Why Is Bernie Sanders Slamming Southern Democrats?
Primary elections, however, are completely different animals. Primary elections are about voters within a political party—and sometimes without, in open primaries, which are another debate that we may get to in the future—having their shot at choosing which candidate their party should nominate. There are of course some states that matter more than others. But there aren’t any individual votes that matter more than others, at least among primaries (caucuses don’t usually report individual votes). For Sanders to dismiss Clinton’s Southern votes as distortions of reality is hugely insulting to Democrats from the region.
And to one group of Democrats in particular, who are concentrated in the South and who happen to be the most loyal Democratic voters in the country. I don’t think Sanders has a racist bone in his body, but is there not a certain racial tone-deafness in dismissing the votes of millions of black voters as distortions of reality? This is the one moment, their state’s presidential primary, when these African American voters have a chance to flex some actual political power in the national arena.
And then to write off Clinton’s Southern votes as “conservative” is just a lie intended to fool the gullible. Sure, the South is conservative at general-election time. But at Democratic primary time, it’s pretty darn liberal. It’s blacks and Latinos (where they exist in large numbers) and trial lawyers and college professors and school teachers and social workers and the like. They’re not conservative, any more than the people caucusing for Sanders in Idaho and Oklahoma are conservative, and he knows it.
The topic of Sanders’s own red state wins actually raises another point. He’s won seven states that both he and Clinton would/will lose by at least 15 points in November, and in many cases more like 30: Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Alaska, along with the aforementioned two. And he won them in caucuses, not primaries, which nearly everyone agrees are less democratic, less representative of the whole of the voting population.
Now let’s look at Clinton’s red-state wins. She’s won 10 red states: Texas, Arizona, Missouri, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina (I’m calling North Carolina purple, and of course Virginia and Florida and Ohio). Neither she nor Sanders would probably win in these states either, although a Clinton win over Donald Trump seems conceivable in a couple of them.
In any case, yes, they’ve both won states that are unwinnable in the fall. Yet do you hear Clinton going around saying that Sanders’s victories in these states are distortions of reality? I don’t. But Sanders goes around bragging, as he did at the debate, about winning eight of the last nine contests, “many of them by landslide” margins, referring to these very states where he or Clinton would get walloped in the fall, while denouncing her red-state wins as aberrational. What is it about his red states that count—or more to the point, perhaps, what is it about hers that makes them not count?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/16/why-is-bernie-sanders-slamming-southern-democrats.html
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The Southern primaries alone would "distort reality" briefly for more than one reason but notably because a very large portion of the 13% of Americans who are black live there. A third of us in Georgia are black.
But so what? Would Bernie have been happier if Georgia took Vermont's place in the primary schedule?The first primaries and the various regions that follow all create temporary distortions, such as the recent string of white states that also fail to represent America's sizable Latino population, but in the end the American electorate has voted.
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(Interestingly, there has been a phenomenon of blacks "returning" for cultural reasons to the south in recent years, although many were born elsewhere to parents who once left to seek better lives, so this map probably understates their concentration.)
Btw, Sanders' comments just dig his hole deeper with blacks, and no doubt with other racial and ethnic groups who are as sensitive to unintended dogwhistle notes as to intended ones. He won't be needing their votes in future races, of course, but he should care.
It's one of the most transient states in the union:
She said she did not just win there, and listed four in a row that are the deep south.
These are all from this year.
Even their state flag is racist!
Oh, wait, That is Arkansas in the south...I take it back your point is stupid.
The HRC camp is getting called out on their racism, stop trying to back pedal out of what you did. I am not going to forgive the way many from this party has used race as a toy. I think we need a sticky on this so I can stop explaining this to people that are somehow blind of what happened.
