With the results of the Iowa caucuses now history —the winner on the Republican side was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz while Hilary Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders for the Democrats—the attention of presidential candidates is now trained on the New Hampshire primary and then shortly afterward South Carolina, it is probably timely to look at African American voting in this first election following the U.S.A.’s inaugural selection of the first Black president. In South Carolina’s primary set for Feb. 27, Black voters represent a solid majority of the Democratic electorate and could make all the difference in the state’s primary.
It’s still in the race for the 2016 presidential nomination, but there has already been some intense lobbying for the Black vote. Traditionally, Black Americans have supported the Democrats, and frontrunner Hillary Clinton is expected to get their vote this election cycle. However, Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, is seen as a viable alternative. Sanders is a left-leaning candidate who got his start as a civil right activist in the 1960s. He has supported issues that are important to Black voters, such as scaling back the prison industrial complex, ending the War on Drugs and supporting Black Lives Matter.
Sanders is one of the few candidates to talk about the link between urban crime and the Black unemployment rate.
In an interview with The Nation, Sanders said unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore was linked to high unemployment among Black youth. He noted that in some cities like Chicago, the real unemployment rate for Black men is about 40 percent.
“I do not separate the civil-rights issue from the fact that 50 percent of African American young people are either unemployed or underemployed,” Sanders told The Nation.
Sanders has also attacked mass incarceration.
“The United States has more people in jail than any other country on earth,” he said on his web site. “Yet, somehow, none of them are the Wall Street bankers whose illegal activities caused the global economic collapse and destroyed the lives of millions of Americans.”
Clinton won’t be able to take the Black vote for granted, observers say. Some people still blame her husband, President Bill Clinton, for harsh drug policies that have led to mass incarceration of Black men during the 1990s. Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman quoted Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” on her reluctance to endorse Hillary.
“I can’t believe Hillary would be coasting into the primaries with her current margin of Black support, if most people knew how much damage the Clintons have done—the millions of families [that were] destroyed the last time they were in the White House thanks to their boastful embrace of the mass incarceration machine and their total capitulation to the right-wing narrative on race, crime, welfare and taxes,” Alexander said.
However, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a Los-Angeles based political analyst and author, said he still expects Black voters to get behind Hillary.
“Hillary will be the Democratic Party nominee. She has the experience, name ID, the blessing of the party establishment, a mountainous campaign war chest, and will win the key primaries,” said Hutchinson. “She will get nine out of 10 Black votes, because of her civil rights history, activism and Bill.”
Clinton has been campaigning hard for the Black vote. She has met with the mothers of victims of gun and police violence. MSNBC said the Clinton campaign has also solicited policy ideas from Black Lives Matter.
On her website, Clinton also lists criminal justice reform and voting rights as important issues. Clinton also wants to equip all law enforcement officers with body cameras; focus on rehabilitation instead of incarceration for drug offenders and reduce restrictions that stop former offenders from re-entering the workforce.
She has even talked about White privilege.
“It is hard when you’re swimming in the ocean to know exactly what’s happening around you, so much as it is when you’re standing on the shore perhaps watching,” said Hillary at Iowa’s Black and Brown forum. “For me, you know, look, I was born White, middle-class in the middle of America. I went to good public schools. I had a very strong supportive family. I had a lot of great experiences growing up. I went to a wonderful college. I went to law school. I never really knew what was or wasn’t part of the privilege.”
Hutchinson said Sanders faces an uphill struggle to get the support of Black voters.
“Bernie’s problem is the lack of a sustained civil rights profile among Blacks, as well as the lack of sustained political visibility among Blacks. Given the limited time he has to build both, this renders his campaign a non-starter with blacks,” claims Hutchinson.
Sanders published a lengthy Racial Justice manifesto on his website detailing his plan to reduce police violence, and end the privatization of prisons and the militarization of the police force, but he still lags behind Clinton. Although they might like the issues he supports, many of them don’t know who he is, or what he’s done in the past.
On the Republican side, few of the candidates seemed to have tried to make an attempt to reach out to Black voters.
A quick perusal of websites for Sen. Ted Cruz, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who finished a close third to national frontrunner Donald Trump in Iowa, finds them concentrating on immigration, the military, right to life and education, but not much on issues that specifically concern Black people. In fact, the only issues concerning Black people they talked about is gun control, and both candidates are strong backers of the second amendment.
“You don’t get rid of the bad guys by getting rid of our guns. You get rid of the bad guys by using our guns,” said Cruz, according to The New York Times.
Cruz’s and Rubio’s campaigns both failed to respond to OW interview requests.
However, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who finished fifth place in Iowa Tuesday with 4.5 percent of ballots cast, has spoken at some HBCUs, met with Black community leaders and also expressed concern about unfair drug sentencing and the militarization of the police.
“Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color. In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed,” Paul wrote in an editorial published after the Ferguson riots in 2014.
Overall Republican frontrunner Trump was widely criticized, when he tweeted an incorrect fact stating that Black people kill more White people than any other group. He met late last year with some Black pastors, who denied they endorsed him. Trump has claimed he will get “100 percent of the Black vote,” and some Blacks have been attracted by his business experience, and promises to crack down on illegal immigration and bring jobs back. Trump’s media office has also failed to respond to an OW request for an interview request.
Michael McKinney, founding partner of Capital Core Group, a political consulting firm, says that Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, could be a possible alternative choice for Black voters. Carson finished fourth in the Iowa Caucuses with 9.3 percent of votes.
The rise of Carson, who has no political experience, shows that voters have an anti-establishment mood, said McKinney.
“People are tired of business as usual,” McKinney said. He added that voters are frustrated with gridlock in Washington and the inability to pass a budget.
McKinney said people like Carson’s “no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it is” attitude. They also like the fact that he is not part of the Washington establishment.
“You are seeing a lot of people saying that he is not a part of the in-crowd,” McKinney said.
He also said many voters feel that an outsider couldn’t do any worse than the current crop of politicians.
However, Hutchinson is not enamored with Carson.
“In a head-to-head between Carson and any Democrat, he’d be lucky to get in the upper range of the single digit percent of the Black vote,” he said. “As long as he wears the GOP and to boot ultra-conservative tag, and to further boot, makes ridiculous quips and cracks about any and everything under the sun, he will continue to be considered ‘Uncle Ben’ by Blacks.”
However, Carson’s campaign seems to be on its last legs. His campaign was recently hit by a rash of high-profile resignations and after a poor showing in Iowa, Carson left to get “fresh clothes” back home in Florida.
