'This Is Not 2016': What People Don't Get About Bernie Sanders and Race

[DonViejo]

The Vermont senator did better with black voters in 2016 than many people realize. But 2020 is a different story.

By SAM SANDERS March 09, 2019

When I first started covering Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2015, I thought it would be a relatively short assignment. He jumped into the Democratic primary with low name recognition, a campaign infrastructure dwarfed by Hillary Clinton’s, and a message many observers deemed too radical to ever succeed nationally.

I was wrong.

My “short assignment” turned into several months on the road with Sanders and his team. By the time he dropped out of the race at the Democratic National Convention in July 2016—after winning 43 percent of the primary vote nationally and outraising Clinton on the strength of his small-dollar donations—he’d become one of the most popular politicians in America.

The Bernie Sanders who announced last month that he is again running for president is in a very different position than the one I reported on four years ago. The party he was trying to pull to the left seems to have caught up with him, with proposals like “Medicare for All” fast turning into litmus tests for 2020 candidates. He’s still a democratic socialist and still running on the same message, but he is no longer an underdog; he’s a front-runner.

And yet, while much has changed for Sanders, some of the same questions that dogged him in the 2016 race will again be asked by Democratic primary voters over the next few months. Perhaps the biggest of those is whether he can convince enough of them that he isn’t a single-issue candidate—and whether he realizes that even as the Democratic Party has moved closer to him on economic issues, it has grown increasingly vocal on race and identity, issues that even some of Sanders’ supporters concede is a blind spot for the candidate.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/09/bernie-sanders-race-black-voters-2020-225611