why am i doing this?
because there's a misconception about what happened in 2016. it is absolutely true that clinton did very well amongst southern blacks, but she also did extremely well amongst southern whites, and she wouldn't have run up these huge margins in the south, otherwise - it was a broad base of support in the south that aided her, not just specifically black voters.
biden is doing well with southern blacks - i do not dispute that - but he does not appear to have that broad base of support. he is not doing well with any white voters at all, and his support amongst latin speakers appears to be both middling and extremely tenuous.
south carolina is overwhelmingly black in it's democratic primary because it is overwhelmingly republican in it's general disposition, and that's where all the white voters end up. i'll remind you that they can vote tomorrow if they want, but most of them won't. so, biden's dominant support in the black community will likely be decisive; everybody realizes this, i offer no dissent.
but, almost all of these other states are not majority black, and that opens up very large spaces for some of these other candidates that are polling much better than biden is amongst southern white democrats - buttigieg particularly, and potentially klobuchar.
so, this mistake that is being made is that clinton relied on blacks, and it's wrong - she relied on the south more generally, and if you were to pull the whites out of her southern coalition, she'd have faltered, just as she would have if you had pulled the blacks out. she needed both, and she got both.
the evidence seems to suggest that biden will not be able to reproduce that cross-racial southern coalition, and people are going to be surprised by what happens in some of these states like virginia and tennessee.
biden could still win these states, but he's going to be scraping for votes, and it could split enough to give sanders some wins in places he otherwise had no reasonable expectation to win in.
south carolina is overwhelmingly black in it's democratic primary because it is overwhelmingly republican in it's general disposition, and that's where all the white voters end up. i'll remind you that they can vote tomorrow if they want, but most of them won't. so, biden's dominant support in the black community will likely be decisive; everybody realizes this, i offer no dissent.
but, almost all of these other states are not majority black, and that opens up very large spaces for some of these other candidates that are polling much better than biden is amongst southern white democrats - buttigieg particularly, and potentially klobuchar.
so, this mistake that is being made is that clinton relied on blacks, and it's wrong - she relied on the south more generally, and if you were to pull the whites out of her southern coalition, she'd have faltered, just as she would have if you had pulled the blacks out. she needed both, and she got both.
the evidence seems to suggest that biden will not be able to reproduce that cross-racial southern coalition, and people are going to be surprised by what happens in some of these states like virginia and tennessee.
biden could still win these states, but he's going to be scraping for votes, and it could split enough to give sanders some wins in places he otherwise had no reasonable expectation to win in.