The Clark County Black Caucus (CCBC) pushed back against the notion that former Vice President Joe Biden, a top Democratic presidential candidate, has near solid support among black voters.
“The notion that Joe Biden has all of the black vote is not true,” caucus chairwoman Yvette Williams told Hill.TV on Friday.
Williams pointed to Sanders’s strong support among young black voters, emphasizing that the voting bloc is not “monolithic.” In addition to taking this into consideration, she noted that candidates shouldn’t just be focused on states like South Carolina, where black voters make up a significant proportion of the electorate.
“We talk about South Carolina when we talk about black people but you have black people living all over in the United States and our needs may be different because we may have social issues that impact us different than in other parts of the country,” she told Hill.TV.
CCBC, which is located in Nevada’s most populous county, initially backed Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) with a second alignment to Sanders. But, since Booker ended his presidential bid earlier this month, Williams said the caucus has thrown its full support behind the Vermont senator.
Biden, meanwhile, has often boasted “broad support” among those in the black community, and for the most part, national polling backs up that claim.
A Washington Post-Ipsos poll released earlier this month found Biden with a 28-point lead among Democratic-leaning black voters, with 48 percent support. Sanders followed with 20 percent, while no other candidate garnered double-digit support.
However, that same Washington Post-Ipsos poll also showed Sanders leading Biden among young black voters by a 12-point margin. According to the results, Sanders boasted 42 percent support among black Democrats aged 18 to 34 compared to Biden’s 30 percent.
Williams attributes much of Sanders’s support to strong grassroots organizations like CCBC as well as Sanders’s ability to motivate first-time and disenfranchised voters.
“You’ve got a lot of first-time voters and you’ve got a lot of folks who just decided I’m just not going to vote anymore — let’s throw our support behind Bernie Sanders and let’s try to get this man elected and let’s see if we can’t create the America that we all truly say we want,” she said.
—Tess Bonn
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