Charleston, S.C.— Even with­out mir­a­cles, Sen. Bernie Sanders could be the next Amer­i­can pres­i­dent. But mir­a­cles would help. The Independent/​Democrat/​democratic social­ist from Ver­mont, by way of Brook­lyn, vir­tu­al­ly tied for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton in Iowa and won hand­i­ly in New Hamp­shire, the first two con­tests. Polls on aver­age show Clin­ton ahead in the next two, Nevada’s cau­cus and the South Car­oli­na pri­ma­ry, but few reflect how ear­ly votes may sug­gest that Sanders is more viable than many vot­ers thought.

Appealing both to an often angry and culturally conservative group of white workers and to the black working-class can be like walking a tightrope.

Clin­ton strate­gists are count­ing on her stop­ping any Sanders momen­tum by win­ning most of a ​“fire­wall” of South­ern states, start­ing with South Car­oli­na on Feb­ru­ary 27 and extend­ing through six of the 11 con­tests on March 1, aka Super Tuesday.

Even Rand Wil­son, a vol­un­teer with the inde­pen­dent Labor for Bernie orga­ni­za­tion and a firm believ­er in Sanders’ chances, says, ​“If Bernie doesn’t break the fire­wall, it’s game over.”

A Sanders vic­to­ry in South Car­oli­na — or even a near-miss — would smash through the fire­wall and force the press and vot­ers to pay more atten­tion to him, under­min­ing the self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy of Clinton’s inevitabil­i­ty. But South Car­oli­na will be chal­leng­ing ter­rain for this test. A Dec. 20, 2015, CBS poll showed Clin­ton with a 36 per­cent lead among like­ly pri­ma­ry vot­ers in the state. The gap stretched even wider, to near­ly 60 points, among African-Amer­i­can vot­ers, who made up 55 per­cent of South Carolina’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry turnout in 2008. Yet even before the Iowa cau­cus­es, her lead over Sanders dropped to 30 per­cent in an aver­age of two late Jan­u­ary polls by NBC and CBS.

Con­ven­tion­al wis­dom favors Clin­ton, but it some­times proves not so wise. After all, Clin­ton was sup­posed to take South Car­oli­na in 2008 and lost to a skin­ny young sen­a­tor from Illi­nois with a fun­ny name.

Sanders has a longer way to go in a short­er amount of time — by Jan­u­ary 2008, Oba­ma and Clin­ton were tied— although he can prob­a­bly count on a last-minute burst of enthu­si­asm from South Carolina’s uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents and young vot­ers, as in oth­er states. And momen­tum is on his side. He nar­rowed Clinton’s lead by around 15 points in the last two months of 2015. That’s where key Sanders sup­port­ers like Christale Spain and John Grim­s­ley enter the fray.

Until last Sep­tem­ber, Spain, a 39-year-old African-Amer­i­can grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na Aiken, was deputy exec­u­tive direc­tor of the state Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. Then she joined the Sanders cam­paign, where she now serves as the polit­i­cal out­reach direc­tor. Like so many of his sup­port­ers, she was drawn by ​“Bernie’s mes­sage, his plat­form, specif­i­cal­ly racial jus­tice,” such as reforms of polic­ing and crim­i­nal-jus­tice poli­cies, which take on grave sig­nif­i­cance for her as the moth­er of a 15-year-old. But she also finds Sanders’ cam­paign appeal­ing because it pro­motes poli­cies that com­bine both racial and class jus­tice, such as a $15 min­i­mum wage, expand­ed social secu­ri­ty, free tuition at pub­lic col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, and uni­ver­sal, sin­gle­pay­er healthcare.

Grim­s­ley, 48, is an elec­tri­cian and a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tion­al Broth­er­hood of Elec­tri­cal Work­ers union. With only 2.1 per­cent of the work­force in South Car­oli­na who are mem­bers of unions, he’s a rar­i­ty — a white, work­ing-class union mem­ber in the South who is not afraid of Sanders’ ​“social­is­tic idea.” As Grim­s­ley sees it, social­ism is sim­ply the rea­son­able notion ​“that we’re all in this togeth­er, and we tax the rich peo­ple to pay for it.” He played a video of Sanders’ mes­sage to his local union hall and con­vinced his fel­low mem­bers, many of whom pre­vi­ous­ly knew lit­tle about the can­di­date, to endorse Sanders with very lit­tle and low-key hesitation.

