there are some southern states where you might not even need to run multiple black candidates to split the vote, but just a number of centrists.

for example, i'm sure that gore would have cut into clinton's vote in tennessee, which, iirc, was about 70-30. enough? maybe not.

but, what our currently unknown leftist champion needs here is a field with a large number of centrists in it, and if we end up going into the southern primaries with 8 centrists and one leftist, our champion could mitigate the damage well enough to win by sweeping the midwest.