What Iowa Can’t Predict: Whether Black Voters Will Embrace Sanders
Iowa’s racial demographics don’t match America’s. Non-Hispanic whites make up 87.1 percent of the state’s population, compared with 62.1 percent of the U.S. population. Iowa is 3.4 percent black, while the nation is 13.2 percent black.
Black Americans began showing a strong party preference for Democratic presidential contenders in the late 1940s, a trend that grew by leaps and bounds during the civil rights era.
As a result, the two biggest levers that black voters have over the presidential process, given the strong party affinity, are their choices in the primaries and their overall turnout in the general election.
In this primary, the question is whether Sanders’s appeals to economic justice and criminal justice reform will be enough to sway black voters that have long taken the Clinton legacy seriously. (Though, clearly, from Barack Obama’s win in 2008, that respect does not lead to an unconditional slate of votes.) The 3.4 percent of black voters statewide and the quirks of the caucus system make it unlikely that we’ll learn much about what lies ahead for the black electorate. That’s most likely to become clear in South Carolina, where 27.8 percent of the residents are black. In 2008, South Carolina’s Democratic primary became the moment when Obama not only bested Clinton, but began receiving endorsements from prominent black politicians originally pledged to her.
