Young Blacks Aren't Enamored of Hillary Clinton

Here's the age divide among black voters, at LAT, "Among some black voters, a generational divide on Clinton vs. Sanders":

The president of the New Frontier Democratic Club made his hard pitch for voting for Hillary Clinton inside the South Los Angeles community room.

She will lead the charge for racial equality and fair pay for women, Mike Davis told the two dozen black men and women last month. She will fight for black families, he said, stretching his hosannas for the former secretary of state for a good 10 minutes.

Can we just take a vote to endorse Hillary, someone in the crowd said. “Let’s vote,” Davis agreed.

James Scriven Sr., 79, raised his hand high along with everybody except for two holdouts: Scriven’s two sons, Tabari, 39, and James Jr., 41.

To their father’s mild displeasure, they were feeling the Bern.

 “He has new ideas that will help the economy and create jobs,” Tabari, of Inglewood, said of Bernie Sanders. “Young people are trying to better themselves through education, but student loans are standing in the way.”

With the California primary set for Tuesday, polls suggest the race between Clinton and Sanders has tightened, although she still appears to hold a lead.

A poll of black voters in California commissioned by the African American Voter Registration Education Participation Project conducted by Evitarus found that 71% of 800 likely voters surveyed supported Clinton. But among the black voters younger than 40, half said they would probably vote for Sanders, compared with 34% for Clinton. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

His sons’ support for Sanders did not sit well with the elder Scriven, who like many blacks has an enduring affection for Clinton’s husband.

“Bernie is not going to win,” Scriven said dismissively. “They will be voting for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.”

Despite her overall lead with blacks, Clinton did not neatly inherit the love many felt for Bill Clinton, who famously played a soulful saxophone on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992 and whom novelist Toni Morrison later dubbed “the first black president.”

If significant numbers of younger African Americans vote for Sanders, that could play an important role in a primary that Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, said could be tight.

“There is no question that Sanders can win the California primary,” Schnur said. To do so, however, he would need an unusually large turnout of young voters,  including young minority voters like the Scriven brothers.

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