Respec­tive­ly, Spain and Grim­s­ley speak to two con­stituen­cies that are key to Sanders’ suc­cess but often at odds polit­i­cal­ly — black vot­ers and white work­ing-class vot­ers. Sanders strate­gists believe that both groups would great­ly ben­e­fit from the poli­cies he advo­cates, but the cam­paign has not yet mobi­lized the over­whelm­ing sup­port of either. Whether Sanders can win in South Car­oli­na rests in large part on whether he can break through to them.

Bernie who?

The biggest poten­tial — and pos­si­bly biggest imped­i­ment — comes in Sanders’ effort to expand sup­port from black Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers. Based on the make­up of the 2008 elec­torate, Sanders may need more than 50 per­cent of the black pri­ma­ry vote to win South Carolina.

Judg­ing from In These Times’ inter­views with sev­er­al dozen South Car­olini­ans and from reports by orga­niz­ers, many African Amer­i­cans like Sanders’ con­crete pro­pos­als and cheer his bat­tle against the ​“bil­lion­aire class” that is rip­ping off the 99% through a ​“rigged econ­o­my.” But Sanders’ prob­lem is how lit­tle he’s known among vot­ers — espe­cial­ly black vot­ers — accord­ing to orga­niz­ers. ​“Our main goal is to edu­cate peo­ple in the African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty,” says Chris Covert, the campaign’s state director.

Hillary Clin­ton, for her part, has some big chits in the pri­ma­ry game: She is well known in South Car­oli­na and ben­e­fits from resid­ual affec­tion for Bill Clin­ton among African-Amer­i­can vot­ers, despite the harm done by his poli­cies on wel­fare, manda­to­ry sen­tenc­ing, NAF­TA and oth­er issues. Prag­ma­tism also works in her favor: Black vot­ers lean strong­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic and have plen­ty of rea­son to wor­ry about a Repub­li­can in the White House.

As I walked around a large­ly black, low-income neigh­bor­hood of North Charleston, the peo­ple I talked with were con­sis­tent­ly pro-Clin­ton and admit­ted not know­ing much about Sanders. But the com­mit­ment often seemed shal­low. ​“I’d go with Hillary Clin­ton,” says a 63-year-old man who sup­ports him­self with Social Secu­ri­ty dis­abil­i­ty pay­ments, ​“because she’s going to be the damned president.”

A 36-year-old moth­er of four who planned to vote for Clin­ton says that ​“all I know is Ben Car­son is say­ing things that are off the wall. …[Clinton’s] got my vote. The Repub­li­cans are worse than the Democ­rats. They want to cut all the pro­grams [that help peo­ple like me].” When asked what she thought of Sanders’ sup­port for a $15 min­i­mum wage, she smiles broad­ly. ​“Now you’re talk­ing,” she says. ​“Oh, I’d like that. I make $8 an hour clean­ing rooms.”

“Peo­ple have no idea of who he is,” says Christale Spain. ​“That’s the obsta­cle here in South Car­oli­na. Once [they] spend 10 min­utes find­ing out what he’s done, they’ve com­plete­ly turned our way. Now we’re mak­ing inroads.”

Luck­i­ly for Sanders, Spain’s pre­vi­ous post in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty taught her the polit­i­cal nit­ty-grit­ty that com­ple­ments his focus on big ideas. And it helps Sanders to have a high-pro­file, local black orga­niz­er accom­pa­ny him on his for­ays to pro­mote those ideas in the black community’s bar­ber­shops, hair salons, church­es and meet­ing halls, as well as pro­duc­ing ads for black com­mu­ni­ty radio. Three jam-packed vis­its in late fall seem to have gen­er­at­ed some ener­gy for the cam­paign, con­vert­ing mid-lev­el black Democ­rats and boost­ing his poll numbers.

There are still more prick­ly prob­lems. South Carolina’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic estab­lish­ment is fair­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. Accord­ing to Adolph Reed, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia polit­i­cal sci­en­tist who works with both the Sanders and the Labor for Bernie cam­paigns, many local black politi­cians in South Car­oli­na look to can­di­dates like Clin­ton for future jobs, con­tracts and con­tacts, and often define civ­il rights in terms of their spe­cial inter­ests. This polit­i­cal cli­mate goes as far back as Bill Clinton’s 1992 cam­paign, he says: ​“Clin­ton peo­ple went through the region and had a pow­er­ful mes­sage. Our guy is going to get the nom­i­na­tion, and if you want access, get on board right now.”

