Sanders’ team has long pointed out that he narrowly won young black voters in 2016. “The senator has trouble with older voters across the board. Millennials love him the most,” said Nina Turner, a Sanders campaign co-chair. She added that in regards to African-American outreach, “We’ve been working really hard. We’re going to continue to do so."

But younger black voters cast ballots at much lower rates than their older counterparts. This year, there is little exit poll data on black voters under 30. One exception is South Carolina, where exit polling found that Sanders defeated Biden among black voters under 30 in the state by a small margin, 38-36. But they only accounted for 6 percent of the electorate.

Sanders also bested Biden 41-29 among black voters under 30 in Texas — who comprised 2 percent of the electorate. But young voters haven’t turned out in the numbers Sanders’ campaign had hoped, putting the senator’s promise of an expanded electorate out of reach.

Polls have shown that older voters and people of color are more concerned with so-called “electability” than others, and recent surveys have found that voters see Biden as more able to defeat Trump than Sanders.

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, whose policies align with Sanders, said the Vermont senator’s “strong economic analysis resonates particularly with the black activist class.” But she doesn’t think Sanders understands that racism is as “central and key to our condition as the economic issues. Sometimes I feel like he doesn’t see that.”

“There's a blind spot as it relates to race,” said Brown, who previously endorsed Warren and has no plans at this time to back another candidate. “Bernie has not publicly expressed that he even thinks that he needs black voters.”

Brown was bothered by a recent interview Sanders gave to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. When pressed on his lack of support among black voters across the board, Sanders pinned it on Biden’s connection to former President Barack Obama, and claimed that in 2016 Bill Clinton’s popularity with black voters helped Hillary Clinton.

Brown praised the work of Sanders’ surrogates Turner, Agnew and Cornel West, but asked: “Where is the concerted effort and message that can actually bring in the masses of black people? I'm not seeing it, something is not resonating.”

Sanders also drew media attention after deciding not to deliver his original speech on race in Flint in favor of giving the mic to black leaders at his roundtable to talk about issues such as reparations, though he did speak himself late in the program about the wealth gap between white and black Americans, as well as the maternal mortality rate among black women.

Some of Sanders’ allies were miffed by the narrative that emerged from the event, which focused on Sanders’ scrapped speech rather than the voices of the black leaders and surrogates present who talked about their experiences with racial and economic injustice. “As black folks, we have been fighting for our entire lives to be positioned in a way in which we get to tell our stories,” said Jennifer Epps-Addison, president of the pro-Sanders Center for Popular Democracy and a member of the panel that night.

Likewise, Sanders’ decision to cancel a Mississippi event and skip the commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama raised eyebrows among some black activists and Democratic Party leaders.

“While it may seem like it’s a small state or regional event, [it] projects out to the larger African-American community,” said Andrew Gillum, a progressive star in Florida who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018 with Sanders’ backing. “It’s those kinds of things that candidates have to be very conscious of their participation. Black people watch for those signals from these candidates.”

Turner said Sanders attended the prior two Bloody Selma commemorations, and that he “is very committed to the civil rights movement” and “was a part of that movement as a young Jewish man.” Sanders held an event in Los Angeles, California, that day.

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Gillum said Sanders’ campaign would benefit from bringing in more black surrogate voices, or working to get different endorsers on the trail and making the rounds on cable television. “These campaigns have to constantly be signaling growth.”

Detroit, the most populous city in Michigan, will be the test of Sanders’ newly focused outreach to black voters, said Gillum. Last week, Sanders performed better among black voters in states outside the South. In Minnesota, for instance, Biden narrowly beat him among black voters, 47 percent to 43 percent — by comparison, Sanders lost black voters by 44 percentage points in South Carolina, according to exit polls.

“Sanders won Michigan in 2016 but lost the black vote to Hillary Clinton by 40 points,” said Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice whose research covers racial identity in electoral politics. “Nothing he's done since then suggests he can improve on that margin against Biden, especially with recent polls showing Sanders down by at least 15 points.”

“The Jesse Jackson endorsement and the Cornel West appearances are unlikely to move the needle much — there's simply no moment waiting for Sanders in Michigan that will do for him what [House Majority Whip Jim] Clyburn did for Biden in South Carolina,” said Johnson.

Sanders’ underperformance with black voters to date isn’t a complete surprise for Virgie Rollins, the chair of the Democratic National Committee’s black caucus and a political player in Detroit who hosted Sanders at her house before his narrow primary win there in 2016.

This time, Rollins is hosting Biden. Sanders, she said, is less relatable.

“I hosted Bernie Sanders, and he won Michigan,” Rollins said. “I hosted Barack Obama, and he became president. I hosted Bill Clinton, and he became president. And [now] I’m hosting Joe Biden.”

Marc Caputo contributed to this report.

