Bernie Sanders was on fire.
The most votes in the Iowa caucuses. First place in the New Hampshire Primary. A dominant display in union-dense, racially-diverse Nevada. Three consecutive popular vote victories.
The Vermont Independent had usurped Joe Biden’s longstanding lead. The former Vice President to Barack Obama was on the ropes.
A lackluster fourth in Iowa. A disastrous fifth place in New Hampshire. In Biden’s best state, Nevada, Sanders still doubled his vote total.
Pundits mused that Sleepy Joe was toast.
But, the former Vice President had something no other candidate did: demonstrable support from African Americans, the cornerstone of the Democratic electorate.
South Carolina, whose electorate was two-thirds Black, was next on the Primary calendar. In what was described as “a last ditch effort” to stop Sanders, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden.
Biden won nearly half of the popular vote..
The dynamic was familiar. Four years earlier, Sanders had consistently lost big to Hillary Clinton amongst the Democratic Party’s Black electorate — regardless of class, region, or age. 2020 brought hope that Sanders, one to consistently message about class rather than race, could improve his standing. In fact, Sanders was gradually narrowing the former Vice President’s lead amongst Black voters in national surveys — until South Carolina: where he was rebuffed by thirty points.
Overnight, the entire trajectory of the race changed.
On the eve of the Super Tuesday primaries, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and endorsed Biden. The next day, Biden won 10 out of 15 primary contests, solidifying a lead he would never relinquish. Almost instantly, Bernie Sanders’ plurality evaporated, replaced by a prohibitive deficit against condensed opposition. The only states where Sanders prevailed — California, Colorado, Utah, Vermont — had a small Black electorate, emblematic of his failure to court the “heart and soul” of the Democratic Party.
The race, effectively, ended right there.
While the emerging COVID-19 pandemic soon turned the world upside down, the metaphorical autopsy of Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign came back with the cause of death: a critical failure to make inroads with Black voters, dooming him against Joe Biden.
What was less clear was why.
Did Sanders’ progressive ideals alienate Black voters?
Was the specter of socialism too much to overcome?
Did Sanders focus too much on class war, and not enough on racial justice?
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Less than three months after Sanders dropped out, a middle school principal, Jamaal Bowman, unseated a sixteen-term incumbent in a Bronx and Westchester-based district.
Bowman, born and raised in East Harlem, had been an educator in the Bronx for decades. While he had never run for office before Bowman boasted a vast personal (and civically-engaged) network that spanned decades — parents, students, colleagues. On the trail he was a natural talent with real presence. Gregarious and charismatic, he was the sequel to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: the principal with a love for both his students and The Wu Tang Clan.
Eliot Engel had become dangerously out-of-touch with his majority-minority district. During the COVID-19, the incumbent holed up in suburban Maryland as New York became the pandemic’s epicenter. At a vigil in the Bronx following the murder of George Floyd, Engel harangued the organizers for speaking time, infamously uttering “if I didn’t have a Primary, I wouldn’t care,” into a hot mic. The gaffe was nothing short of political suicide. With the pandemic raging and Black Lives Matter protests taking place daily, Engel proved ill-equipped to meet the political moment.
On Election Day, Bowman clobbered Engel by fifteen percent. The plurality-Black 16th Congressional District was finally represented by one of their own.
Bowman’s triumph was ground-breaking. The former principal decisively won communities, neighborhoods, and zip codes — Black homeowners in Wakefield and Williamsbridge, middle-class co-operators throughout Co-op City, and the multi-racial working class across Westchester’s economically-marginalized cities, like Yonkers, Mount Vernon, and New Rochelle — where the left had never previously been competitive. This was not Astoria or Bushwick, there were no cadre DSA or WFP electeds down the ballot, and certainly no gentrifiers to speak of.
Upon arriving in Washington, Bowman unsurprisingly joined The Squad. In November, Bowman was one of six House Democrats to break with the Democratic Party and vote against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act because it did not include the Build Back Better Act.
Less than three years later, Bowman’s “no” vote was the focus of relentless negative advertisements, which assailed the Congressman for not sufficiently supporting Joe Biden.
Such was not a problem for Bowman’s first re-election, where he coasted to a thirty point victory. However, said victory came via a radically altered Sixteenth District, for the seeds for Bowman’s downfall were planted during the decennial redistricting period. Having lost population according to the Census, New York State was due to lose one Congressional District in 2022. And, following an attempted Democratic gerrymander being struck down by the State Court of Appeals, the court-appointed Special Master pushed Bowman’s district farther north into suburban Westchester County, while drastically reducing the Bronx portion. In 2020, the Bronx accounted for greater than forty-percent of the vote in NY16. Two years later, as a consequence of said redistricting, that number would fall to six-percent.
