Kamala Harris focuses on black women voters who ‘hold a lot of power’ in 15th SC trip
In 25 years living on Joan Street in Columbia, Vanessa Bazemore had never had a presidential campaign knock on her door.
Until Saturday afternoon, when two of Kamala Harris’ longtime friends — Jill Louis, who traveled from Texas, and Tiffany Hall, who flew in from New York — rang her doorbell, asking whether she planned to back the U.S. senator from California for president.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing to have someone (in the White House) who looks like us?” Louis asked Bazemore, 54, noting the commonalities between the Columbia resident, Harris and the candidate’s two friends-turned-campaign advocates: all black women.
Bazemore told The State reporter tagging along Saturday that up until that point she also was undecided about who’d get her vote. There are so many candidates running, she noted, adding she’d considered voting for U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — “I know he’s old,” she said — and Cory Booker of New Jersey — “I’m not quite sure he’s ready,” she added.
But after a visit from Harris’ camp, Bazemore said she could see herself backing Harris in South Carolina’s Feb. 29 “First in the South” Democratic presidential primary.
“She’s a tough little cookie now,” Bazemore said. “She is.”
Harris’ outreach to women, particularly black women, has been a cornerstone of her S.C. campaign since she first introduced herself to voters this year at the Pink Ice Gala in Columbia, a sorority fundraiser for the Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Gamma Nu Omega chapter.
She’s not the only candidate trying to appeal to black women, who were the largest voting bloc in the S.C. presidential primary in 2016, exit polling showed.
Elizabeth Warren, for example, also has targeted black voters in her campaign. She spoke at historically black Clark Atlanta University Thursday, a day after 10 presidential hopefuls debated at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia.
Warren has seen her support among black S.C. voters tick up, but not by much — she was the third pick after Sanders, though both trail far behind former vice president Joe Biden — in a recent Quinnipiac University Poll. Her campaign stops continue to show her interest in reaching black voters.
But Harris has arguably been the most aggressive in her campaign effort to reach black women voters.
In every trip to the state, Harris has made a concerted effort to relate her story as a black woman to voters, and she has made targeted visits to black female-owned businesses when she has toured the state.
Making her 15th trip to the Palmetto State on Saturday, Harris once again zeroed in on outreach to black women, part of her Black Women Weekend of Action that started in South Carolina early Saturday with phone banking and knocking on doors in Columbia.
The day ended in front of 300 people at Benedict College, one of Columbia’s historically black universities, where Harris filed the official paperwork with the S.C. Democratic Party to put her name on the state’s presidential primary ballot in fewer than 100 days.
“The reality is, when we talk about black girl magic ... we know it is something special,” Harris said at Benedict. “It is something you can see. Sometimes it’s just something you feel. Sometimes it’s just something you sense. But here’s the thing. The truth of it is that magic is born out of hard work. It didn’t just magically appear. Nobody just sprinkled it on us. It’s because of the work we put in.”
In South Carolina, the women vote is extremely important, said Jennifer Clyburn-Reed, daughter of U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who has not made a 2020 endorsement.
“I don’t think it’s a bad strategy (to reach out to women),” Clyburn told The State. “In fact, it’s very smart for candidates to look to appealing to women’s wants and women’s needs and women’s desires for their families and their careers.”
Black women ‘show up’
The central role that women, and particularly black women, play in South Carolina’s Democratic politics is no secret.
Black voters make up two-thirds of South Carolina’s Democratic primary electorate, making South Carolina the first true test for 2020 candidates to see how they fare with southern black voters.
And in 2016, it was largely black women who turned out to vote in the primary, boosting former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the finish line past her primary opponents U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.
“Certainly in some of the Deep South states like South Carolina, the black electorate is the majority of the primary electorate,” said Theodore Johnson — a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on black voting behavior. “Based on just historical patterns, the majority of those voters are likely to be older than 45 and likely to be women.”
Trav Robertson, chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, told the Benedict audience Saturday that more than 1.7 million South Carolinians voted in the 2018 midterms. Of that number, the state was roughly 46,000 votes shy of having 1 million women cast ballots.
More than 835,000 registered voters in South Carolina are black, according to an October 2018 S.C. Elections Commission breakdown, the latest available information. Nearly 492,800 — or 59% — of those voters are women.
Those numbers are likely to grow as the 2020 contests near and campaigns ramp up efforts to register more younger, black voters.
“Not only will they (black women) show up, but they are show more ... loyal (voters) than any other group,” Johnson said.
Still, candidates run the risk of ignoring the important voting bloc that black women are in the Democratic primary, and candidates who more closely represent their diversity face a tough battle to the nomination, Democrats note.
“People are accustomed to seeing women in certain roles, certainly that’s not a political dominant role,” said Aiken City Councilwoman Lessie Price, also first vice chair of the S.C. Democratic Party, referring to the women, and women of color, running for president in 2020 — a rarity in races for the nation’s highest office. “Once they become accustomed to it, once they see the mountains of success that they can bring, then there’s an acceptance.”
‘The black female has a lot of power’
Harris, and other candidates, have struggled to chip away at Biden’s black support in South Carolina.
The latest state polling put the former vice president’s support among black voters at more than 40% — in part, because he served as the second-in-command to the first black president and his familiarity in the state.
“In this campaign, the top polling people have been on the stage for decades — at least three of them,” Harris said on Saturday. “So, they’re well-known. I’m still introducing myself. We’re still introducing ourselves.”
All the research of voting patterns shows black women support black candidates more than anyone else, Johnson said.
But, he noted, “Pragmatism tends to be the thing that … if the primary goal of this election is to defeat Donald Trump, then support will be thrown behind the candidate who has the best chance.”
Johnson continued: “If the sense is that Biden is better positioned than Kamala Harris, ... if she’s not perceived to be capable of winning over the white vote,” then, Johnson said, voters will “put ideology on the back burner” and prioritize winning the election over picking the candidate most aligned with their beliefs.
That is not to suggest Harris’ policy proposals are turning voters away from her campaign, Johnson said.
But it “suggests that perception is Biden best positioned to beat Trump and everything is secondary and tertiary.”
Regardless, Harris’ most loyal voters see a path to victory through the vote of black women.
“In any Democratic election, it’s always been black women who pull people over the line,” said Bernice Scott, 75, head of the Reckoning Crew that has endorsed Harris’ presidential bid. “A lot of black women understand that. We’re more aware of our worth (than before).”
Scott, who served her community of lower Richland County for two decades on county council, was one of many black S.C. women on the front lines for Clinton four years ago.
“The black female has a lot of power.”
This story was originally published November 24, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
