Amy Klobuchar Has Similar Struggles As Pete Buttigieg with Black voters [View all]

[LeftTurn3623]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mollyhensleyclancy/amy-klobuchar-iowa-pete-buttigieg-black-voters-2020


In a Washington Post poll of black voters earlier this month, Klobuchar was at 0% to Buttigieg’s 2%.

Now Klobuchar is facing criticism there this week over revelations about her decades-old prosecution of a black teenager. A group of black leaders in Minnesota called for her to suspend her campaign in light of an Associated Press investigation suggesting the 16-year-old boy Klobuchar put in jail for life may have been innocent.

Her home state’s two most prominent black politicians, Rep. Ilhan Omar and Attorney General Keith Ellison, endorsed Bernie Sanders. Outside of Minnesota and the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, she has scarce support from people of color, including just one elected official, California Rep. Linda Sanchez, who endorsed her Saturday. No black elected officials have announced their support for Klobuchar in other states.

Perhaps more significantly, Klobuchar faces serious hurdles to winning over black voters moving forward: She spent a chunk of her career as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and has been criticized for failing to prosecute a single killing by the police when she headed prosecutions in Hennepin County, Minnesota’s largest county.

The revelation of serious flaws in the case Klobuchar built against Myon Burrell, the teenager Klobuchar charged with the murder of an 11-year-old girl, Tyesha Edwards, in Minneapolis, is likely to cause a further issue for Klobuchar.

Klobuchar has repeatedly used Burrell’s prosecution to bolster her own political career — including during her first Senate run, when she cut an ad with Edwards’ mother, who said, “When our little girl, Tyesha, was murdered, Amy saw to it that those gang members were put away.” And she brought the prosecution up in a recent Democratic debate, where she cited the case to deflect criticisms that she had not been committed to racial justice.

“I would say that Amy Klobuchar does not have any real connection to the black community in [Minneapolis] or in Minnesota,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a community activist and civil rights lawyer who joined calls for Klobuchar to suspend her campaign and address the Burrell case.

“She has portrayed herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor while working to appeal to mainstream white middle-class voters. But the reality is that Klobuchar did measurable amounts of harm to the black community when she was the lead prosecutor in Hennepin County,” Levy Armstrong said.

Klobuchar has also been criticized for failing to bring charges against a single police officer who killed a citizen in her eight-year run as the top prosecutor in Minnesota’s most populous county. There were more than two dozen police-involved killings in that period. Minneapolis police have long faced allegations of excessive force — leading to unrest that culminated in widespread protests over the 2015 killing of Jamar Clark.

Deborah Berry, a Buttigieg supporter who served for 14 years as one of Iowa’s few black legislators, said she felt Klobuchar’s appeal to people of color should be receiving equal scrutiny.

“I do feel like it’s unfair,” said Berry, who endorsed Buttigieg in December and defended his record on race in a phone interview on Friday. “He encourages people to speak out,” she said, asking why voters didn’t have similar questions for Klobuchar. “It’s really frustrating.”

Leslie Redmond, the president of the Minneapolis NAACP, who had joined calls for Klobuchar’s campaign to be suspended, raised another contrast: between Klobuchar and another former candidate who was a prosecutor, Kamala Harris.

Black leaders in Minneapolis say they want Klobuchar to suspend her campaign in order to focus on helping Burrell, who is now 33.

“There’s no way that a person who represents good, old-fashioned Midwestern values can sit back silently and allow an innocent person to suffer inside the criminal justice system, knowing that they had a role in putting them there, and even using the case as a talking point in the debate,” said Levy Armstrong.

“Her response has been to try to deflect and put the focus on the current prosecutor. But if she’s going to take credit for putting this man behind bars in the first place, she needs to take responsibility now.”