South Car­oli­na Demo­c­ra­t­ic state Rep. Ter­ry Alexan­der, a promi­nent African Amer­i­can min­is­ter and for­mer Clin­ton sup­port­er, is a high-pro­file con­vert to Sanders. ​“I like Sanders,” he says. ​“He’s very approach­able, a good old coun­try boy from up the road. [Clin­ton] is run­ning more on her name than on what are the best poli­cies. What’s she done for African Amer­i­cans?” To peo­ple con­cerned about Sanders’ social­ism, Alexan­der responds that the term sim­ply means a gov­ern­ment that active­ly pur­sues ​“what’s good for the people.”

It’s dif­fi­cult, how­ev­er, to pierce Clinton’s pro­tec­tive cloud of inevitabil­i­ty. One of the most influ­en­tial pro­gres­sive labor and African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers in Charleston, Ken Riley, pres­i­dent of a union local rep­re­sent­ing 1,500 long­shore work­ers, will not be sup­port­ing Sanders, despite his close ties to many key Sanders sup­port­ers and his admi­ra­tion for Sanders’ record in pol­i­tics. ​“It’s late in life to be mak­ing state­ments,” he says in Novem­ber, sit­ting in the large, new and strik­ing­ly mod­ern union hall. ​“I want to win. … I look at who I believe can win against the Republicans.”

He thinks it’s Clin­ton who stirs more excite­ment as an expe­ri­enced indi­vid­ual, as some­one with whom blacks feel famil­iar, and as a woman. With Sanders, he spec­u­lates, Repub­li­cans will ​“play the social­ist game, the age game, the angry old white guy — Bernie’s talk­ing revolution.”

But Charles Brave, Jr., a long­shore work­er, for­mer Riley ally and now vice-pres­i­dent of the state AFL-CIO, is one promi­nent African-Amer­i­can labor leader work­ing for Sanders. He believes he has won over enough sup­port for Sanders with­in the local to over­turn Riley’s per­son­al endorse­ment of Clin­ton at the next meet­ing, if Riley calls one before the primary.

Engag­ing the work­ing class

Sway­ing a third of South Carolina’s black Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers in a sin­gle month is a tall order. Sanders may not have to pull off quite as mirac­u­lous a con­ver­sion if he can turn out new vot­ers who didn’t par­tic­i­pate in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry in 2008: the polit­i­cal­ly dis­en­gaged, inde­pen­dents and even Republicans.

Sanders may be best able to engage dis­af­fect­ed white work­ing-class vot­ers who find that he offers a new way of mak­ing sense of their world — cast­ing the rich and pow­er­ful, rather than the weak and poor, as respon­si­ble for the prob­lems of both their coun­try and themselves.

To bring in sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of these vot­ers, how­ev­er, Sanders must reverse the work of the Repub­li­can polit­i­cal oper­a­tives who, 50 years ago, launched the party’s ​“South­ern strat­e­gy” in South Car­oli­na and peeled away con­ser­v­a­tive Democ­rats, espe­cial­ly work­ing-class whites. The strat­e­gy was based on a potent cul­tur­al brew of cod­ed appeals to racial resent­ment and issues involv­ing ​“God, guns and gays”— all of it wrapped up in coun­try music cul­ture — and it was suc­cess­ful. In 2008, South Carolina’s white elec­torate vot­ed Repub­li­can by the fifth-high­est mar­gin in the coun­try, with 26 per­cent of white votes in South Car­oli­na going to Barack Oba­ma and 73 per­cent to John McCain. Sanders hopes that some of those cul­ture- and race-relat­ed con­verts to the GOP can be won back if the Democ­rats defend work­ers against greedy bosses.

Steven Auer­bach, pres­i­dent of a Unit­ed Steel­work­ers local near Charleston rep­re­sent­ing AT&T work­ers, sees poten­tial among his union broth­ers and sis­ters. ​“Eighty per­cent of my mem­bers prob­a­bly vote Repub­li­can,” he says. Trump is pop­u­lar with some, but Sanders ​“looks at eco­nom­ic issues from a sim­i­lar point of view as them,” Auer­bach says. ​“He thinks employ­ees should get their fair share, which is a big con­trast from a lot of the big pro­cor­po­rate Repub­li­can candidates.”

