March 07, 2016
Pundits may be declaring that Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign is over, but he's still planning for a fight in Pennsylvania's April primary. A new radio ad playing in Philadelphia shows that he's going after a constituency that has been key to Hillary Clinton's success so far: black voters.
As NewsWorks reported, the Sanders campaign has purchased ad time on hip-hop station Boom Philly 107.9 FM. The radio spots paint Sanders as "a reformer who believes in ending racial profiling and mass incarceration so the justice system works for everyone."
Sanders has won eight primary contests so far, but not one state where more than 8 percent of the population is black. In contrast, Clinton has enjoyed landslide victories in states with large African-American populations, earning more than 70 percent of the vote in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina.
In Sunday's Democratic debate on CNN, Sanders emphasized his civil rights record in the '60s — he was arrested while protesting segregation in Chicago schools and attended Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington — as well as his sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement.
"I was with young people active in the Black Lives Matter movement," he said. "A young lady comes up to me and she says, 'You don't understand what police do in certain black communities' ... I believe that as a nation in the year 2016, we must be firm in making it clear. We will end institutional racism and reform a broken criminal justice system."
To counter, Clinton pointed out that as a young college graduate she worked for civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman and investigated segregated schools in Alabama.
Pennsylvania is around 11 percent African-American; that number rises to 44 percent in Philadelphia. Clinton is up by 17 points over Sanders in the Keystone State, according to FiveThirtyEight's polling average, but that's based on data from before Super Tuesday.
The Democratic primary isn't until April 26, but if the race is still competitive at that point, Pennsylvania, with its 189 delegates, will be a must-win. Florida, New York and California are the only states left in the race with more delegates at stake.
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