Why Black Voters Support Hillary Clinton [View all]

[Her Sister]

https://medium.com/marcushjohnson/why-black-voters-support-hillary-clinton-afcf7e6ff5bb#.idpbdia3a


The 2016 primary season has been a particularly interesting one. Bernie Sanders, the insurgent candidate on the Democratic side, has taken up the label of the candidate of the common man. Although he has energized millions of voters and won several states, he’s done terribly with the most consistent and reliable Democratic voters in the Party — Black voters. Sanders has not cracked 30 percent of the Black vote in a single state, atrocious numbers for a Democrat who wants to be the nominee.

Sanders and his campaign have made several convenient excuses:
1. Black voters will flock to Sanders once they get to know him
2. Voters in “red states” don’t matter, because those states are more conservative
3. The Clintons are a brand, and Bernie is a relative unknown


All of these excuses are problematic, especially for someone who is supposed to be running a national campaign. Votes in South Carolina could just as much as the ones in Washington state, for one. And if Black voters don’t know who Sanders is by now, then the blame lays with the Sanders campaign for doing a terrible job at minority outreach. Perhaps the worst excuse, which we don’t really hear from the campaign, but we do hear a lot from backers on social media, is that Black voters just don’t know what’s in their best interest. This is condescending at best, and racist at worst, the insinuation being that Black people aren’t smart enough to know who the candidates are, what they stand for, or what their own interests are as a group. Black voters are just as intelligent as any other group, and they know their interests just fine. It’s just that they’ve decided Hillary Clinton serves their interests far better than Bernie Sanders. That is why Hillary Clinton has beaten Sanders by 40 points or more with Black voters in every single state that has voted so far.

Black voters’ preferences have perplexed many observers, especially leftists who have found fault with the Clintons for not being “progressive enough,” and angered Sanders backers such as Michelle Alexander, who don’t believe the Clintons “deserve” the Black vote. In the past few months, the entire Clinton Presidency has been relitigated with a particular focus on the crime bill. The crime bill was supposed to be the smoking gun that would turn Black voters against the Clintons this election cycle. That line of thinking has failed mostly there is a lot of confusion from academics about what the bill actually did.
What People Get Wrong About The Crime Bill :...

Pretty long article, lots of good information about Voting Rights, History, the Clintons all the way to Obama