[B]ernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic nomination picked up more than record-breaking crowds in a recent West Coast tour. The independent senator may have found a way to address the perception that he’s out of touch on racial equality.
Hours after protesters claiming affiliation with the #BlackLivesMatter movement shut down an afternoon event in Seattle, Washington, a 25-year-old black woman took the stage at an arena on the University of Washington campus to introduce the populist presidential candidate.
Symone Sanders (no relation) is the Sanders campaign’s new national press secretary. A veteran of progressive politics in her home state of Nebraska, Sanders is the national committee chair for the D.C.-based Coalition for Juvenile Justice, a criminal justice reform group.
After a somewhat tone-deaf response to a disrupted Q&A session at the progressive Netroots Nation conference on July 18, in which Sanders responded to activists’ cries for racial justice with a call for economic justice (which didn’t pacify), the senator sought help from within the activist community.
Symone Sanders had sent a resume to the Sanders campaign, and had already spoken with two top aides. After that confrontation in Phoenix, she met with the senator for a roughly hour-long conversation, and walked out a staffer, she told VTDigger in an interview Wednesday.
The senator was receptive to her message that economic justice and racial justice should be addressed as “parallel issues.” Addressing the widening wealth gap in the U.S. must be done in concert with an acknowledgement of “real institutional barriers for people of color,” she said.
Sunday morning, the Sanders campaign site published a racial justice page and again Symone Sanders introduced her new boss to a massive 28,000 person crowd at the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon. Symone’s remarks acknowledged the potential for further disruptions, but stressed that Sanders’ campaign for the presidency was about uniting people.
Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel described the addition of Symone Sanders to the Bernie Sanders campaign as a “blessing” adding that when she spoke in Portland, “Quotes that could set off protesters when Bernie Sanders used them were pure applause lines when coming out of the mouth of Symone Sanders.”
The following day, Sanders spoke to an equally large crowd at a stadium in Los Angeles, California, where he sounded familiar themes: making college tuition free, reducing the wealth gap, taxing the rich, addressing climate change and getting money out of politics.
“The reason we’re doing so well in this campaign is we’re telling the truth,” Sanders told the crowd in L.A., according to the Los Angeles Times.
There’s evidence that the senator’s version of truth-telling is gaining traction. Two days after the L.A. event, a Boston Herald/Franklin Pierce poll showed Sanders had overtaken Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation primary state.
But Sanders’ ascendence in the Granite State won’t win him the nomination. As New York Times columnist Charles Blow pointed out in a series of tweets, Sanders will need to increase his support from black Americans to win the Democratic nomination.
Quite simply: Primary map dictates that Sanders must win over more blk support. Most active primary month will be March. 24 primaries 1/2
— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) August 9, 2015
Half the primaries in March will be in the South where Dem is increasingly synonymous with blk. To have a shot at nom, he must win some 2/2
— Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow) August 9, 2015
A Gallup poll published earlier this week shows that only 33 percent of black adults surveyed were familiar with Sanders. Contrast that with 92 percent who were familiar with Clinton.
Symone Sanders acknowledges that the senator has work to do increasing his name recognition in minority communities, but said that’s a challenge she is excited to take on. The campaign is increasing its outreach efforts and will be in South Carolina (often called the “First in the South” primary state).
African Americans aren’t a bloc of one-issue voters that only care about racial justice, though that is an important issue for many, and Symone Sanders said she believes Bernie Sanders progressive platform will resonate once his name recognition increases.
“People of color care about climate change,” she said, and they also care about the pocketbook economic issues of wealth inequality, and raising the minimum wage, that are a hallmark of the Sanders campaign, she added.
