Bernie Sanders Salesman Cornel West Finds Bernie a Tough Sell

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Bernie Sanders Salesman Cornel West Finds Bernie a Tough Sell

Bernie Sanders surrogate Cornel West is finding the Bernie Sanders ticket harder to sell to African-American voters as the days progress.

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In the ballroom of a convention center in Columbia, South Carolina, Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner stared out at the crowd of supporters that had gathered for what they’d hoped would be another victory party. The group was much smaller than the ones who’d flocked to see her and Sanders throughout South Carolina that week, but it did share one key characteristic with its predecessors: It was mostly white.

And that was precisely the problem for the Sanders campaign in a state where two-thirds of the primary electorate is Black.

Former vice president Joe Biden didn’t just win South Carolina—early results show he swept every county and nabbed nearly half of all votes cast. Exit polls suggest Biden had support from 61 percent of Black voters, compared to Sanders’ paltry 17 percent. Turner, who had been the lifeblood of Sanders’ outreach, told supporters in the ballroom that Sanders, according to early internal numbers, had won voters under 44 years old, young Black voters by 40 percent, and first-time voters by 30 percent. But the reality was clear: Sanders had barely beaten his 2016 showing in the Palmetto State, when Hillary Clinton crushed Sanders.

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Few people are more proficient in the surrogacy game than Cornel West.

Since 2016, West has provided the intellectual messaging for Bernie Sanders’ political outlook in ways few surrogates have—or, quite frankly, have the capacity to execute. He is particularly keen at framing the intersection of neoliberalism and the black political elite’s perpetuation of that system, which harms the communities they claim to represent. But even West has his off days.

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His most recent one was Saturday, in Flint, Michigan.

Speaking before a rally of mostly white people in a mostly black city that didn’t show up to hear Sanders speak, West responded to Sanders’ question of why black people are supporting Joe Biden. Citing a headline in the Detroit News that highlighted Biden’s support among African Americans, Sanders delved into quality-of-life indicators in which black people are at the bottom when compared to whites: white-black wealth gap, poverty, unemployment, housing, etc.AMIBC® - VOTE! BE COUNTED! BE HEARD!

SOURCE ⇒ MOTHERJONES

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