New York primary: Bernie Sanders must regret ignoring black voters

The crowd at the Bernie Sanders rally in Washington Square Park last week was white, for New York. Not very white, but white for New York – even perhaps for those particular streets, where the purple flags and drapes of NYU ripple in the breeze. This reflected Bernie’s big problem: he hasn’t excited the non-white portion (almost half, nationwide) of the Democratic electorate – particularly, he has failed to impress black voters. Whether or not he could change this was the key to last night’s primary, and probably, therefore, to the Democratic race in general.

Bernie had racked up seven straight wins, in Idaho, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming – all states with comparatively few delegates, and demographics that skew away from the Democrats’ usual coalition (the Democratic electorate in November is projected to be 24 per cent black; it was 10 per cent black in Wisconsin, low single digits in the rest).