THROUGH THE SHOWDOWN IN MOTOWN
MARCH 1 ENDED UP MUCH as we had anticipated. Hillary Clinton swept the South. Bernie’s overwhelming victory in Vermont was deeply moving to the entire Sanders family. He won all the pledged delegates—the only state where one candidate captured them all. Thousands attended the accompanying rally at the Essex Junction fairgrounds, after which Bernie headed home. I went to our Burlington headquarters.
The other states we expected to win were going to be closer than Vermont had been for us or the southern states had been for Clinton, so the entire staff gathered to follow the results. I nervously paced for hours waiting for the results. If we were beaten everywhere outside Vermont, it would be hard to make the case that our campaign had a path forward.
In the end, we won three more contests that night and came within 2 points in Massachusetts. Our strategy paid off in terms of state wins. Significantly, the 19-point margin that Bernie won by in Colorado was so large that it would have been almost statistically impossible to have pulled it off without winning the Latino vote there. This clear win among Latino voters in Colorado—confirmation of our claim about Nevada—would be overshadowed by Clinton’s wins with African Americans across the South.
In the next week, Bernie won four more contests, while losing only one. Between South Carolina and Michigan, each candidate had won eight contests. Clinton won Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and American Samoa. Bernie had won Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Maine, Vermont, and Democrats abroad. Hillary Clinton did have a large delegate lead after March 1. But we were intent on chipping away at that lead as the calendar moved forward. Hillary Clinton’s lead looked far more impressive in news reports, because the media would include the hundreds of superdelegates that were pledged to—but not bound to—her.
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Michigan had been a key target for our campaign since the early fall. It represented the first opportunity for Bernie to compete in and win a large, diverse primary state. Our benchmark polling in Michigan in mid-February had us down 9. Only single digits! That was the first state where our benchmark poll did not have us down double digits. Also important was the fact that we were doing much better with African American voters, particularly young African American voters, than we had in the South.
Michigan is one of the only states where we did focus groups. Through those discussions with voters, we learned that Bernie’s rigged-economy message was extremely well received by working-class voters in the state. And his position on criminal justice reform was powerful with younger voters, particularly young voters of color. But the single most powerful issue with voters in Michigan overall was Bernie’s opposition to the unfair free-trade agreements that had devastated America’s industrial heartland. For people in Michigan, free trade was imposed with a high cost to workers, their families, and their communities.
It was an issue that cut across racial lines. Because of opportunities in the auto industry, a thriving black middle class had arisen in Detroit and surrounding communities. Articles like Jonathan Mahler’s June 24, 2009, New York Times Magazine piece chronicle the vibrancy of that community and its decline as domestic auto production died. David Goldberg, an African American Studies professor at Wayne State University, is quoted as pointing out that “it wasn’t that long ago that Detroit was the home of the nation’s most affluent African-American population with the largest percentage of black homeowners and the highest comparative wages.”
The impact of American trade policy, and NAFTA in particular—and its role in exporting American auto production—was an issue that we knew we had to focus on, especially as it was an issue where Bernie and Secretary Clinton had very different positions and records. In our paid media, we highlighted the rigged economy, the need for criminal justice reform, and trade.
The other issue that dominated the discussion in Michigan was the Flint water crisis. Due to neglect and malfeasance on the part of state leaders, the people of Flint, Michigan, were exposed to contaminated water—a fact that was kept from them. It had a devastating impact on the health of the community, especially on Flint’s children. As early as mid-January 2016, Bernie had called for Michigan’s governor to resign over the issue—a position that Hillary Clinton would not adopt until the March 6 debate. Bernie met with Flint families in a low-key meeting in mid-February. CNN’s Elizabeth Landers observed that Bernie “struggled to describe the meeting when he took the stage last week at a rally in Dearborn, saying he cannot fathom a United States of America that allows children to be poisoned in 2016.” ABC’s MaryAlice Parks described him as “visibly and admittedly shaken by that meeting.” And in fact he was. Although known for his large rallies, Bernie held small meetings—as he did with Flint families—in many different communities, often coming away unsettled. Early on, he met with a small group of Latinos who cried as they described how fearful they were that their families would be torn apart by broken immigration policies. In many of his speeches thereafter, he spoke of the “tears streaming out of” these young people’s eyes. Flint, too, would find its way into his speeches across the country.
He followed up his meeting with Flint families with a community forum in the city in late February. “The event was a sharp contrast from the candidate’s usual events, and Sanders began the community forum clarifying that this was not a rally. Instead, he spent most of the time listening to Flint residents,” wrote Landers. It was indeed different from Bernie’s big rallies. But those of us who had worked with him knew well that this was exactly the kind of meeting that he had held in communities throughout Vermont for decades. I have little doubt that as president he would have held community forums from time to time.