Anoth­er advan­tage is that ​“he is not pro-gun con­trol, unlike the oth­er Democ­rats,” Auer­bach says. ​“All I hear from [many mem­bers] is about Oba­ma want­i­ng to take their guns.”

“Most Democ­rats don’t so much sup­port us as much as they try to per­suade us to believe they will,” Auer­bach con­tin­ues. ​“Bernie doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk, join­ing the pick­et lines.”

But there are also work­ing-class vot­ers who have dropped out of pol­i­tics, dis­il­lu­sioned with con­ser­v­a­tive Democ­rats as well as with right-wing Repub­li­cans. White work­ing-class vot­ers have among the low­est vot­ing rates of any group. South Car­oli­na Fed­er­a­tion of Labor Pres­i­dent Emer­i­tus Don­na DeWitt says that many of these drop-outs have emerged to work for Sanders.

Sanders may indi­rect­ly ben­e­fit from the work that the fed­er­a­tion has done in recent years to cre­ate a nucle­us of rankand-file pro­gres­sive activists. Under DeWitt’s lead­er­ship, in 2005 and 2006 it helped estab­lish a state branch of the Labor Par­ty, and under her suc­ces­sor, Erin McK­ee, it joined the state’s Work­ing Fam­i­lies Par­ty. Both ini­tia­tives have cul­ti­vat­ed a net­work of pro­gres­sive union mem­bers active in politics.

But in June 2015, after the state fed­er­a­tion urged the nation­al AFL-CIO to endorse Sanders, AFL-CIO Pres­i­dent Richard Trum­ka warned the South Car­oli­na orga­ni­za­tion that it was break­ing fed­er­a­tion rules and could not back Sanders. Even so, the state federation’s ear­li­er work, along with sup­port from Labor for Bernie, may boost both the black and white work­ing-class vote for Sanders.

Polls sug­gest Sanders’ feisty defense of work­ing-class eco­nom­ic issues can appeal to many blue-col­lar inde­pen­dents. Take John Grim­s­ley, the elec­tri­cal work­er. He has nev­er vot­ed and has no par­ty affil­i­a­tion, but he plans to vote for Sanders in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic primary.

Grim­s­ley shares with his work­mates a wide­spread belief that life in Amer­i­ca is going down­hill for peo­ple like them. But he does not blame it on the decline of reli­gion in the schools or the accep­tance of gays in the military.

“My grand­dad­dy, he didn’t work when he was old,” Grim­s­ley says. ​“He had mon­ey in the bank, and when he died he left mon­ey behind. Back in the ​’50s, every­thing was made in Amer­i­ca, but now it’s shipped from some­body else. And as the unions go down, every year it gets worse. How much mon­ey do peo­ple need before it’s enough? If you don’t put a stop to this, peo­ple will march on Wall Street.”

Although sev­er­al hun­dred elec­tri­cians are based in Grimsley’s local, many trav­el to find work, and there were only about 15 peo­ple at the hall when he got up to talk.

“Half of those at the meet­ing had nev­er heard of Sanders, and the oth­er half didn’t know much,” Grim­s­ley says. ​“I said that I’d nev­er heard of him either, but I like what he has to say. I nev­er heard any politi­cian doing some­thing for me until I heard this man. The peo­ple in Con­gress look out for the 1%, not the 99%.”

When he played the video of one of the senator’s speech­es, he wor­ried that some of his fel­low union mem­bers would be turned off by Sanders’ self-descrip­tion as a social­ist, although the word doesn’t both­er him. ​“It’s more ​‘for-the-peo­ple’ than the cap­i­tal­ist thing,” Grim­s­ley explains. ​“I believe in social­ism and cap­i­tal­ism. Some­thing in the mid­dle would be a good thing.”

The mem­bers vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly that day to endorse Sanders. In the next month’s meet­ing, when Grim­s­ley was absent and the ques­tion came up with the read­ing of the min­utes from June, they approved the vote with no dissenters.

