Bernie Sanders’ prolific small-dollar fundraising means the Vermont senator can be a factor in the primary through the end of March – and perhaps for much longer. | AP Photo Why the Democratic primary is about to get racial There's a reason Bernie Sanders' first campaign stop after New Hampshire is with Al Sharpton.

CONCORD, N.H. — Hillary Clinton’s got until South Carolina to prove this is all a fluke. Bernie Sanders has until the end of March to prove it’s not.

If Sanders is truly going to become a Barack Obama-style Clinton-slayer of 2016, he knows he’s going to need to start racking up Obama-level support among non-white voters, and quickly, because the Democratic primary is about to come down to race.


The Sanders campaign understands this, which is why the first campaign stop after his blowout victory in New Hampshire is a breakfast meeting Wednesday with the Rev. Al Sharpton in Harlem’s iconic Sylvia’s restaurant.

Sanders, who represents the overwhelmingly white state of Vermont in the Senate, has yet to prove he has the ability to win minority voters -- a critical component of the Democratic Party coalition. He’s said he’s confident non-white voters would come to him once they heard his message -- and aides consistently repeat that claim – but his close defeat in Iowa and landslide win New Hampshire, two states that are just as white as Vermont, haven’t answered any of the questions.

The next two early states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, have much larger Latino and African American populations, which means he no longer has the luxury of appealing to his base of white liberals.

“He can’t get there from here. She can win with everything he’s got,” said Joe Trippi, who faced a similar problem when he was trying to figure out the math for the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean, another Vermont liberal popular among white progressives, but one who didn’t have a primary opponent with the kind of strength among African-Americans and other minority voters that Clinton’s shown in 2008 and so far in this race.

“Once you leave New Hampshire, the Democratic Party is 44 percent non-white,” Trippi said. “What Iowa should have told everybody is that they’re probably going to dead heat each other among the 56 percent of white Democrats—and that’s probably being generous to him, because of all the conservative and moderate white Democrats elsewhere around the country.”

But if Sanders can make enough inroads by the Feb. 20 Nevada caucuses and then by the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary to come in a close second in those minority-heavy states, that’s when the Democrats who’ve dismissed the Vermont senator as a slight itch would start worrying the condition is becoming a full-on burn.

“With minority voters, African-Americans and Latinos, the main obstacle we have is they simply don’t know [Sanders]. As they get to know him, as they get to know his story, as they begin to see his message and what he stands for, I think he’s going to have a tremendous opportunity,” said chief strategist Tad Devine after Sanders’ victory Tuesday evening. “We also believe with African-Americans that Bernie Sanders’ story is enormously powerful. This is a guy who as a student at the University of Chicago set the direction of his entire life to the civil rights struggle and we think telling his story and what became of it, his fight for equality, civil rights, his fight against inequality and economic injustice is very, very powerful, and is going to resonate with the African-American community.”

Sanders has said that he plans to stick around until the convention, and new investments in television ads in Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma (all largely white states) on Tuesday sent a clear message that he has the money to fund that kind of prolonged challenge.

That still won’t be enough to take Clinton down: Sanders would need to almost run the table in the 10 caucus states that come in March and do respectably enough in the primary states, all while holding off a Clinton machine that’ll be pulling out all the stops.

Illinois State Sen. Terry Link, an assistant majority leader in Springfield and a Clinton delegate, said that he doesn’t expect there to be much of a race on his home turf on March 15.

“Sanders will obviously do very well in New Hampshire, but I think after that, where does he go?” Link said. “You see the handwriting on the wall.”

Sanders will also need to defuse the all-but-inevitable grenade that will be rolled into the fray by his rivals -- that Sanders is trying to beat an almost all-white path to the nomination through the notably not diverse Democratic electorates in caucus states like Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Maine, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, and Washington.

That caucus-based strategy is designed to soften the expected blow on Super Tuesday, when Clinton is expected to run well in Southern primaries. Sanders is betting on heavily white caucus states like Minnesota and Colorado that say, while banking on winning proportionally-allocated delegates in populous states like Virginia and Massachusetts.

From there, they hope a Clinton-is-stumbling-badly narrative will have taken hold, opening the door to upsets in primary states like Michigan. By late March, the Sanders campaign hopes, the senator will have amassed enough delegates—and momentum—to make clear he's in it for the long haul.

But Clinton, reading the New Hampshire tea leaves, turned her focus to South Carolina even before the polls closed in New Hampshire Tuesday night – she announced endorsements from six new state legislators there and turning the attention back to Sanders' gun control record and its potential resonance with African-Americans.

In a nod to the campaign’s new emphasis on the racial dimension of the primary fight, the Clinton camp also said new legislators in Mississippi – the state with the highest percentage of African-Americans in the nation – would back her on Wednesday based on "her commitment to fight for women, families and African Americans as President," and, to drive home the point, the campaign said three mothers of African American men killed in high-profile cases of violence, would campaign for her in the coming weeks.

Sanders’ prolific small-dollar fundraising means the Vermont senator can be a factor in the primary through the end of March – and perhaps for much longer. His campaign is expected to get a surge of donations with his win Tuesday and the party’s proportional allocation of delegates will allow him to keep on collecting delegates even in states where Clinton trounces him.

Michael Dukakis, who won New Hampshire in his 1988 Democratic race then went on to split primaries for weeks until he locked up the nomination with the New York primary in April, said that the number of wins Sanders racks up in the next few weeks are going to determine whether he looks like a competitive candidate or flips back to an alternative protest candidate, like Jesse Jackson became in his race.

“People want to be enthusiastic about things,” Dukakis said. “I suppose he could do what Jesse did in my case and say, ‘I’m going to keep running because I have ideas and opinions and I want to get them out there.’ But it’s tough to sustain momentum and it’s tough to sustain fundraising. The enthusiasm for that trails off.”

