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Some members of the campaign say
Sanders can improve at translating his
dedication to social justice into the lan-
guage of now. “Obviously, we’ve got to do
a better job of communicating that record
and that vision,” Jeff Weaver, a longtime
adviser, told me. Sanders, he said, needs
to articulate his ideas “in a culturally com-
petent way.”LONELY NO MORE
one of The final sTops on sanders’
Midwest battleground tour was a nurses’
convention at the Mohegan Sun Pocono
“racino”—a mix of racetrack and casino—
in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Sanders stood be-
fore a room full of nurses in red T-shirts
and spoke to them about their own hard-
ships, with real empathy and knowledge.
He mentioned patients who cut their pills
in half to save money, and nurses who
spend hours on the phone haggling with
insurance companies. The nurses roared
the roars of being seen. He was serving
them anger made of their pain, and they
lapped it up.
Then, having spoken about their
lives, he vanished. No time for pictures,
no handshakes, no hugs. He told them
how essential they were to the republic,
and peaced out. You could see the disap-
pointment in many of the nurses as they
rushed to the front to no avail, confused
into believing that a man seeking their
vote might be interested in them as peo-
ple, not just as examples of a thesis.
The racino was not a fluke. Along our
6,000-mile journey, when Sanders came
upon a voter in an airport or on a sidewalk
and the situation demanded a smile, he
gave the smile my 4-year-old gives when
he knows that greeting our dinner guests
nicely is the price of staying up. He didn’t
display a typical politician’s interest in
people’s names, how long they’ve worked
in a place, their story—unless it was an
event about their story. He barely engaged
with the press, not even just popping onto
the bus to say hi and build goodwill. Sand-
ers is a crusader with little patience for
small, human things—macro-compas-
sionate, micro-cantankerous. “There is a
gruff, no-nonsense aspect of his person-
ality,” Gray told me. “It’s not reserved for
people; it’s reserved for, I think, what he
perceives as distractions from people. Dis-
tractions from the issues that really mat-
ter.” But will the traits of the crusader,He sees economic
inequality as the
paramount issue in
American lifemortality rate for black women. Trans-
gender rights. The question of when phys-
ical contact between men and women
escalates from friendly to predatory.
The problem of combating hate crimes.
The woke primary is a challenge for
Sanders. In part because he is an old-style
leftist whose overriding lens is class, not
identity. In part because woke culture
often craves the kind of gesture making to
which he’s allergic. And in part because
Sanders seems to struggle with the expec-
tation that a 77-year-old white guy needs
to learn, evolve and prove that he “gets it,”
even if he was at Dr. King’s march.
The 2016 campaign left a residue of
doubt about Sanders’ ability to navigate
both ends of I-94. Critics complained that
his signature campaign advertisement,
set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,”
featured overwhelmingly white faces. His
campaign leadership was “too white, too
male,” as Sanders himself has put it. There
was the time in 2015 when Black Lives
Matter activists, unsatisfied with Sand-
ers’ responses to the problem of police
violence against African Americans, in-
terrupted a town hall at which Sanders
was speaking. “Shall I continue or leave?”
Sanders asked. “I’ve spent 50 years of my
life fighting for civil rights and for dig-
nity,” Sanders added, turning toward the
protesters. “But if you don’t want me to
be here, that’s O.K.”
The Sanders campaign is adamant
about two things: First, the notion that
Sanders has a “black problem” or a
“woman problem” is made up—a narra-
tive pushed by the Clinton camp in 2016.
The campaign says that Sanders actu-
ally does well among young voters of all
groups; his support weakens as people
climb toward his age. And, second, yes,
there were real problems that weren’t a
planted Clinton narrative, and they are
working hard to solve them. Every major
team on Sanders’ 2020 campaign now
has women in leadership roles; the cam-
paign claims a majority of its national
leadership team is female. Shakir is the
first Muslim-American boss of a major
U.S. presidential campaign. In response
to sexual- harassment complaints in 2016,
the campaign announced a slate of mea-
sures and published detailed guidelines
to curb the behavior.
But what makes Sanders an awkward
fit with the woke era goes deeper than mis-
steps. He is philosophically committed to
a view of the world that can sometimes
conflict with the expectations of 2019
identity politics. As a democratic social-
ist, he sees economic inequality as the par-
amount issue in American life—and rac-
ism and other injustices as derivative of it.
When asked, for example, about the 2015
death of Freddie Gray after being taken
into custody by Baltimore police officers,
Sanders talked about the “short-term” fix
of police reform, before suggesting that
the “long-term” solution was better em-
ployment opportunities to get young Afri-
can Americans off the streets—which isn’t
necessarily a fix given that police have also
gunned down unarmed black men in their
cars and backyards.
David Sirota, a Sanders speechwriter
and senior adviser, calls him a devotee of
“the actual Dr. Martin Luther King,” as
opposed to King the symbol. Sirota saysSanders is committed to “a multi racial,
class-unifying agenda,” in keeping with
King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which
married the quest for civil rights with out-
reach to poor whites. Briahna Joy Gray,
Sanders’ press secretary, who is black,
insists Sanders’ universal emphasis is
appealing to many working-class Afri-
can Americans, who favor programs like
Medicare for All and free public college. A
Quinnipiac poll of likely Democratic vot-
ers in late March found Sanders is the sec-
ond most-popular candidate among Afri-
can Americans, after Biden, with twice as
much support among such voters as the
leading black candidate, Harris. As re-
porter Perry Bacon Jr. of the political site
FiveThirtyEight put it, “While some black
political activists may dislike the Ver-
mont Senator, there is little evidence that
black voters do.” However, it’s also true
that Sanders remains less popular among
black voters than the electorate at large.