The Clinton campaign sent top aides to meet with the mayor of Flint. This was heralded by some as a genuine sign of the secretary’s interest and, in one Huffington Post piece, by Amanda Terkel, as evidence that Clinton “focuses on the pragmatic instead of the aspirational.” I am confident that Secretary Clinton and her staff cared just as much as we did about the impact of Flint water contamination. How sending presidential campaign staff to meet with the mayor demonstrated her pragmatism, however, still escapes me.
We had two other big advantages in Michigan heading into the primary. The first was overwhelming support from the Arab American community. As reported by Michigan Radio, Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute and a Dearborn native, described why, in her view, Bernie did so well with the Arab American community: “The Sanders campaign did some ‘very basic things’ to draw Arab-American votes: reaching out to include the community in events, running a strong social media campaign in multiple languages, denouncing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, and running Arabic-language ads.”
The media made much about Muslims voting for a Jewish candidate, an observation that rightly struck many in that community as reinforcing stereotypes of Muslims as being anti-Semitic, as reported by the Huffington Post’s Kate Abbey-Lambertz and others. What the media missed was that Bernie’s strong support among Arab Americans was another nail in the coffin of the false narrative that his political revolution was not multiracial.
Another important development was that the United Automobile Workers (UAW) elected to remain neutral in the election. This was important not only in Michigan but also nationally. Because the UAW, the National Association of Letter Carriers, IBEW, United Steelworkers, and other unions opted to stay out, and the National Nurses Union, the Postal Workers, the CWA, the Transit Workers, and others endorsed Bernie, Clinton was denied an AFL-CIO endorsement—even though her campaign had hoped for the nod as early as August 2015. Reuters reported in July 2015 that the AFL-CIO was wary of an early endorsement of Clinton, because at that time she had not yet reversed her position to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement: “President Richard Trumka said earlier this year that it was ‘conceivable’ that the AFL-CIO would not endorse any candidate in the 2016 race.”
As John Nichols wrote in the Nation, by February 2016 AFL-CIO head Trumka announced definitively that no endorsement would be made. The work of union leader Larry Cohen and the many thousands of Bernie’s grassroots labor supporters had paid off. Many locals, particularly of the IBEW, would go on to endorse Bernie. Even some locals of national unions that endorsed Clinton would back him, such as SEIU Local 1984, representing over 11,000 New Hampshire state employees.
Notwithstanding the fact that the UAW was officially neutral, there were many in its ranks and its hierarchy who were actively supportive of Bernie during the Michigan primary and played a critical role after the March 6 Michigan debate. Bernie campaigned in every corner of Michigan, because of its importance and because we had the luxury of a week’s time before the next contests. Although he also made stops in Kansas, Nebraska, and Maine, this really was his first opportunity since before South Carolina to blanket a state with such intensity, sparking a Grand Rapids News story: “Bernie Sanders Goes Where Few Democrats Have Gone Before in Michigan.”
As we headed to the finish line in Michigan, the public polling had Bernie way down. The RealClearPolitics polling average for the end of the race had Hillary Clinton up over 21 points. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight predicted that Hillary Clinton had more than a 99 percent chance of winning Michigan. Still to come was the critical March 6 Michigan debate, one of the three we had secured in exchange for agreeing to Hillary Clinton’s request for an additional debate in New Hampshire. Because Bernie was moving around Michigan so intensely, the amount of time for debate prep went way down. This was not really a problem; the national issues that would come up had been rehashed many times in previous debates. And Bernie was well versed on the issues that were more Michigan-focused, such as trade and Flint.
We began the debate with two pieces of good news. The first was that Bernie was announced the winner of the Maine caucus. The second, on which we held a pre-debate press conference, was the endorsement of Don Riegle, former U.S. senator from Michigan. In a speech announcing his endorsement, Riegle delivered broadside after broadside against both Hillary and Bill Clinton, as reported by Caitlin Dickson of Yahoo! News: “We have to do a necessary accounting of hurtful decisions of the Clinton administration between 1992 and 2000, key decisions made back then that badly damaged our country. The Clintons rammed NAFTA down the throats of the American people with false promises. This can’t go on, unless you want to see a lot more communities look like Flint looks today.” (If the Clinton campaign was following the rules of Honk-A-Mania that Bernie and I had established years ago, they were no doubt busily marking Senator Riegle down as “undecided.”)
