Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

Kamala Harris was dubbed the “Female Obama” even before she announced she was going to “pull off an Obama-sized feat in 2020,” as McClatchy put it when the California senator formally entered the Democratic presidential primary this week. Now, her campaign envisions replicating the coalition that backed Barack Obama’s 2008 primary upset: “Asians, Latinos and other voters of color, as well as educated white liberals” and young voters.

Julián Castro has the same idea. After the 44-year old grandson of Mexican immigrants announced his candidacy, his brother Joaquín predicted that he would have “strong support” among Obama voters because “his message resonates” with them.


Julián Castro’s fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke was also touted as Obama’s natural political successor. “He’s Barack Obama, but white,” said one anonymous donor to POLITICO, marveling at O’Rourke’s Senate campaign and his online fundraising haul.

Other candidates, still waiting in the wings, can be expected to eye the Obama coalition for themselves. If Cory Booker or former Attorney General Eric Holder enter the race, surely more Obama comparisons will be made. Nobody would confuse Joe Biden for Barack Obama, but he does have the unique credential of having been Obama’s vice president and would hope to impress his voters. Bernie Sanders, who won over young white progressives but not older African-Americans in 2016, has been spending more time in front of black audiences ever since.

The demographic path Obama charted in the 2008 Democratic primary is a tantalizing one: Put together African-Americans with young voters and white liberals who live near Whole Foods, and you can send every other Democrat packing. But there’s a big problem with trying to recreate Obama’s 2008 success in 2020. In a field with so many choices and so much diversity, African-American voters are far less likely to function as a monolithic bloc.

The black vote became decisive in 2008 once the field winnowed down to Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s early polling lead was buoyed by African-Americans. But after Obama captured the hearts of liberal white Iowans, African-Americans recognized he had a shot at making history, and thereafter were nearly unanimous in rallying to his side.

Where that made the biggest difference was in the Southern states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, where African-Americans accounted for about half of the Democratic electorate. Obama edged Clinton in the entire race by only 29 pledged delegates, and those five states netted Obama 65 more delegates than Clinton won—more than doubling his eventual margin of victory.

Eight years later, African-American primary voters held no grudges and gave Clinton their overwhelming support. In turn, Clinton racked up a 153-delegate lead over Sanders in those five crucial Southern states. She netted another 122 delegates over Sanders in Tennessee, Texas and Virginia—three Super Tuesday states where black voters were between one-fifth and one-third of Democratic primary voters. (In Texas, Clinton also beat Sanders handily among Latinos, who made up one-third of the vote.) Those eight states helped Clinton by early March build a lead that was essentially mathematically impossible for Sanders to overcome, and accounted for most of Clinton’s final pledged-delegate margin of victory of 359.

Clinton’s 2016 coalition diverged from Obama’s in one key respect: The white part of her coalition was mainly composed of more moderate, less educated senior citizens instead of younger progressives likely to hold college degrees. But the clear constant in the two victories was bedrock black support.

The power of the black vote was evident in the 2018 Democratic primaries, too. African-American Stacey Abrams romped over her white opponent in Georgia’s gubernatorial primary. In Florida, Andrew Gillum, the lone African-American in a seven-person field, eked out a victory with a little more than one-third of vote after running up the score in four populous counties with large black constituencies. Abrams and Gillum ran to the left in their primaries, hewing closely to the Obama ’08 model by bringing white progressives into their winning coalitions.

This trend is why the South Carolina presidential primary—the first majority-black primary in 2020—is garnering increased attention at the expense of the lily-white affairs in Iowa and New Hampshire. And appropriately so. Black voters are a major component of the Democratic Party and should play a sizable role in picking the nominee.

But their role may be more complex this time around. The primaries of 2008 and 2016 quickly came down to binary choices. In 2008, North Carolina’s John Edwards limped into the South Carolina primary, came in third, and called it quits, making it a two-person race for the rest of the South and beyond. And 2016 was always a contest between Clinton and Sanders (Jim Webb’s plea for time notwithstanding). With the white vote divided, once black voters forcefully swung behind Clinton, the race was over.

This white male pundit has no special insight into the mindset of today’s African-American voters. But early polling suggests they are not rushing unanimously toward any one bandwagon. This week’s POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows Biden leading among African-Americans with 26 percent, followed by Sanders with 14 percent. Harris comes in third with 7 percent (most of the poll was conducted just before she announced her candidacy) while Booker (2 percent) and Holder (1 percent) are near the bottom of the pack.

It is often noted that Obama trailed Clinton in early 2007 polling, and that was among black voters as well. But even back in January of that year, the same stage of the primary season as today, Obama was scoring double digits and held a solid second place, ahead of more established figures like Edwards, John Kerry and Al Gore. None of the current and probable candidates of color begin the race in the strong position Obama held.

Early polling is not always predictive because many voters aren’t yet paying close attention. But according to South Carolina’s leading African-American politician, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the black voters who are paying attention are still shopping, albeit from an initial short list. “From African-Americans, I’ve only heard three names being discussed: that’s Booker, Harris and Biden” he told the New York Times. He even went as far as to predict Biden, who has long vacationed in South Carolina and maintained political ties to local leaders, would win the state and “everybody else would be running for second place.”

