This young mayor of South Bend, Indiana, officially kicked off his presidential bid at a rally this week in that city.
Buttigieg said to the adoring crowd: “I recognize the audacity of doing this as a Midwestern millennial mayor. More than a little bold — at age 37 — to seek the highest office in the land.”
As Alex Burns of The New York Times noted: “This line is an almost explicit invocation of Mr. Obama’s 2007 announcement speech, when he said, ‘I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity’ to a junior senator like him seeking the presidency. Mr. Buttigieg uses Obama-esque flourishes throughout, including more than half a dozen references each to ‘hope’ and ‘change.’”
But alas, Buttigieg isn’t Obama. No one is. The swelling crowd of Democratic hopefuls consists of candidates who are their own people with their own strengths and weakness. And, one of those weaknesses, for many, is how to appeal to black voters.
As former Obama campaign manager and White House adviser David Axelrod tweeted about Buttigieg’s announcement speech: “Watching the @PeteButtigieg announcement from South Bend. Crowd seems very large, very impressive but also very white — an obstacle he will have to overcome.”
In a follow-up tweet, Axelrod explained: “And by obstacle I mean deficiency. He will need to build out his coalition in a very diverse party.”
A quarter of the population of South Bend is African-American. Where were they?
And, it is not that candidates like Buttigieg haven’t attempted outreach to African-Americans. This month he went to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference and told the crowd, “I believe an agenda for black Americans needs to include five things that all of us care about: homeownership, entrepreneurship, education, health and justice.”
(Cory Booker, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang also spoke at the conference.)
The problem of course is connection, and connecting with a voting base that people too often think of as monolithic when in fact it is multifaceted and fractured.
The day after Buttigieg’s announcement speech, he addressed on CNN his campaign’s issue with attracting and appealing to a black voter, pledging to “do better” and saying in part: “I’ve been on the trail, we found, to some extent, it depends on geography. We had a very diverse crowd at my first stop in Nevada, but less so in South Carolina.”
Bingo!
Among the many different ways the African-American population is diverse in this country is geographic. There is the South, where most black people in this country still live, and there is everywhere else.
In a way, I think that you could make a case that there are two black Americas among the people descended of the enslaved in this country: The sons and daughters of the Great Migration and the sons and daughters of the people who stayed in the South.
I was born and raised in the South, but have lived the last 27 years in the Midwest and Northeast, and I can tell you that those are not the same black Americas.
One difference is religiosity. While black people in general are more religious than the overall population, black people in the South are also appreciably more religious than black people in other parts of the country, according to Gallup data. The data reveals that the percentage of black people who were deemed “not religious” (based on how important attending church was to them) was 13 percent in the South. It was twice that number in the West, and around 20 percent in the Midwest and East.
The Pew Research Center found a similar difference in 2009: While only 9 percent of black people in the South were religiously unaffiliated, that number nearly doubled in the Midwest to 17 percent and was 14 percent in the Northeast and 15 percent in the West.
This religiosity translates into a form of social conservatism. Taking that into consideration, a more progressive view may have more resonance among black people outside the South than in it. Messaging, policies and appeals won’t necessarily work the same in these different areas.
This is important to understand, since black voters are critically important for securing the nomination, particularly in the South, and can make the difference in the general election, particularly in the Midwest.
In 2016, African-Americans were the majority of Democratic primary voters in Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia, according to exit polls. (There were no exit polls for Louisiana.) All of those states were early on the primary calendar, voting by the second week in March. This gave black Southerners a stronger hand in shaping the direction of the race for the nomination.
In the general election, these voices were drowned out by their Republican neighbors, almost all of whom are white. No Democrat has won one of these states in 23 years, when Bill Clinton won Louisiana in 1996.
Another division is age. Young black voters do not necessarily align their interests with their parents.
These factors, in part, explain the performance of the black electorate in the 2016 contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Sanders struggled to attract older black voters, particularly in the South, and Clinton struggled to excite young black ones.
A 2016 study from The Associated Press and the University of Chicago found that 60 percent of young African-Americans chose Sanders over Clinton as “the candidate who best understands the problems of people like them,” and “among African-American young adults who indicated they voted in the primaries, a majority, 54 percent, said they voted for Bernie Sanders.” And yet Sanders still lost all of the states in which black voters were the majority during the primaries.
Lastly, there is a division that I believe is harder to grasp, more ephemeral but also more profound: the difference between the black activist and the black traditionalist.
This overlaps with religion and age, to be sure, but I believe that it also speaks to the differences in the black political cultures of the North and South. We have seen this split for generations in the different approaches taken by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers.
This is not a judgment about which approaches were right or more effective, but rather an acknowledgment that they were different, and informed by place. An issue like reparations can have a particular potency in some areas and not nearly as much in others.
Buttigieg and the rest of the field would do well to recognize these differences when setting out to woo black voters. The loudest voices in the biggest cities are not necessarily representative of the whole African-American community. Topics trending on Twitter may not be top of mind in Mississippi.
If you want to win more of the black vote, recognize that there are a variety of different black voters and fight for their votes individually rather than believe that it’s a one-size-fits-all approach.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.