Then it was off to the debate. The tone turned out to be much sharper than previous ones. Both campaigns viewed Michigan as pivotal. For Clinton, it was a chance to land her own knockout blow against Bernie. We, on the other hand, were fighting for our lives to reestablish our momentum. The issues raised were as expected, until Hillary Clinton accused Bernie of having opposed the auto industry bailout during the Great Recession. Like Senator Riegle’s attacks, hers was not nuanced. “I’ll tell you something else that Senator Sanders was against,” the New York Times transcript of the debate reads. “He was against the auto bailout.” It was an attack that appeared to throw Bernie off a bit. He wasn’t prepared for it because it wasn’t true. He would later tell CBS’s Kylie Atwood, “Sometimes somebody says something to you, and it is untrue, so it took me about 12 seconds or less than that, I figure, to try to understand what she was saying.” But he quickly regained his footing. According to the New York Times, he responded as Clinton attempted to interrupt. “If you are talking about the Wall Street bailout, where some of your friends destroyed this economy…” In fact, she was.
Bernie had voted for a stand-alone auto bailout bill in December 2008. Republicans had killed that bill in the Senate when the UAW refused to cave to Republican demands that they cut their members’ compensation, according to a December 2008 Politico story. What Bernie opposed was the release of the second half of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package—which he had voted against when it was originally passed, and which the Bush administration was now promising to use a fraction of to help General Motors and Chrysler. (Ford never took any bailout funds.) At the debate, Bernie summed up his view on the Wall Street bailout in this way: “I believe that the recklessness, the greed, and the illegal behavior of Wall Street drove this country into the worst economic downturn in the history of the United—modern history of the United States of America. And I will be damned if it was the working people of this country who had to bail out the crooks on Wall Street.” He then successfully pivoted to the issue of trade and Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street connections. She was very vulnerable on both counts. We were pleased with the way the debate went. From our perspective, Bernie was strong on the Flint water crisis, trade, and Wall Street. Over the next few days, Clinton faced considerable backlash for her auto bailout claims.
On election day, David Axelrod, former Obama strategist and CNN commentator, called Clinton’s auto bailout charge a “cheap shot” and “too cute by half.” FactCheck.org called her claims “quite a stretch.” Even Keith Hennessey, director of the White House National Economic Council staff for President Bush, wrote on his personal blog, “Secretary Clinton’s attack misleads Michigan voters and others who supported the auto loans. She is playing semantic games in an attempt to create a policy difference where none exists.”
Democratic senators who had voted the same way Bernie had, including moderate Democrat and Clinton endorser Evan Bayh, were quick to disagree with Hillary Clinton’s attack, according to an article by David Sirota in the International Business Times:
“My state, Indiana, is a big auto state, and I was always very strongly in favor of helping the auto companies, and I’m glad we did,” Bayh told Sirota. “So I would find it to be very unlikely that I cast something that at the time was perceived as an anti-auto vote. The United Autoworkers were always some of my strongest supporters; I had good relations with the auto companies themselves. So it couldn’t have been primarily an up or down vote on the autos.”
Pushback came from a lot of sources, but our looming concern was to get the word to voters. We were only a day and a half from the polls opening in Michigan, and if the false charge stuck, it could be devastating. Clinton aired an ad on the issue. We quickly aired radio ads the next day calling into question the honesty of the attack. Friends in the UAW circulated fact sheets to their email contacts.
The day of the Michigan primary, we moved to Florida. We were hopeful about Michigan, but the public polls had us way down and ours had us within single digits. My own prediction to the media traveling with us was that we would finish between 7 down and 2 up. We had a rally planned at the James L. Knight Center in Miami for that evening. It was scheduled to end before the final Michigan results came in. An enthusiastic crowd in Miami, which was holding its primary the following week, would be a much better visual than a disappointed crowd in Michigan if we were not successful there. Also, moving to Florida that day would give us time for prep on March 9 for that night’s Univision debate. After Bernie’s rally, we alerted staff and the media that all events were concluded for the day.
At 9:00 p.m., Decision Desk HQ, a website that provides real time election results, called the race for Hillary Clinton: “We project that Hillary Clinton will defeat Bernie Sanders in Michigan.”
That’s not a dig at them. They have a great track record. But it made the announcement even more inauspicious.
Bernie, Tad, Briggs, Bernie’s son Levi, and I crammed into Bernie’s small hotel room—the smallest in North America, it seemed—to watch the results come in. Tad started making calls to contacts in the media to see what information was available. He hung up his phone. “Well,” he said, “everyone thinks it going to come down to Wayne County, and it will come in late.” The time ticked by, minute by minute. Finally, around 11:30, the major networks called the race for Bernie. We cheered in the tiny hotel room.
