[Op Ed] Race and Loathing in South Carolina Presidential Primaries

“We view race as an intrusion in politics instead of race being central to it …”
–Taylor Branch

That assertion from the celebrated civil rights movement chronicler aptly characterizes both the GOP and Democratic primaries in South Carolina. Leading up to the March 1 “Super Tuesday” contests–a multistate delegate grabfest–last week’s GOP primary within the state and this Saturday’s Democratic slugfest between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders demonstrate why stakes are so high–and the pivotal role of race.

For instance, Clinton and Sanders have openly wooed the black vote, seeking to prove their racial bona fides while acquiring influential surrogates: Some like Rep. James Clyburn, the powerful dean of the South Carolina Democratic Party, argue that Clinton‘s depth of experience is unsurpassed while others such as controversial director Spike Lee proclaims “my brother Bernie Sanders will do the right thing.”

[Related: B.E. Political Dictionary: Super Tuesday]

Known for its rough-and-tumble politics, the critical GOP and Democratic presidential primaries, respectively, reveal two sides of racial politics. Historically, it has been used in some primaries as a tool to repel white voters and derail campaigns. In other cases, presidential candidates have openly courted black voters to gain political advantage.

Let’s take a GOP case study: During the primary in 2000, a whisper campaign was initiated in which Sen. John McCain was accused of illegitimately fathering a black child, who was, in fact, the daughter he and his wife adopted from Bangladesh. The move siphoned white votes, scuttled McCain’s campaign and left the door open for George W. Bush to seize the nomination. It has been nine months since the horrific shooting that took the lives of nine African American congregants of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church–one of the oldest such institutions known as “Mother Emanuel”–rocked Charleston. The tragedy, in which an avowed white supremacist allegedly pulled the trigger, sent shock waves through the state and eventually led to the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse.

Last Saturday when Cuban-American Sen. Marco Rubio gave his victory speech for his second-place showing in the South Carolina primary, he hailed the GOP’s Benetton ad-style diversity, appearing with Nikki Haley, the state’s Indian-American governor who actively pushed for removal of the Confederate flag months earlier, and Tim Scott, the state’s first black U.S. senator. This political mosaic may have been found on stage but not among the GOP electorate: 96% of the voters were white versus 1% of African Americans.

For all the GOP’s talk about aggressively seeking to attract African American voters, its outreach has been pretty lame. What has given many African Americans pause has been divisive campaigns from the party front-runners that serve as breeding grounds for xenophobia and racial intolerance.

Take Donald Trump, the dominant force in the GOP’s sweepstakes that crushed the competition in last week’s South Carolina contest. Polling data found that a good number of his supporters would like to see a return to the antebellum South. In a recent YouGov/Economist poll, nearly one in five Trump supporters don’t approve of the emancipation of slaves in the Confederacy. And according to Public Policy Polling, 70% of Trump’s South Carolina primary voters advocate for the Confederate battle flag to still fly at the state capitol. This is the prevailing attitude among a phalanx of Trump voters more than 155 years after South Carolina began the Civil War by becoming the first state to cede from the Union.

Another fact of political history: Since 1980, only one GOP candidate who won the South Carolina primary–Newt Gingrich in 2012–has not become the party’s presidential nominee. This is a scary proposition this year for many inside and outside of the party.

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Race and politics play a large role in the Democratic race with the African American vote the coveted prize–the state’s African American population is 27.8%. As a result, gaffes can prove costly. For example, Hillary Clinton made a huge faux pas at a January forum in her poor characterization of Reconstruction–

the post-Civil War period in which a number of freed blacks gained a measure of political power, including Robert Smalls, a former slave who rose to become a South Carolina state legislator and U.S. representative and helped to create our nation’s first public school system. Her gaffe, in part, made the case for such prominent figures as hip-hop artist Killer Mike and highly-acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates to align with Sanders.

Clinton’s campaign was hurt by race-related blunders eight years ago when she desperately attempted to paint then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as a political dilettante with a naïve narrative. Leading the charge was former President Bill Clinton, who engaged in a series of red-faced attacks designed to question the qualifications of the nation’s first black presidential front-runner. At one point, the former president’s criticism regarding Obama’s record on opposing the Iraq War as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen” infuriated black voters in South Carolina.

To add fuel to the fire, when Obama won the state by a landslide, a bitter Bill Clinton alluded that his campaign played the race card and that the outcome was inevitable because Rev. Jackson had won the state in 1984 and 1988. This was a blow for the Southern politician who had once been endearingly referred to as the nation’s “first black president” and won the state primary with overwhelming black support in 1992. The former president has since been forgiven.

Today, Hillary Clinton, a former Obama cabinet member, has engaged in an Obama love-fest in ads and speeches, invoking the president’s record and legacy as a means of distinguishing herself from Sanders. She insists that a Hillary Clinton administration would build upon the accomplishments of the nation’s first black president and has even gone to great lengths to paint Sanders as a progressive who has betrayed Obama with his criticism of a number of the administration’s initiatives.

In a recent CNN town hall, Clinton defended Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, and knocked Sanders free college tuition plan as a vehicle that would endanger HBCUs relying on such payments. The Vermont senator countered, now pushing for an expansion in funding for black colleges and universities–a new addition to his proposal.

Both candidates have made appeals by attacking institutional and societal racism. For example, Sanders called Republican “birthers” who have questioned that President Obama was born in the United States “racists” while Clinton took the opportunity to publicly display empathy for a black student who told her she had recently decided to wear her hair natural and had been looked at differently. Both have continued the pandering to blacks in radio ads, seeking to portray themselves as inheritors of the mantle of the civil rights movement while routinely sniping at the credibility of one another in this area.

The Clinton—Sanders contest is as much about race as it is about the generational gap and political divide among African American voters. According to the latest WSJ/NBC news poll, Clinton leads 68% to 21% among African American voters–roughly 50% of the turnout in South Carolina–but her support wanes among African American under 45: 52% to 35%.

Clinton, 68, attracted Clyburn, Atlanta Congressman John Lewis and members of the Congressional Black Caucus as well as recently gained the endorsement of the mothers of prominent victims of race-related violence Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin, among others. As for Sanders, the self-professed 74-year-old democratic socialist, he has Lee, Coates, actor-singer Harry Belafonte, former NAACP CEO and Silicon Valley diversity advocate Ben Jealous and activist professor Cornell West in his corner.

The GOP primary and the upcoming Democratic contest reveals that the more diverse South Carolina serves as a true pre-Super Tuesday barometer than more homogeneous states like Iowa and New Hampshire. It also demonstrates the racial complexity that will be a part of future primaries and the general election. The battles in the Palmetto State communicate loud and clear that this is a different election. Will the GOP truly become the inclusive party Rubio promotes or take on the Trump campaign’s angry, polarizing mien? Will Democrats take the black vote for granted or realize that it is not monolithic? And black voters must embrace the fact that they can play a significant role, collectively and individually, in the outcome of primaries as well as who will ultimately occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.