But an analysis of 25 states that held primaries and where exit polls were conducted by NBC News showed that one of Sanders’ challenges is that younger blacks are not voting in large numbers. Sanders, according to the exit polls in these states, received 52 percent of the votes of African-Americans under 30, compared to 47 percent for Clinton.
However, blacks under 30 were only 3 percent of the Democratic electorate in these states. In contrast, blacks over 60 were 7 percent of the electorate in these states. Clinton won 89 percent of their votes, Sanders 9 percent. (The Washington Post completed a similar analysis last week and also found low turnout among young black voters.)
Among blacks ages 45-59, Clinton was ahead 85 percent to 14 percent. Among blacks ages 30-44, Clinton won 70 percent, Sanders 29 percent.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/huge-split-between-older-younger-blacks-democratic-primary-n580996
Another good article on this topic:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-democrats-race-racial-divide-213948
Though it might offend his uber-progressive supporters to hear this, the Sanders insurgency is largely a white revolution. 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. In many ways a Sanders victory, propelled by the least diverse states in the nation, would have been a step backward in American race relations. Now that Hillary Clinton has laid claim convincingly to the nomination with decisive wins in California and New Jersey, the party—and Bernie’s supporters—are at a crossroads. If they insist on maintaining their purist divide from Clinton, they will create a rift in the party that’s not just ideological, but racial.
“That refusal to accept the necessity of compromise in a winner-take-all two-party system (and an electorate in which conservatives still outnumber liberals) is characteristic of a certain idealistic style of left-wing politics. Its conception of voting as an act of performative virtue has largely confined itself to white left-wing politics, because it is at odds with the political tradition of a community that has always viewed political compromise as a practical necessity. The expectation that a politician should agree with you on everything is the ultimate expression of privilege.”
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com has shown that Clinton’s victories look much more like the Democratic Party—which, with a projected 54 percent white vote this year, will be majority-minority long before the country is—than do Sanders’ wins. Even in Sanders’ upset in Michigan, pundits were claiming he had made a breakthrough with black voters because he lost them only by 35 percent points. And exit polling data in Nevada that showed him edging Clinton among Hispanics is widely suspected to be wrong, given where Clinton racked up votes in that state.
...many white Democratic voters missed the sentiment shared among black Obama voters in 2008 that, once again, the “first black” was being handed a seemingly impossible task—two ground wars, a collapsing economy, a record deficit—and if he wasn’t able to perform a miracle, it would not only be his failure, but that of black people in general. To downplay what he has been able to achieve despite the obstacles, which also included an unprecedented level of obstruction from the GOP, confirms a fear shared by many people of color—Democratic or otherwise—that no matter what they achieve, it will never be enough. Sanders and Susan Sarandon may sincerely believe things are so awful only a revolution can heal the country’s ills. But their overwrought rhetoric, and no more than lukewarm support of Obama’s accomplishments, taps into that deeply-held frustration among minorities.
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