There was a knock at the hotel door. A staffer was there to say that there was a media request for an interview with Bernie. “Well, I can’t just talk to one media outlet without talking to everyone,” Bernie said. “Let everyone know I’ll come down and make a statement.”
The job of setting up the poolside press conference fell to Joe Magee. Joe traveled with Bernie’s party throughout the campaign and did a million different jobs, all of them well. But that night he didn’t have the right tape as he tried to post Bernie placards on the poolside wall behind where Bernie would speak. The placards started falling, but he had managed to get a few to stick by the time Bernie came down. The pool area was poorly lit. Bernie looked like he was on the run giving an interview from an undisclosed location.
That same night, we lost the Mississippi primary by large margins, and Clinton actually increased her delegate lead. But because both campaigns had staked so much on Michigan, Bernie’s victory there created all the buzz. The Detroit Free Press reported that turnout in Detroit was only 25 percent, and in Wayne County 31 percent, while it was closer to 40 percent statewide. For Hillary Clinton, the outcome of the Michigan primary was a foreshadowing of bad things to come in the general election. While she won black voters overall by large margins (but not younger black voters, according to all our internal polling), the turnout among black voters for her in the Michigan primary was not strong enough, and voters in small cities and towns and rural areas came out strongly against her.
In the general election, the Detroit News reported that “Trump also benefited from lower turnout in Wayne County and particularly Detroit, where Clinton received 47,840 fewer votes than Obama did in 2012. Clinton won Wayne County, but not by the margins Obama ran up in 2012 and 2008. She got 78,884 fewer votes than Obama, while Trump won 14,449 more votes in the state’s largest county than Romney did.” In the end, given the small margin by which Trump won in Michigan, all the warning signs were there but Brooklyn never tacked to address them.
What was also significant in Michigan was that Bernie did much better with African American voters than he had in the South. As Glenn Thrush pointed out the next day, Bernie’s support among young voters broke through the final color barrier: “Sanders fought her to a draw among under-40 African-Americans.”
This fact, that Bernie was winning with young people of all races, was ignored by most of the media. It ran counter to the Clinton campaign’s self-serving message. And because the media did not do sufficiently expansive polling, they would never see it. But the young women and men behind #berniemademewhite got it right.
It wasn’t until after the campaign was effectively over that the kind of polling and analysis would surface that would validate what young Bernie supporters of color (and our campaign staff) already knew. In June 2016, according to polling by GenForward, a survey of the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 54 percent of African Americans between the age of eighteen and thirty who voted in the presidential primaries supported Bernie Sanders—a full 14 points more than supported Hillary Clinton. Among Latinos age eighteen to thirty who participated in any primary, Bernie had the support of 60 percent, as compared with 20 percent for Clinton. Among Asian American millennials, it was Bernie, with 72 percent, and Hillary Clinton, with 13 percent. Among white millennials Bernie’s support was 45 percent with 12 percent for Clinton (many more white millennials voted in the Republican primary than did millennials of any other race).
Taking millennials as a whole who voted in one or another primary during 2016, Bernie was far more popular with voters of color than with white voters. Jeff Guo, writing for the Washington Post in mid-July 2016, observed the following about GenForward’s findings: “It challenges the stereotype that Sanders solely appeals to white liberal voters. Among millennials who are Democrats, Sanders commands majority support across ethnic groups.”
Guo was right. If you look at just African American millennials who voted for Sanders or Clinton or O’Malley (and thereby exclude the small number of African American young adults who voted in the Republican primary or in a third-party contest), the report—based on almost 2,000 interviews—found that Bernie won the votes of well over 57 percent of young black voters. The same is true for other racial groups who participated in the Democratic primaries. Three-quarters of Latinos, over 80 percent of Asian Americans, and 79 percent of whites who voted in Democratic primaries went for Bernie.
Issac Bailey’s piece for Politico on June 8, 2016, exemplifies the type of analysis that simply rested on inaccuracies. He wrote: “All the talk about Sanders representing the future of the Democratic Party because of his overwhelming popularity among young people leaves out an important caveat: He couldn’t persuade minority voters to sign on.” He then argues that black voters are more comfortable with incrementalist politics. For the record, I respectfully disagree with Bailey’s claim that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of a multiracial mass movement of poor and working people to secure civil and economic rights was incrementalist.
