Democrats 2020

Millennials, Rappers, and Revolution: Inside Bernie Sanders’s Playbook for Winning the Black Vote

The old, white senator from Vermont has become an unlikely hero to black and Hispanic millennials in Los Angeles. At a private lunch last month in Hollywood, Sanders explained his vision for winning minority voters—and snatching the nomination from Joe Biden.
Vic Mensa attends a Bernie Sanders GrassRoots Fundraiser in Hollywood July 25 2019.
Vic Mensa attends a Bernie Sanders Grass-Roots Fundraiser in Hollywood, July 25, 2019.By Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images.

Two weeks before he would appear at the Iowa State Fair, surrounded by a sea of whiteness, Bernie Sanders was at the Italian restaurant Chi Spacca, in Hollywood, trying to shore up another key constituency. The presidential candidate, who remains a serious contender for the Democratic nomination despite having slipped in the polls, was having lunch with 25 or so creatives—writers, musicians, artists and social-media mavens, most of whom were African American or Latino.

The topics of conversation were typically Sanders: Medicare for All, student debt relief, and criminal justice reform. But for keen political observers, the Chi Spacca strategy session—described by one attendee as closed-door and “definitely off the record”—also had another goal: eating into Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s base of support with black voters—voters who are, by almost any estimation, the most reliable pillar of the Democratic base.

It was a somewhat unusual scene for Sanders, who seems to dislike the glitterati, never mind people in general, and who has studiously avoided the sort of $2,800-a-plate parties that are a staple for other candidates jetting in and out of Hollywood. Like Elizabeth Warren, Sanders has mostly eschewed big-dollar donors in New York, L.A., and Silicon Valley in favor of a more national network of so-called ordinary people who give $20 or $30 a pop. (Biden and Harris have a little more than a quarter million individual donors. Sanders has nearly three times that.)

Sanders prefers to wag his finger, to be earnest, to lecture—about inequality, structural imbalances, socking it to the billionaire class. He seems permanently furrowed, slovenly, cantankerous. He has no time to glad-hand. But there he was at Chi Spacca, where the tomahawk pork chop runs $90, and the beef Florentine is $195. Sanders ordered steak.

The campaign picked up the tab. During his last presidential bid, Sanders was accused by Black Lives Matter activists of neglecting race relations and criminal justice reform. He appears to be trying, this time, not to let that happen again. The point of the meeting, said Ferrari Sheppard, an artist and musician who was there, was to hear from attendees about the struggles faced by the black and brown communities.

On criminal justice reform, student loan forgiveness, and health care, there was general agreement, Sheppard, 36, said. “He has something that’s really attractive to young people, which is a grassroots demeanor,” said Sheppard, who, with Mos Def, makes up the hip-hop duo Dec 99th. “He’s eating his steak while he’s talking to you. He says, ‘Hold on while I chew this.’”

When it came to the Middle East, things got awkward. Sheppard, speaking from his studio in L.A.’s Arts District, said rapper Vic Mensa “brought up the Palestine conflict, which kind of made the room tense, not because of us, but because of Bernie and his people, who got quiet, and Bernie deflected the question and moved back to domestic issues.” Sheppard said he didn’t care for Sanders “glossing over the United States’ continual glossing over [of] the Israeli occupation.… That just reminded me that you’re up against this huge machine.”

Mensa, who had headlined a Sanders fund-raiser the night before at Hollywood’s Montalbán theater, said he remains a steadfast supporter. What matters most, said Mensa, 26, is Sanders’s record fighting for civil rights, which stretches back to the 1960s.

For many black millennials, including Mensa, the No. 1 issue is criminal justice reform—the easing of mandatory minimum sentences, narrowing sentencing disparities between crack- and cocaine-related crimes, and the elimination of bail, among other provisions. But the 2020 election is a quandary for the nation’s 30 million eligible black voters, who have been told they must choose between a nominee who can win white, working-class voters in the Upper Midwest and one who will do something about the 500% increase in the prison population over the past four decades. The politics are complicated: A plurality of black voters currently support Biden, the front-runner in the race, who helped author a 1994 “tough on crime” law that has been accused of contributing to mass incarceration in the 1990s. (Sanders has said he regrets voting for the bill.)

Mensa, speaking from his home in L.A.’s upscale Silver Lake neighborhood, focused his criticism on Harris. “Kamala Harris is a cop,” he said. “She’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor. That’s like the opposite of a revolutionary, and I could never vote for her.… I’m not impressed because she’s a woman of color, because I recognize what neocolonialism is, and I recognize that token black people are propped up to positions within the imperialistic, patriarchal, white supremacist state that is America to enforce all of those ideologies. That is a prosecutor—to prosecute those who reject the white supremacist, patriarchal state.”

A Sanders campaign spokeswoman said Mensa did not speak for the campaign. Deputy campaign manager René Spellman, who attended the Chi Spacca event, declined to comment.

By Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

This frustration with the establishment—coupled with Sanders’s longstanding radicalism—is forcing many black millennials to rethink the conventional wisdom surrounding identity politics. In America in the second decade of the 21st century, race, gender, and orientation reign supreme in the same way that class, a half-century ago, was the lens through which the left viewed the whole of reality. Then, it was assumed that one’s economic status defined the way one apprehended the world. Now, it’s assumed that one’s identity plays an analogous role. Hence the sentiment, widespread in certain progressive circles, that, in a post-#MeToo world, Democrats must nominate a woman. Or, in the wake of Ferguson or Baltimore or any number of other high-profile killings of unarmed African Americans, a black candidate.