All told, New York’s 16th Congressional District lost more than sixty-thousand Black residents.
And, despite Bowman’s margin-of-victory, his 54% felt more like a ceiling than a blowout.
Eliot Engel, a noted Israel hawk who chaired the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, resented his successor. Along with a handful of close allies, Engel represented a dogged constituency who never gave Bowman a chance, and plotted their political revenge for years. Redistricting presented opportunity. Amidst the chaos, they tried (and failed) to convince neighboring Rep. Mondaire Jones to launch a sneak-attack on Bowman, once an ally. Despite publicly posturing that he would never challenge a fellow-Black progressive, Jones polled the hypothetical matchup, but found himself down thirty-points to the popular Bowman, and ultimately abandoned the idea.
Westchester County Executive George Latimer was their choice for 2024. Latimer, who had never lost a race, boasted a thirty-year career in Westchester County politics. And, while not well acquainted with the Bronx (his initial announcement failed to mention New York’s lowest-income county), Latimer knew that his path to victory came via the district’s affluent, suburbs. Already laying the groundwork for a challenge, October 7th further spurred Pro-Israel forces, led by AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee), to invest their considerable financial resources in Latimer. The Westchester County Executive’s had always struggled to fundraise. AIPAC ensured that would no longer be an issue for Latimer.
Opposition research trickled out every week. Bowman immediately endorsed a ceasefire in Gaza, while Latimer championed the pro-Israel consensus of the Democratic Party establishment. Bowman would undoubtedly crush Latimer in the district’s Black communities, but their electoral footprint had been significantly reduced since his 2020 election. Whereas Latimer was well-positioned to harness the suburban backlash to the incumbent. By the new year, before AIPAC had spent a single dollar, Bowman was ten points underwater.
Across media spaces, the race became a referendum on the War in Gaza. In Westchester County, that was certainly the case, with Latimer appealing to the large Jewish population, who cast the left-leaning incumbent as antisemitic for his sympathy for the Palestinian plight.
However — in the Bronx, Mount Vernon, and Yonkers — Israel-Palestine was rarely litigated.
Instead, Bowman’s vote against the Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Project became the featured line-of-attack, perpetuating the narrative that the incumbent was preoccupied with furthering his own image — at the expense of both his district and the Democratic President.
“Jamaal Bowman has his own agenda, and he’s hurting New York,” the ads repeated.
For weeks on end, this message consistently dominated the airwaves of the New York media market. What some might argue as Bowman’s greatest strength, his outspoken and candid nature, was ruthlessly turned against him. There was little appetite among Bowman’s opposition to litigate Palestine with working-class voters.
Nonetheless, even in defeat, Bowman’s Black support in the Bronx increased. Had New York State counted only eight-five more people during the 2020 Census, Jamaal Bowman’s district would not have been altered. His seat in Congress was lost to an accident of history.
—
I spoke to Jamaal Bowman recently about the left’s odyssey to build more rapport in Black neighborhoods, particularly in light of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City Mayor against Andrew Cuomo. While Mamdani would go on to defeat Cuomo resoundingly, he nevertheless lost Black voters by 20 points. We spoke before Zohran’s victory, when he was just beginning to poll neck and neck with Cuomo.
What had made Bowman so successful with Black voters, where other progressives had failed?
“The answer is easy: I’m Black,” he chuckled.
“I see no ideological divide between the Black community and progressives. Black people want affordable housing, fully-funded public schools, universal childcare, and jobs.”
A good candidate that can appeal to the Black community, in Bowman’s eyes, does “not shy away from class and race.” Many Black people want to see “one of our own” elected.
“Progressives sometimes, like Bernie Sanders, double and triple-down on class issues. For the Black community it is class and race. Bernie himself told me he tried to stay away from the race issue. We want to hear you have a racial analysis along with your economic analysis.”
Facetime with the community, rather than ideological kinship, is a prerequisite to running for office: “I didn’t run as a progressive. I ran as Jamaal Bowman, an educator who happened to be Black. I had worked in the Bronx for seventeen years. I taught and graduated thousands of kids over the years. Those people were excited to get on board with my campaign.”
On the issues, where the progressive left, increasingly college-educated, and the Black community, diverse and disproportionately working-class, are “talking past each other,” Bowman points to public safety and capitalism, where “certain segments of the Black community are ‘more conservative.’”
