This week, as Democratic presidential frontrunner Bernie Sanders turns to South Carolina’s primary, where around 60 percent of the Democratic electorate is black, his campaign is flanked by high hopes for 2020 and the long shadow of 2016. Not only did a weak performance among black voters lead to Sanders 47 point loss in South Carolina in the last primary, but the 7 percent dip in national turnout among black voters also hindered Hillary Clinton’s hopes in the general election.

This time around things are different. Sanders just surpassed Joe Biden with a plurality of black voters nationwide at 26 percent in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Aiming to redeem his performance from last cycle and to wipe any lingering doubts about his candidacy, Sanders rebooted team stands armed with a strategy leveraging peer-to-peer organizing and a message of economic uplift aiming to fulfill generations of broken promises.

“I think that people are right to look at our political system and be skeptical and frustrated,” says Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders's national press secretary. “I think that people of color feel that if not as much more than white voters, in part because of the way that inequities have heaped on us disproportionately. I think that there is a culture of skepticism within the black community, which is justified by the way we've been treated in this country.”

Gearing up for the 2020 election, the Sanders campaign—like other campaigns jockeying to reach voters of color—prioritized recruiting a multiracial staff to tailor its populist message to the particular plights of the Democratic party's diverse base. Joy Gray, who is black, says that the swift and unsuspected ascent in the 2016 campaign, made it difficult for Sanders’s then shoestring staff to reach out and organize the coalition necessary to win the nomination (In 2016, Sanders, who hails from the 94-percent-white state of Vermont, was starting off in the hole, campaigning against the Clintons who had built decades long relationship with Democratic black voters through the presidency.) His leadership team in the last cycle was initially all-white, lagged minority support in states like South Carolina, and was caricatured as monolithically supported by white male “Bernie Bros."

“This time around is very different. We’re obviously a serious campaign,” says Joy Gray. “We’re front runners, and from top to bottom, the staff is both robust and incredibly diverse.”

In addition to Joy Gray, campaign co-chair Nina Turner and deputy campaign manager René Spellman are also black women. And with co-chair Ro Khanna, who is of South Asian descent; co-chair Yulín Cruz, who is of Putero Rican descent; campaign manager Faiz Shakir who is of Pakistani descent; and teams of Latino organizers advocating for “Tío Bernie” in California and Texas, the campaign has built multiracial juggernaut. In the early states, Sanders’s team has been buoyed by a multi-platform effort: high-profile endorsements including that of New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a California concert with hip-hop icons Public Enemy, and viral videos with surrogates of color like the rapper Killer Mike and criminal justice reform activist Philip Agnew. Politico even posited the Bronx rapper Cardi B, who promoted her nail salon interview with Sanders to her 59 million Instagram followers, “might be one of Bernie's most powerful 2020 allies.”

While this new squad has worked to organize around keynote issues that disproportionately impact minorities like mass incarceration and family separation, much of the outreach has centered around the same kitchen table issues that plague all working families. “There is this perception that voters of color care about these very specific issues exclusively to other issues, so Latinos, only care about immigration and black people are supposed to only care about criminal justice reform, but what we found, and we found this in Nevada, is that [like] so many voters there, Latino voters care enormously about health care,” says Joy Gray. “Is that surprising when you look at the fact that Latinos are the most underinsured group in this country? No, it shouldn't be. And it's the same thing when you talk about black voters.”