But what if you lacked faith in those candidates to get it done? And what if you had faith in Sanders, who’s been droning on about police brutality and the evils of capitalism since before you were born?

“I can’t, you know, put food on the table with your identity,” said Aja Monet, 31, a poet and activist who also attended the lunch. “I can’t pay the bills with your identity. I can’t make sure my kids go to school with your identity. I can’t get the root canal I need with your identity.” (Monet’s partner is Phillip Agnew, the co-director of Dream Defenders, a Miami group focused on the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and a campaign surrogate.) Tonatiuh Elizarraraz, a 21-year-old actor best known for his role on the Starz drama Vida, said that invoking identity amounted to a “privileged” or “neoliberal” attempt at prodding people of color into voting for Harris, New Jersey senator Cory Booker, or South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg.

Monet’s comments echoed those of other black millennials, who were also critical of Barack Obama for not having embraced the “change” he ran on in 2008. The former president evokes complicated feelings among America’s 30 million eligible black voters. The older generations mostly adore him. He will forever be the first black president, the president whose election marked a cosmic break with the country’s original sin, the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining. That’s why Biden’s African American support skews old.

But younger black voters want more than a black president. They want a government that, they believe, speaks directly to the needs of black voters. To a degree few could have anticipated in 2008, their fears and frustrations were exacerbated by Obama’s election. “With Barack Obama, there was so much of a buildup around his presidency and what it symbolized, and I think that ultimately younger people of color, you know, were disappointed,” Sheppard said. These younger people of color wonder how it is that, even with a black president and first lady, there were still Travyon and Ferguson and “I can’t breathe.” Their answer: a ubiquitous, seemingly ineradicable white supremacy.

“White supremacy lurks in every single corner of America, and I understand that Bill Clinton was able to incarcerate more niggers than any other president and convince us he was one of us just by playing the saxophone,” Mensa said. “So I don’t give a fuck if you’re a Democrat or a liberal. I know that those people will still walk across the street when they see me on the sidewalk.”

That was the genesis, in 2013 and 2014, of Black Lives Matter. “Two thousand fourteen was a really big year,” said Jehan Gordon-Booth, a Democratic state representative from Peoria County, Illinois, who, at 38, straddles the generational divide. “In February 2014, I introduced a body camera bill, and I literally could not get this moved out of committee. By the time we were back to veto session”—in November—“everything had changed. The world had changed in terms of what people expected, particularly within the Democratic Party.”

A few months later, at the Oscars, singer-songwriter John Legend won best song for “Glory” and used his acceptance speech to denounce skyrocketing incarceration. The next year Netflix released Ava DuVernay’s 13th.

Then, as if to validate the angers of a new generation of black voters, the country elected Donald Trump—the redliner, the birther, the voice of that pre-2008 America that older black voters had assured them they’d left behind.

Activists fought back in the 2018 midterms, helping elect the most diverse Democratic field ever, including Lucy McBath, the onetime Delta stewardess catapulted into the spotlight by the murder of her son, and the Squad, which embodies the anger—the uncontainability—of the new progressive class. “Millennials want what they want,” Gordon-Booth said. “It isn’t about compromising. It’s not about, ‘This is a candidate that can win.’ Millennials are much more into, ‘If you’re not this, this, this, and this, then forget it.’”

Now the discourse is growing hotter, more intemperate. There’s an open disdain for the old incrementalism. Everyone—the media, even the presidential candidates—seems to be talking about reparations and overturning the antebellum power structures. There is a feeling that something radical must happen.

The young black voters I spoke to resent being told they should vote for Biden because he was Obama’s vice president, and they really resent being told they should like Harris, and they think Booker is a nice guy running the Obama playbook circa 2008. They want all people—black, brown, white, everyone—to be evaluated not on the basis of their skin color but on their record. Weirdly, they start at the same philosophical juncture that so many conservatives claim for themselves—that of colorblindness—and wind up somewhere very different.

The Sanders people seem aware of all of the above, which is why they decamped to Chi Spacca—to hone their message and build on what they view as their growing support in black and brown communities.

This might just be the ticket. As Booker said during the last debate, Democrats desperately need to fire up their coalition of black voters—particularly black women—in order to reverse their razor-thin losses in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where the black vote dipped in 2016. That’s why savvy political strategists are looking to South Carolina, not Iowa or New Hampshire, as a leading indicator for who might run away with the nomination. It might also explain why Sanders felt free to tag-team with Warren at the last debate, according to an L.A.-based Democratic bundler who’s anti-Sanders: He doesn’t consider her his chief rival. In a recent South Carolina survey, Warren polled at just 2% among black voters versus 12% for Harris, 15% for Sanders, and 41% for Biden.

Beyond the primary race, however, there lies Trump—and the unknowable contours of an election pitting a self-avowed socialist against a race-baiting demagogue.

Sheppard voiced concern that Sanders, should he snag the Democratic nod, might be unprepared for the general election. “Bernie said explicitly, ‘Look, I’ll be frank with you. In terms of our social media strategy, where we’re headed, we don’t know what we’re doing.’” Sanders supporters, like Democrats more generally, want their candidate to win the primary. But the most important thing is that they win the presidency. “I think Bernie is concerned he won’t be heard over [the] Jerry Springer audience chants and WWE action that has become the political landscape,” added Sheppard. “He needs help being a troll.”