When the dark horse suddenly becomes THE horse
The dark horse suddenly becomes THE horse to beat Spencer Platt / Getty

The big noise being made at this moment on social media is that Elizabeth Warren, a progressive, is holding Bernie Sanders back by not stepping out of the race and endorsing him. This analysis is not without substance. Warren really should end her run. The White House is clearly not in her future. It still might be for Bernie Sanders. But the focus on Warren may prevent many of Sanders’s hardcore supporters from making a deeper analysis of the present state of things. Biden’s fortunes changed dramatically in South Carolina, and the reason for this change can be found in two developments: one, a surge in black voters and, two, a decline in young voters. Let’s unpack these two developments.

If Biden becomes president, which is now a real possibility, much of the thanks will have to go to older black Americans. But why Biden? Why not vote for Sanders, whose program would, if realized, would make life better for black Americans? The answer is, of course, Obama. What cannot be ignored is that Biden had, publicly, a very close relationship with the first black president of the US. He is a white man who stuck with his black boss for eight years. There was no turbulence during this entire time. Biden appeared to do his job in exactly the same way he would for a white president. This fact means a lot to older black American voters. Sanders might have a better social program than the present frontrunner, but he has not been tested like Biden. He has never worked under a black man. If you cannot understand why this is of great importance to many black Americans, then you simply don’t understand black history, which is also the history of black disappointment.

But what about young voters? Where were they in South Carolina?

From USA Today:

Young voters cheer Bernie Sanders’ anti-establishment message. They turn out in throngs at his rallies. And they form the core of his grassroots efforts to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

But their fiery passion did not translate into the robust turnout he needed on Super Tuesday to win a number of key states, notably in the South where a strong showing by Joe Biden has made the nomination contest a two-man race, especially now that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden.

Exit polls for several states Biden won, including Massachusetts, Texas and a number of southern states that helped catapult the former vice president into front-runner status, found that while more young voters went to the polls this election cycle, they did not show up at the rate they did in 2016.

This is very, very bad news for our democracy. Young voters, it seems, were more active in 2016 than they are in the present presidential cycle. And this trend is found in all of the states in the South. Young voters, and particularly young black voters, decided to stay at home.


And though we need to address this situation as a major political crisis, many are now asking this question: Will the youth vote also be a low-show (in terms of rate) in one of the most important election days in the history of the country? This question or concern will not help Sanders’s run to the White House. Black voters turned out for Biden, and the impression is that they will do so again in November. That is a tangible. The youth vote, which might, for good reasons, feel that democracy in its current state is not worth the trouble, is an unknown. At present, this is where things stand. But there’s still lots of time and room for big changes to occur.

(If you want to know, I voted for Sanders.)

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...