“The average Black person might speak about public safety from a more punitive, and less sympathetic, perspective — doubling-down on accountability. Whereas many progressives will go into a systemic dissertation on the criminal justice system. In my opinion, both things need to be occurring. Harm is done, but there needs to be accountability; part of that accountability needs to be rehabilitation, not recidivism.”
In 2021, New York City elected Eric Adams as Mayor. As crime increased in the wake of the pandemic, Adams told New Yorkers that they would not have to choose between justice and safety. A former police officer from South Jamaica, Adams’ law-and-order message crushed his more liberal rivals throughout the city’s Black neighborhoods.
“We were amidst the third iteration of Black Lives Matter, when George Floyd was killed. There was a whole movement around ‘Defunding the Police,’ and that became the rallying cry for criminal justice reform. And you’re just not going to get the median Black voter to support Defunding the Police. That’s a tough sell.”
Bowman’s election to Congress came at both the apex of “Defund” and the Black Lives Matter movement. His insurgent victory, along with that of Cori Bush in St. Louis, was dubbed the “George Floyd Era.” However, according to the Pew Research Center: “Since 2020, the share of Black adults who say police spending in their area should be decreased has fallen nineteen percentage points (from 42% to 23%), including a thirteen point decline in the share who say funding should be decreased a lot (from 22% to 9%).”
“When you unpack it — having mental health professionals respond to mental health issues, police focus on violent/serious crime, supporting incarcerated people with programs — Black people are on board,” Bowman said. “However, the slogan was weaponized very well by opponents of progressives. Bail reform happened around that time as well. There was a messaging problem,” he concluded.
Public Safety and Policing had been the seminal issue of 2020; four years later, criminal justice reform was barely discussed, as both Bowman and Bush were defeated by opponents bankrolled by AIPAC. While Zohran Mamdani laser-focused on affordability and costs-of-living, the democratic socialist also made clear he had no plans to cut the NYPD’s headcount, so as not to alienate working-class voters. Rather, Mamdani pledged to create a new entity — The Department of Community Safety (DCS) — staffed with trained social and mental health workers; focused on expanding violence interrupter programs and mental health teams that respond to 911 calls. “The police have a critical role to play,” he told The New York Times. “Right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net. This department will pioneer evidence-proven approaches that have been successful elsewhere in the country.” While Mamdani did not embrace “Defund,” his vision for police is rooted in the reforms of 2020.
—
“The Black community is almost completely aligned with Progressives when it comes to Gaza. Black voters are pro-human rights, against apartheid and genocide. Black elected officials are co-opted by the Israel lobby. They have been strategically building relationships with up-and-coming, talented Black elected officials — supporting their campaigns and whatnot.”
This dynamic, according to Bowman, is reflected by the political and lobbying power of both Israel and Palestine in Washington D.C. and New York City: “How many Palestinian leaders did Hakeem Jeffries meet with in Brooklyn when he ran for his Assembly seat? I would guess zero. How many Pro-Israel leaders did he meet with? I would guess more than zero. Black elected officials consistently engage with the Pro-Israel lobby, and have not been with a Palestinian lobby.”
However, while Black voters agree with the progressive line on Gaza, material conditions (economic issues) are still the dominant driver of political preference: “What the Black community cares about is money coming to our community, going somewhere else. Why are we spending money to bomb children that are starving to death when we can invest that money, not only on preventing those children from starving to death, but on childcare, transportation, affordable housing. I’m struggling here — why are we sending $4 Billion to Israel?
Democratic socialism, increasingly appealing to Millennials and Generation-Z, is still viewed skeptically by older voters, the heart of the Democratic electorate. The flaws of Capitalism are nonetheless familiar. Older Black voters (particularly the middle-class) remain weary of socialism: “We have worked very hard for four hundred years to succeed in the system that enslaved us, lynched us, oppressed us, and kept us out of power. Many of us have broken through that system to build wealth. The idea that others can work hard to build wealth too. Now progressives come along saying “Abolish Billionaires, Tax the Rich, and everything should be a cooperative,” and you have Black people being like, “Hold on a second. I’m doing well in this system. And now you’re trying to switch it up on me?”
According to the Pew Research Center, “despite having generally pessimistic views of capitalism, nearly six-in-ten Black adults (58%) said that supporting Black-owned businesses is an extremely or very effective tactic for helping Black people move toward equality in the U.S.” In fact, the same survey found that “Black adults are the only racial or ethnic group more likely to view capitalism more negatively than positively, and also the only group more likely to view socialism more positively (52%) than negatively (42%).”
