden voter to point out the cost to taxpayers was Dale Snoke, a rare white voter at True Gospel Ministries on the outskirts of Columbia. Instead, the conservatism behind black Democrat worries was a dispositional conservatism: They distrust rapid change to a complex and precarious situation, a situation they feel has dramatically improved over the course of their lives.
“You can propose radical changes,” said Ronny, who attends True Gospel Ministries and voted there on Saturday, “but it’s not going to get accomplished.” Ronny spoke the same way when I asked him about overcoming the persistent segregation in and around Columbia. “You gotta give up something to get something. You can’t get what we want radically. It ain’t gonna happen. … If you take a moderate approach, you will have a better chance of getting things done.”
A lot of the wariness toward Sanders comes down to this: Sanders wants to replace Obamacare, the core policy accomplishment of our only black president.
Terry Moten, a black man in his 60s, was at Biden’s Friday morning rally. He cited gradualism and continuity for his support of Biden. “I think he’s going to be more of a continuation of Obama compared to the rest of them,” he said.
Speaking of Obamacare, Moten said, “Anything can be tweaked and made better,” but “Medicare for all is a big task, and I don’t know that [Sanders] would be able to pull that off.”
Bradley Tony, a black Biden supporter from Sumter, called Sanders’s healthcare plan “a big mistake.” He put it this way: “If you’re riding down the highway and you blew a tire — three tires are good, one tire’s bad — work with what you’ve got. Change the one that’s bad. Then go on.”
“To start all over again,” said Anthony Sampson, another black Biden backer, “will make it that much harder.”
And it’s not merely a baby boomer thing.
Walter Jones is a school principal in Columbia, is in his 40s, and voted for Biden, along with everyone else at Stroy’s barbershop, where the crowd is generally in their 20s and 30s. Jones agrees when Sanders says all public school teachers should make at least $60,000 a year. That doesn’t mean he thinks a president can or should make it happen.
“I agree,” Jones told me. “Whether it’s realistic, that’s…” and he trailed off into a laugh.
Tolanda Able, a black woman in her 40s, told me after she voted for Biden at Columbia High School that she wants things to change “little bit by little bit.”
Jones says that the black electorate really values someone they “can trust” who has proven experience.
That’s a huge plus for Biden. First, Biden’s most valuable experience was under Obama. “He had Barack Obama’s back for eight years,” one Biden ad directed at black South Carolina voters states. “It’s time to return the favor.”
That idea resonates with at least some black voters. “He’s gonna carry on what President Obama started,” Eva Jones, a Biden supporter and black grandmother in Sumter, told me.
Second, the experience provides a steadying influence. “He doesn’t have to come in and have on-the-job training,” Bradley Tony said before the Biden rally. “He knows the job.”
But much of the Democratic electorate doesn’t see Biden’s years near the levers of power as a good thing.
“The older some people get,” Paul Grant, a 31-year-old Sanders supporters told me Friday, “the more settled into certain ways that they have, and maybe younger people are more willing to push it forward a little bit, instead of laying back and being comfortable with the way things have been. Younger people tend to be risk-takers.”
Grant wants the nominee and the policy agenda to be “radical. As radical as possible.” He says Obamacare “can be torn to shreds” for all he cares.
Rob Morrell, a rare nonwhite person at the Sanders rally Friday afternoon, doesn’t buy the calls for incrementalism, and he thinks Democrats shouldn’t fear talk of radicalism or revolution. “People said that in the 60s when Martin Luther King was championing for civil rights, there was a revolution. People thought of him as a socialist and a communist, so I don’t fall for that crap.”
“Radical change changed this country,” Killer Mike said in introducing Sanders, calling back to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. “People who are now 80 and 70 and 60 and 90 took to the street, and they fought the administration on behalf of us.”
“If you are going to claim to be a progressive party,” Killer Mike continued, “you have to actually progress.” That is, you cannot consider past wins to be enough. The radical change of 55 years ago isn’t good enough, in his definition of “progressive.” Change must continue forever.
“You can’t rest on the laurels of the Voting Rights Act,” Killer Mike continued. “You can’t rest on the laurels of everyone’s in public school together. You have to progress what we did 55 years ago. That means economic progression, educational progression, healthcare progression, women’s rights progression. … Ending of police brutality, Medicare for all.”
This radical viewpoint doesn’t allow for slow and steady progress. “If anyone tells you to hold and wait a little longer, they’re bullshitting.”
One reason Sanders voters don’t mind the gamble of radicalism: They feel we’re already experiencing it. “If we don’t go to this approach,” Morell said of scrapping Obamacare for “Medicare for all,” “the Republicans are gonna take it away anyway. They’re trying to do it right now.”
Jasiri, a black Sanders voter in the outskirts of Columbia, said revolution was appropriate because our current president is so extreme. “Trump has changed very rapidly. He does what he wants to do.”
Speaking just before Killer Mike at the rally was Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, who bragged about making Jackson “the most radical city in the nation.”
“Radical,” Lumumba argued, shouldn’t be a slur. “We need to be as radical as the circumstances dictate we should be.”
The voters of South Carolina, particularly the black voters, seemed to think the current circumstances called for nothing more radical than Joe Biden.
