Today, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign released an arresting new ad. It features no dialogue from the candidate himself, other than the obligatory “I’m Bernie Sanders and I approve this message” at the end. Instead, the one-minute spot captures scenes of everyday American life, while Simon and Garfunkel’s idealistic anthem “America” plays in the background. As the song moves to its refrain of “They’ve all come to look for America,” the camera pans over the crowds at Sanders’s rallies.
In its focus on individual Americans, and in its positive message, the ad embodies much of the attraction of the Sanders campaign, which has refused to run traditional negative ads against its opponents. But the clip also reflects one of the underlying problems with the Sanders strategy to date: its inability to speak to minority voters.
Recent polls show Hillary Clinton leading Sanders 75 percent to 18 percent among African American Democrats, and 71-14 among non-white voters more broadly. A nostalgic ad that evokes an America of yesteryear to the soundtrack of the last generation’s bards is unlikely to move the needle in those communities. While it might resonate with older white voters in some early states, it won’t reverberate much beyond them. And this is not simply the consequence of a cultural divide. African-American and Hispanic Democrats tend to be more conservative, and the more centrist Clinton better appeals to their politics. It doesn’t hurt that she spent years forging ties with the African American community in New York while serving as a Senator, something Sanders never had much opportunity to do in 95-percent white Vermont.
In addition, Sanders’s rhetoric of class-based politics, while attractive to white progressives, is less suited to the identity politics of the Black Lives Matter era. This incongruity has resulted in conflicts with the movement—which has protested Sanders’s events—and with prominent African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who asked: “The Vermont senator’s political imagination is active against plutocracy, but why is it so limited against white supremacy?”
The tagline of Sanders’s ad, “A Future To Believe In,” consciously evokes Barack Obama’s famous 2008 slogan “Change We Can Believe In.” But if Sanders is to repeat what Obama achieved and overtake Hillary Clinton, he’ll need to move beyond his current base—and beyond the comfortable chords of Simon and Garfunkel—to do it.
Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Subscribe to his newsletter, listen to his music, and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