So what’s lost in translation?
“People in Co-op City don’t know what a socialist is. [It’s] hard to ask someone who is 60, 70, 80 to embrace this new thing. Show up, do the work, and listen. I don’t think ideology in and of itself is the answer to our problems. When you’re Black, you’re not thinking about ideology, you’re trying to get from one day to the next: keep a roof over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, live and age with dignity.”
So what can progressives do to build support among Black voters?
“Do the work in those communities over a period of time. It’s not that complicated. Show up in an authentic way, not for your agenda, but for the agenda of the community.”
Sometimes “doing the work” and “community” are terms used by the establishment to gate-keep their opposition from seizing political power. However, this sentiment is rooted in truth and history. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party had real organizations. Precinct captains went from block-to-block whipping votes, inserted themselves into neighborhood struggles, and ensured their local clubs were packed with volunteers. Most importantly, many in the neighborhood wanted to belong to a kind of civic life, and the political machines provided that modest wish. Now, the machines hardly run at all.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for Mayor, with fifty-thousand volunteers and counting, attempted to recreate the sense of civic life, decaying in New York City for decades. Standing in the way was Andrew Cuomo: “He’s a household name. He is an institution. Whether you disagree with his politics or not, people trust him. A lot of people want dramatic change, but there are many others who want things to be stable. They perceive Cuomo as someone who provided stability,” Bowman told me as we concluded our conversation.
A consistent theme in my writing has been the influence of relationships and institutions, rather than ideology, on voter preference. Naturally, I followed-up: “Cuomo led among Black voters, not because of name recognition or some great ideological statement, but because they know him — not just his name — but what he’s about; in some cases, that relationship spans many decades. He symbolizes stability, something pre-pandemic, something trusted.”
“That is exactly right,” Bowman asserts, “and cannot be underestimated.”
—-
While Zohran Mamdani did not win Black voters overall, he built an entirely unique coalition; rooted less in race, and more in age, housing, and transportation.
A cursory review of the election results shows Mamdani’s results neatly tracing many of the city’s subway lines. In neighborhoods where younger voters (Gen-Z & Millennials) have asserted themselves politically, particularly in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, Mamdani trounced Cuomo. According to precinct data reviewed by The New York Times, Mamdani won “middle income residents,” those whose incomes are between fifty and one-hundred thousand dollars per year, by ten-percent; while winning majority-renter precincts by fourteen percent. Of the demographic data sorted by the Paper of Record, renters (70%) and those with “middle-incomes” (49%) were the two largest segments of the Democratic Primary electorate. Muslims and South Asian enclaves, long overlooked and taken for granted by the political class, emerged as a formidable voting bloc too, breaking heavily for Mamdani, one of their own. While Andrew Cuomo’s core coalition bookended the ends of the economic spectrum (the wealthy and the poor), Zohran Mamdani’s coalition was the “in-between” (working, middle, and upper-middle-class renters spanning white, Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods).
However, in spite of this mandate — the most votes ever in a New York City primary election — pundits have mused whether Mamdani has a “problem” with Black voters. Yet that is to view the Black electorate as monolithic. Consider the farthest reaches of Central Brooklyn, beyond the frontier of gentrification, such as Ocean Hill–Brownsville. On these blocks, Black voters comprise more than sixty-percent of the electorate in precincts Mamdani won by thirty and forty points, respectively. Here, the Black electorate is far younger than the citywide average, and indexed heavily towards the middle-income renters where the democratic socialist performed best. Most importantly, the campaign exhibited a consistent presence in this overlooked corner of Brooklyn, for many months. The same could be said for pockets of Mamdani support in the Bronx neighborhoods of East Tremont and Fordham. These precincts, in the heart of Cuomo Country, were islands of Mamdani supporters. Why? African Muslims, one of many new immigrant groups taken for granted by the Democratic Establishment, were courted by the Mamdani campaign, which visited a head-spinning 135 mosques the Friday before the Primary.
The common thread linking Mamdani’s strong support from Black voters is relationship. Not only did the voters, in many cases, meet him directly; they routinely heard from his eager supporters, before becoming ones themselves. Now, the Democratic nominee, armed with a movement that keeps on growing, is moving full speed ahead to November. Soon, the narratives will be retired.
You can read more of Michael Lange’s work on his substack, Narrative Wars.