The GenForward research shows that whatever validity Bailey’s piece may have had in terms of its analysis of politics in the African American community and its history, on this point—that the Political Revolution did not include a majority of young voters of color—he is empirically wrong. As are all the others who have denied the very existence, and in that sense the personhood, of the majority of millennials of color who supported Bernie’s transformative vision for America. I don’t have any particular bone to pick with Issac Bailey. It’s just that his June 8 article is one of the most emphatic in terms of asserting this factually infirm premise. There were many others who perpetuated the myth for their own reasons.
The reason young people of color supported Bernie Sanders can also be found in the GenForward report. “Majorities of African Americans (60 percent), Asian Americans (69 percent), Latino/as (68 percent) and Whites (59 percent) picked Bernie Sanders as the candidate that best understands the problems of people like them.” The corresponding percentages for Clinton were 35, 20, 23, and 11.
Bernie Sanders’ strong favorability rating included young voters of all races—“73 percent of African Americans, 78 percent of Asian Americans, 73 percent Latino/as, and 55 percent of Whites”—which led GenForward to the conclusion that so many have fought and continue to try to deny: “In many ways, our data suggests that Bernie Sanders appealed to Obama’s coalition of young voters of color better than Hillary Clinton did.” Contrast that with Bailey’s assertion that “Clinton, for all of her supposed faults, has run a campaign so tactically effective she has been able to pull together a coalition similar to Obama’s.”
The findings of the GenForward study were confirmed by our own internal polling and, more importantly, what was happening on the street in 2015 and 2016, namely the Black Lives Matter movement. Started by young African Americans, Black Lives Matter’s goals were supported by people of many races including Bernie Sanders. Their efforts to highlight and stop the killing of African Americans at the hands of or in the custody of authorities was so successful that in all our polling, no message was received more positively by young voters of all races than Bernie’s call for criminal justice and police reform.
In his many meetings with Black Lives Matter activists, and in mine, from one end of the country to the other, participants could not have been more clear that the last thing they were interested in was incrementalism. The Black Lives Matter movement’s uncompromising demand for bold, swift action does not represent “the ultimate expression of privilege”—a charge that Bailey (quoting Jonathan Chait) levels at other elements of the progressive movement whom he argues are too uncompromising.
The question is, if Bernie Sanders was winning the young African American vote, how come his overall vote totals among African Americans in so many states were low? Here’s at least part of the answer: As Perry Bacon, Jr., then at NBC, reported at the end of May 2016, Bernie Sanders was winning the vote of African Americans under thirty based on Democratic primary exit polls in twenty-five states. While African Americans as a whole represented 25 percent of voters in the exit polls, African Americans under thirty were only 3 percent. Put another way, only 12 percent of black voters in the Democratic primaries were under thirty. That compares with an overall percentage of Democratic primary voters under thirty, who, according to CBS News in mid-May 2016, comprised 17 percent of Democratic primary voters. If my math is still good, that translates to a turnout percentage of 18.66 percent among voters under the age of thirty drawn from the 75 percent of Democratic voters who were not African American.
The low turnout among young black voters meant that Bernie’s performance in the black community was going to be lower than among those communities with higher young voter turnout. According to Bacon, “Sanders’ weak performances among African-Americans may have been because of their age, which made them more likely to back Clinton, like other older voters, not their race.” That is certainly an important part of the explanation. Another is a phenomenon we witnessed consistently in our polling throughout the primaries. Among voters who had favorable opinions of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—a number that grew substantially as the campaign progressed—Clinton was winning by over 30 points.
That Hillary Clinton was popular in the African American community as a whole from the beginning of the campaign is well documented. Even as Bernie became better known and more popular with black voters, we still had to overcome that challenge. The same was true of older voters, particularly women over fifty-five, who, from the start of the race, overwhelmingly viewed Hillary Clinton positively.
Compare that with the portions of the Democratic electorate that had less favorable views of Hillary Clinton—young voters and independents aligned with Democrats. They came out overwhelmingly for Bernie. In that sense, Bernie’s commitment to run a positive campaign benefited Clinton. Democratic voters seemed unwilling to move away from her (for a lot of reasons) as long as they had a favorable view of her, even as Bernie’s favorability with those same voters soared during the course of the campaign.
More recent polling shows that Bernie Sanders’ high favorability rating with voters—voters of color in particular—is enduring and not limited to the young. The Hill, reporting in April 2017 on a Harvard-Harris poll, wrote that Bernie Sanders “is the country’s most popular active politician.” That article points out that he is popular among all racial groups—and most popular with African Americans (73 percent favorable), followed by Latinos (68 percent), Asian Americans (62 percent), and whites (52 percent). The reality is that the increasing number of young people of color coming of age in the country and within the Democratic Party bodes well for the future of the multiracial movement for transformative political and economic change that Bernie dubbed the Political Revolution.