If that proves true, or if no one candidate wins South Carolina by a large margin, it sets up a dynamic different than the recent past. In 2008 and 2016, the landslide winner of South Carolina went on to the sweep the rest of the critical Black Belt states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. This time, South Carolina may be more of a winnower, culling the field but not catapulting one candidate into the lead. Different Southern states may go different ways. No one would reap a decisive delegate haul.

An argument that has gained prominence is that the best way to win a Democratic primary is to be an African-American candidate who runs left. National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar observed after the 2018 gubernatorial primaries: “African-American candidates were able to build an energized Democratic coalition of black voters, white liberals, and younger voters to swamp more-established candidates in primaries. But white liberal candidates struggled to expand their support beyond the most predictable precincts, unable to build racially diverse coalitions for their progressive messages.”

As Theodore R. Johnson further explained in POLITICO Magazine last October, white Democrats have moved left since 2000, but “the notoriously pragmatic black electorate” has not. Fifty-five percent of white Democrats now self-identify as liberals, double the share of black Democrats. Successful progressive black candidates have cannily black voters’ desire “to elect people who understand the experience of being black in America” while also “running to the left of their competition to have a shot at winning white liberals.”

In Slate, Jamelle Bouie speculated along similar lines that a black candidate could have the edge this primary cycle. White candidates, he suggested, either can’t adequately convey “social solidarity” with black voters, or in trying too hard to convey it, spark backlash among white voters. Black candidates, Bouie argues, “can stay somewhat silent on race, embodying the opposition to the president’s racism rather than vocalizing it and allowing them space to focus on economic messaging without triggering the cycle of polarization that [Hillary] Clinton experienced.”

But if black voters are not a political monolith in 2020, that would greatly expand the plausible permutations for assembling a winning coalition in the Democratic primaries. In 2016, Sanders and his democratic socialist “revolution” failed to impress most “notoriously pragmatic” African-Americans. But he did narrowly win among black voters under 30, who are presumably more idealistic. If he held on to that niche and most of his earlier base of young white voters, in a fractured field, that might be enough.

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a possible dark horse entry, has been purposefully antagonizing the left by deriding en vogue ideas like free college for all and a federal job guarantee as “unrealistic ideological promises.” Political suicide in today’s Democratic Party? Maybe. But McAuliffe might be able to convey “solidarity” and win some share of the black vote by selling his biggest gubernatorial accomplishment, restoring the voting rights of approximately 173,000 ex-felons almost single-handedly. Then, with the help of older, moderate white voters, he might rebuild a version of the Hillary ’16 coalition. Weirder things have happened! Though Biden, if he really does have the inside track in South Carolina, would be better positioned to pull off a multiracial coalition of pragmatists.

The candidates who are people of color may have the best grasp on how to win a sufficient amount of narrower slices of the Democratic base. For example, Harris, who has Jamaican and Indian ancestry, is leveraging her membership in the 300,000-member Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which may help her consolidate college-educated black women. The website Jamaica Global recently praised Harris for emphasizing her Jamaican heritage at a 2018 campaign appearance in South Florida, which has a significant Jamaican-American population. And media outlets in India have taken note of how Harris regularly extols her Indian mother. But despite Harris’ potential for stitching together a broad, racially diverse coalition, if Castro proves successful in consolidating the Latino vote, he could give Harris a scare in her delegate-rich home state of California.

Beyond how well they perform in their own racial and ethnic communities, candidates of color will have to decide which white subgroups to pursue. Johnson’s analysis, written before the November 2018 midterms, raised a red flag. Referring to African-American progressives like Abrams and Gillum, he warned, “If these nominees are unsuccessful, it would suggest, rightly or wrongly, that black progressive candidates may still be a bridge too far for too many Americans, just as Jesse Jackson was in 1984. And it may very well disrupt the white liberal-black voter coalition within the Democratic Party ... ”

Abrams and Gillum did lose their general elections in 2018. Therefore, as potent as a progressive black-white coalition can be in the primary, nonwhite Democratic candidates will have to examine whether an overly aggressive pursuit of white progressives would harm their ultimate chances of becoming president. Then again, self-described liberals compose a majority of white Democrats, and you can’t win the general if you don’t win the primary. Harris and Castro, as well as Booker and Holder if they run, probably should still lean left, but they need not feel obligated to chase Sanders to the furthest left pole on everything.

One thing is certain: Even if the black vote doesn’t repeat its Democratic primary role as a monolithic gatekeeper, black voters—plural—are still of the utmost importance. And that means issues affecting the black community are of the utmost importance as well. But candidates and their campaign strategists will need to tailor their messages based on factors like age, education level, region, gender and ideology, just as campaigns often do when wooing white voters. In the process of doing so, they may learn differences in issue priorities and positions among African-American subgroups.

In 2008, the campaign that convinced the most Democrats that it was poised to make history was the campaign that fused the winning coalition. In 2020, the campaign that grasps the complexity of the Democratic Party, and crafts a platform and message to navigate that complexity, will most likely be the campaign that successfully builds its own distinctive, and dominant, coalition.