Conventional wisdom dictates that black voters love Hillary Clinton. But one recent poll has the Democratic presidential front-runner and former secretary of state down by 31 points among black Democrats since July.

Meanwhile, a frequent criticism of Clinton’s main rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is that he doesn’t know how to connect with black voters. According to political strategist Luther Smith, “Sanders’ attitude is … ‘I am talking about the kind of things I think should be important to you, and if I am saying the right things on those policy issues, then you should naturally gravitate towards me’ … That is not how most people operate, but that is definitely not how black people operate.”

While it is insulting to suggest that a candidate’s policy positions are irrelevant to black voters, it’s probably true that some portion of all voters prize style over substance.

But the assumption that Sanders can’t earn black votes is an example of the worst kind of smug, lazy political thinking. Clinton began a long campaign season with high polling numbers among black voters. But this has been driven at least in part by vastly higher name recognition than Sanders, which will not necessarily guarantee her the loyalty of black voters over time.

Black voters want what all voters want — access to education, health care and decent jobs. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement has revealed that certain issues, such as guaranteeing basic physical safety and reforming the criminal justice system, are higher priorities for black voters than for other groups.

Sanders is a gruff, didactic 74-year-old white man who has lived in Vermont, a state that is only 1 percent black, for over 45 years. He’s never going to win on style. But the more people become familiar with him and his policy positions, the more popular he has and will become. Witness Sanders’ recent passionate endorsement from rapper Killer Mike in front of a raucous multiracial crowd in Atlanta, which immediately went viral. On the issues that matter most to black voters, Sanders has a much stronger record than Clinton.

Sanders, who has publicly opposed the death penalty throughout his congressional tenure, said a month ago, “It is time for the United States of America to join almost every other Western industrialized country on Earth in saying no to the death penalty.”



By contrast, Hillary Clinton said of the death penalty, which is disproportionately applied to black people, “I do not favor abolishing it ... because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we’ve seen in most states.” In other words, we know that thousands of black men who may or may not have committed any crime have been and will be executed, but we should try to do it less often.