Beyond a pol­i­tics of fear

Fear lurks just beneath the sur­face of the out­ward­ly com­fort­able yet inse­cure lives of many white work­ing-class men in South Car­oli­na. They sense what a new report from the Pew Research Cen­ter con­clud­ed: ​“the Amer­i­can mid­dle class is los­ing ground, no longer the major­i­ty and falling behind finan­cial­ly.” Indeed, the shrink­ing of the mid­dle class is like­ly the cause of the dis­turb­ing find­ings by lead­ing health econ­o­mist Anne Case and her hus­band, 2015 Nobel eco­nom­ics prize win­ner Angus Deaton, that in recent decades the mor­tal­i­ty rate has sharply increased for mid­dle-aged white work­ing-class men and women — pri­mar­i­ly from sui­cide or the abuse of alco­hol and drugs.

“What I have found is that the peo­ple with the biggest mouths are Repub­li­cans,” says elec­tri­cian Albert Hur­ley, as he walks along an ocean­front beach on a pleas­ant late fall day. ​“They’re the most fear­ful peo­ple. As a result, there’s a lot of big­otry among Repub­li­cans. It all comes down to com­pe­ti­tion for jobs, feel­ing that there’s not enough for every­one, and liv­ing your life in fear. I have nev­er lived my life in fear. You won’t make the right deci­sions and be col­lab­o­ra­tive with your fel­low work­ers if you’re always fear­ful for your job.”

Yet appeal­ing both to an often angry and cul­tur­al­ly con­ser­v­a­tive group of white work­ers and to the black work­ing­class can be like walk­ing a tightrope. Bill Fletch­er, a promi­nent black orga­niz­er and writer focused on labor and left­ist pol­i­tics, thinks that Sanders’ hard focus on inequal­i­ty of wealth and pow­er down­plays the ways in which both race and class inde­pen­dent­ly define the expe­ri­ence of African Amer­i­cans, he says, and risks turn­ing his cam­paign into a ​“one-note Samba.”

“Sanders could say to the white work­er, ​‘Of course, you’re being screwed, and let’s talk about it, but let’s under­stand when the black work­ers talk about inequal­i­ty, they’re not try­ing to take some­thing from you— they just want not to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly,’ ” Fletch­er says. ​“Sanders’ mes­sage should not be that all are being screwed, but all are being held in dif­fer­ent parts of the Titan­ic, some in steer­age and some in first class.”

Willie Leg­ette, pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at South Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty, thinks Sanders is right to pitch his mes­sage about inequal­i­ty broad­ly: ​“If you’re a white work­er get­ting your ass kicked every day, you’re not impressed with talk about white priv­i­lege. When white work­ers hear the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty talk­ing about inequal­i­ty, they think of it as talk­ing about peo­ple of col­or, and they don’t see them­selves as ben­e­fi­cia­ries.” What’s key, he says, is that Sanders ​“con­tin­ue his grand mes­sage about inequal­i­ty” while specif­i­cal­ly high­light­ing both white and black work­ers, ​“as opposed to only talk­ing about peo­ple of color.”

Can Sanders strike the right bal­ance and per­suade both white and black work­ing-class vot­ers to sup­port his cam­paign against the pow­er of the bil­lion­aires? ​“I want to say yes to that ques­tion,” says Christale Spain. ​“I believe he can. As the cam­paign pro­gress­es, there are more work­ing-class peo­ple for Bernie.”

Sanders makes sense to Hur­ley but can’t win, he sad­ly con­cludes. How­ev­er, Sanders may open debate: ​“He reminds peo­ple that things can be done a dif­fer­ent way. He doesn’t seem to be fearful.”

Yet, if enough South Car­oli­na vot­ers like Hur­ley, John Grim­s­ley and Christale Spain set aside their fears and act on their hopes, the ​“fire­wall” of South­ern pri­maries may prove imper­fect, let­ting Sanders con­tin­ue on to more fer­tile ter­ri­to­ry — or should his can­di­da­cy fail, lay the ground­work for it to be sur­vived by an ongo­ing cit­i­zen cru­sade for its ideals: a more demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­try, built on a less cor­rupt poli­ty and a more egal­i­tar­i­an economy.

What is there to fear?

This post was updat­ed on Feb. 10, 2016 to account for results of the Iowa cau­cus and New Hamp­shire primary.