Clinton, Sanders have different challenges to land black votes

A few hours before he rallied 5,205 people in the Bon Secours Wellness Arena on Sunday evening, Bernie Sanders made a stop at the Brookland Baptist Church buffet in West Columbia.

President Barack Obama had stopped at Brookland Baptist, a predominantly black church, during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and returned in 2015 for a surprise visit, welcomed with cheers and shouts, according to media reports.

Sanders’ reception at Brookland Baptist, shown in a video posted by his campaign, was a bit more tepid.

After being introduced by former NAACP President Ben Jealous, Sanders veered directly into a reliable applause line from his stump speech.

“We have, in America today, a broken criminal justice system,” Sanders said in a half-yell made more for a campaign rally and less for a Sunday church buffet. Parishioners continued to mill about the buffet behind the presidential candidate; no applause was audible on the video.

“This is America. We should not have more people in jail ─ largely African-American and Latino ─ than any other country on Earth,” Sanders continued. “One of the points that I’ve been trying to make is that we are going to invest in education and jobs for our young people, not more jails, not more incarceration.”

You could hear some scattered claps.

The response to almost the exact same lines at Sanders’ speech a few hours later in Greenville was quite different. That crowd was raucous, uproarious and overwhelmingly white.

Therein lies Sanders’ biggest problem ─ and opponent Hillary Clinton’s biggest advantage ─ in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary. Sanders has the support of 28 percent of black voters in South Carolina, according to a CNN/ORC International poll. Former Secretary of State Clinton has 65 percent. In 2008, 55 percent of Democratic primary voters were black.

Clinton’s popularity with black voters in South Carolina and across the country can be partially attributed to her close association with Obama, whose cabinet she served in as secretary of state, and her husband President Bill Clinton, a popular figure in the black community.

Pastor Ennis Fant of Pleasant View Baptist Church talks to his parishioners about presidential politics frequently. Many of them have already “zeroed in” on Clinton.

“That’s who they know, and they love Bill Clinton ... When Bill Clinton was president between ’93 and 2000, basically every African American had a job. The economy was booming. You never saw any attacks on affirmative action. You never had to look over your shoulder and worry about attacks on the African-American community,” said Fant, a former state representative who hasn’t decided who he will vote for on Saturday. “The roots run so deep because of the prosperity the African-American community had, and the rest of the country, from ’93 to 2000.”

Hillary Clinton also is seen by many voters, including those in the black community, as a candidate who will continue the work of Obama, having been part of his administration. Obama is still immensely popular among black voters, with an approval rating of 89 percent, 41 points above his overall approval rating, according to Gallup.

“It is without doubt that she has a working relationship already established with the administration, both with President Obama and Vice President Biden, both of whom have an outstanding record of showing compassion and concern to the African-American community,” said Democratic state Sen. Karl Allen, of Greenville, who has endorsed Clinton.

The Clintons also strengthened their ties in South Carolina when Bill Clinton appointed former Gov. Dick Riley to serve as the U.S. Secretary of Education, Allen said. Riley, a Democrat who has endorsed Hillary Clinton, was on hand to introduce Bill Clinton at a campaign rally at the West End Community Development Center. That rally, on a Monday afternoon next door to Allen Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church, attracted a smaller but much more diverse crowd than Sanders’ Sunday event at the Well. About 300 people, many of whom were black and Hispanic, attended the rally where Bill Clinton spoke about his wife’s planned presidential policies for nearly an hour.

But for some black voters, Hillary Clinton's association with her husband’s policies isn’t all good. The criminal justice reform bill Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994, enacting tougher sentencing and drug laws, disproportionately affected African-Americans and harmed the black community, said Bruce Wilson, founder and CEO of Fighting Injustice Together, a nonprofit group that advocates for “fair and equal justice.”

“When that reform happened back in the ’90s, that actually has crippled the black community in 2016 and 2015, ’14 and so on,” Wilson said. “There are young black males who are serving time in prison for possessing marijuana when we have other states where people are getting rich off of selling marijuana. That’s not Secretary Clinton’s fault, but we know she was supporting her husband.”

Sanders and Clinton both support criminal justice reforms including ending private prisons, reforming mandatory minimum sentencing and investing in skills training and re-entry programs for prisoners, but Sanders is free from the burden of the 1994 law that Clinton is tied to.

“It has been devastating to the African-American community in particular because 70 percent of those who end up caught in the legal net are black and brown people. It has caused tremendous damage to the African-American community,” said state Rep. Joe Neal, a Democrat from Richland County who has endorsed Sanders. “Their life choices are limited because they cannot find employment with a felony on their records. Bernie believes in the re-evaluation of our sentencing laws, our judiciary and all of that.”

Clinton supporters also note her ties to the South through her work at the Children’s Defense Fund in the early 1970s, when she investigated so-called “segregation academies,” private schools founded with the intent to serve only white students, in Alabama and worked to keep minors out of adult prisons in South Carolina.

“This is not just something that started when she started campaigning,” said state Rep. Chandra Dillard, a Greenville Democrat who has endorsed Clinton.

Sanders, a senator from Vermont, with a 95 percent white population, has had neither the time nor the need to create those kinds of deep relationships in the African-American community until now. His chief problem with black voters is not ideology or messaging, but familiarity.

“It’s still a learning process. There’s a familiarity in terms of Clinton,” said Todd Shaw, a political science and African-American studies professor at the University of South Carolina. “Hillary Clinton's personal presidential politics go back to 2008, but, certainly, there’s a memory of her in the African-American community back to 1992. That’s a longer span of getting to know a personality who’s a political figure than just a few months. Sanders has represented a state that’s 95 percent white. The types of connections he would have made with African American community leaders are just not there.”

But Sanders has made up ground quickly, earning the endorsements of prominent figures in the black activist community, including Jealous, political scholar Cornel West and filmmaker Spike Lee. His significant popularity among young voters has extended to young black voters, according to polls.

Fant, while undecided, said Sanders’ centerpiece policy proposals should resonate strongly with young African-Americans.

“There are three things that Bernie Sanders says that should resonate with every African-American: One, a $15 an hour minimum wage, which would impact a significant number of African-Americans, especially young people,” Fant said. “Two: Every human being would get universal healthcare. Three: Free public college. That should resonate with all the African-Americans, especially young people, who are strapped with student loan debt or the cost is too high that they can’t even go.”

Fant was initially a Clinton supporter, but became undecided when he learned more about Sanders' policies.

“I felt like everybody else: Support the devil you know instead of the devil you don’t,” Fant said. “But you’ve gotta take a look at the devil you don’t know too.”