Blacks Put an End to Buttigieg and Steyer Campaigns

Credit Image: © Pete Souza / The White House / ZUMAPRESS.com

After embarrassing defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire, Joe Biden held a rally in South Carolina where he proclaimed, “I want y’all to think of a number: 99.9 percent. That’s the percentage of African-American voters who have not yet had a chance to vote in America.” Mr. Biden then went on to lose the Nevada caucus, leading many commentators to declare his campaign all but dead. Then on Saturday, South Carolina’s Democrats went to the polls. About 60 percent of voters were black, and they gave Mr. Biden a landslide.

The final tally left Mr. Biden with 48.4 percent of the vote, more than double that of Bernie Sanders, who placed a distant second with 19.9 percent. Exit polls suggest Mr. Biden got at least 61 percent of the black vote and perhaps as much as 85 percent. The former Vice President and his boosters had long touted black support as a “firewall” that would make him hard to beat. Doubters, especially in the past few weeks, did their best to find polls that disputed this claim, such as a recent one conducted by Winthrop University that put black support for Mr. Biden in South Carolina at just 31 percent. Despite doubling that figure, those pining for Bernie Sanders are still hoping recent national polls indicating rising support for the Democratic Socialist among blacks will prove accurate on Super Tuesday. But given the minimal black support for Mr. Sanders in 2016, and how much the polls underestimated Mr. Biden in South Carolina, white socialists hoping for black solidarity are likely to be disappointed. Blacks play a decisive roll in crowning the Democrat nominee, and invariably vote as a bloc — a problem for Mr. Sanders. Indeed, black indifference to Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer effectively ended their campaigns this weekend.

Mr. Steyer’s strategy had always been to use black support in South Carolina to make him a serious contender . He spent over 20 million dollars on ads in the state, largely targeting blacks, and called repeatedly for reparations, during the debates and elsewhere.

New York Magazine reported in early February that he was pouring “$200,000 a week into Facebook ads targeting South Carolinians, along with millions of dollars worth of direct mail. The billionaire has also held more events in the state than Biden or anyone else still in the race.” The goal was to “breach” Mr. Biden’s “firewall,” and there were some signs that he could. The same New York Magazine piece claimed Mr. Steyer had 24 percent of black South Carolinians’ support, close to Mr. Biden’s 30 percent.

The night before the South Carolina primary, Mr. Steyer made one last big gesture in his quest for the black vote: He and his wife shared a stage with black rapper Juvenile and awkwardly gyrated to his 1998 hit “Back That Azz Up.”

Perhaps Palmetto State blacks were unimpressed with Mr. Steyer’s dance skills; 24 hours later, the pandering billionaire placed a pitiful third, with just 11.3 percent of the total vote.

Pete Buttigieg suffered a similar blow. In 2019, he burst into the race and quickly got a lot of sympathetic media attention and support. In Iowa, to the surprise of nearly everyone, he effectively tied Bernie Sanders for first place (Mr. Sanders won the state’s popular vote by a slim margin, but Mr. Buttigieg got one more delegate). He did the same thing in New Hampshire, after which many people dubbed him the “anti-Bernie” candidate, but there was never really any chance of his stopping the front runner. Mr. Buttigieg did so well in Iowa and New Hampshire because he was popular with white voters, and those two states are overwhelmingly white. His support among Hispanics and especially blacks was anemic. Nationally, his black support never came close to breaking out of single digits, and many blacks held him in open contempt. Like all Democrats, Mr. Buttigieg did all he could to truckle to America’s first underclass. During his Iowa “victory” speech, he was careful to puts his few black supporters in the row behind him, so the cameras would give the impression he had multi-racial support.

In South Carolina, like Mr. Steyer, he spent millions trying to woo blacks, and even stooped to exaggerating his black support in the hope this would prompt real black support. It didn’t. On Saturday, he won 8.2 percent of votes cast, about a fifth of Joe Biden’s total. After their pathetic showings in the South’s first primary, and no black or Hispanic support on the horizon to buoy their chance, both Pete Buttigieg and Tom Steyer dropped out. They fawned over blacks as publicly and vociferously as possible — to the tune of tens of millions of dollars — to no avail.

Why does pandering sometimes work and sometimes fail? Debasing yourself may win votes — or it may win contempt. It reminds me of what Oswald Spengler wrote of non-whites nearly a century ago:

“Once they feared the white man; now they despise him. Our judgment stands written in their eyes when men and women comport themselves in their presence as we do, at home or in the lands of colour themselves. Once they were filled with terror at our power — as were the Germanic people before the first Roman legions. Today, when they are themselves a power, their mysterious soul — which we shall never understand — rises up and looks down upon the whites as on a thing of yesterday.”

In any case, the Democrat candidates have no choice. Theirs is the party of non-whites, which makes blacks — until Hispanics outnumber them — kingmakers. Non-white support and viability are correlated. Six candidates remain: Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Joe Biden. No one takes Miss Gabbard, Mrs. Klobuchar, or Mrs. Warren seriously anymore . . . and they have almost no non-white support. The three real contenders do. Mr. Biden has blacks, Mr. Bloomberg could take some of  that support, and Mr. Sanders has Hispanics and Asians. Even in a competition between three white men, the victor will be determined by who marshals the most non-whites. The shrinking number of whites who still consider themselves Democrats should ask themselves how they feel about being a despised “thing of yesterday.”