'I'm Baffled': What It's Like to Be a Black Sanders Supporter in the South

“We are losing the opportunity of a lifetime to make real change,” said Cunningham, sitting on her back patio on Primary Day afternoon, surrounded by the farm that has been in her family since the end of slavery.

The reason for Sanders’ looming defeat, she acknowledged: older, black Southern voters — people like herself. “It’s difficult for me to explain it,” she said. “I really can’t.”

Without question, former Vice President Joe Biden owes much of the revival of his electoral fortunes to older black Southern voters. They powered his flagging campaign to a decisive victory in South Carolina, Biden’s first primary win. Building on that, he would go on days later to clean up in Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina.

In Mississippi on Tuesday, Biden won black voters by an overwhelming margin, nearly nine to one. Among black voters over the age of 60, the support was all but unanimous: 96% supported Biden, compared with just 3% for Sanders.

But while middle-aged and older black supporters of Sanders may be very hard to find in Mississippi, they are there — discouraged and perplexed by the near complete rebuff of his campaign by their friends and family and adamant that his platform of universal health care and aggressive prison reform was tailor-made for their state. They were also just as certain, in the days leading up to the primary, that he would lose the state, and badly.

“If you go into black households, you see pictures of Jesus and John F. Kennedy, and now Obama,” said Jeff Moore, 42, a worker at a Nissan plant who met Sanders when he came to Mississippi to march in support of unionization efforts. As long as Biden’s name is attached to Barack Obama, Moore said resignedly, “he’s going to win.”

Sanders was trounced across the South in the 2016 primary, and, as many political observers have noted, his campaign did not heavily invest the time or money in the region needed to change that.

Mike Espy, who on Tuesday night became the Democratic candidate in Mississippi’s U.S. Senate race, described Southern black voters as “extremely practical.”

“They want to unify quickly and go ahead and make it mano a mano against Trump,” said Espy, who in 1986 became the first African American to represent Mississippi in Congress since Reconstruction. Sanders just presented too much of a risk to those who see the No. 1 priority as beating President Donald Trump, Espy said over the noise at an election night party in Jackson, where Biden’s victory was called before the place had even filled up.

As for governance, Espy added, it was true that Sanders had an ambitious platform. But the scope of that ambition was itself reason that black voters were skeptical. “Is it real?” Espy asked. “We’ve been lied to a lot.”

This whole line of thinking is exasperating to the Rev. Kenneth Thrasher.

“He is not Obama, why are you connecting Biden to Obama?” Thrasher asked, throwing his hands up in his church office, down the road from Jackson in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. “That is their mindset: ‘He is OK because we are pro-Obama and he was Obama’s vice president.’ ”

In 2008, having returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with a newfound skepticism of politicians, Thrasher, 45, had only reluctantly supported Obama in the first place. And if he’s being completely honest — and he has gotten grief about his views from friends and co-workers — Thrasher does not see Obama’s tenure as a time of great improvement for black people anyway.

Tanya Marsaw, 42, a full-time church musician and mother of three who was sitting in Thrasher’s office, was not like that; she had been all in for Obama. His victory in 2008 changed what she thought the country was capable of.

But she grew steadily disillusioned, losing her well-paying job as a truck dispatcher in 2009, incurring tens of thousands of dollars in student debt when she returned to school and living without health insurance because Mississippi declined to expand Medicaid.

“People say we want to go back to Obama but it didn’t help us,” she said. The only candidate she saw as offering real plans to help was Sanders, she said. Student debt forgiveness, “Medicare for All” — this is what she thought Mississippi needed, and it was a message she saw as far more likely to beat Trump. But no one around her seemed to agree.

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“I’m baffled,” Marsaw said. “Here in Mississippi, the poor whites, you vote against your own interest because you voted Trump. And here we are the poor blacks are voting against our own interests, too.”

Marsaw and Thrasher had attended a canvassing event for the Sanders campaign in Jackson on Sunday, one of several smaller profile campaign events around town. Sanders had canceled his scheduled pre-primary appearance in Jackson to focus on Michigan. On Sunday, a couple of dozen people sat in folding chairs outside of a high school to listen to Danny Glover, a Sanders campaign surrogate and for some, the only reason they came. “Otherwise I’d probably be at Tougaloo,” said one man standing in the back.

Across town Biden was speaking to a huge crowd at Tougaloo College, a historically black school, hours after speaking to a full sanctuary at the most influential black church in Mississippi. A host of high-profile black Mississippians including Espy had joined him. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s sole black congressman, extolled Biden to the crowd, calling him the kind of man you might meet at soul food institutions in Jackson and the one person who could “bring black and whites together on behalf of making this country a better place.”

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No black supporters of Sanders said they would stay home if Biden were the nominee. They want to beat Trump, too, and even think Sanders would give them a better shot. But they understood why Biden was likely to be the nominee.

“I think that there is level of familiarity with Joe Biden,” said Chokwe Antar Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson.

Lumumba had endorsed Sanders after pledging to support whichever candidate was chosen at an organized “people’s caucus” of more than 100 voters from across Mississippi in February. The voters gathered to discuss which presidential candidates had the strongest answers to their most pressing issues, including criminal justice, health care and economic equality. They chose Sanders.

This caucus, Lumumba pointed out, took place before South Carolina, when Sanders appeared to be the front-runner. Lumumba ended up as the only prominent elected official in Mississippi to endorse Sanders. Still, he stood by it.

“If we don’t demand anything different, we won’t get anything different,” he said.

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Sitting on her patio, Cunningham recalled leaving the farm as a young girl and meeting an activist named Stokely Carmichael. Soon after, she was traveling with the activist Fannie Lou Hamer to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, full of expectation.

She talked of the cynical dealing by Democratic Party leaders at that convention, of the stark inequities that persisted in Mississippi schools after integration, of the profound racial resentment in the country exposed almost immediately upon Obama’s becoming president and now, of the looming failure of the campaign she had put so much hope in.

“When you get disappointed and disappointed and disappointed it’s not easy,” she said. “That’s the difference between me and a lot of people. They say, ‘You’re always angry.’ I tell them, ‘You don’t know what I know.’ ”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .