Interesting Article Re SC - Bernie Sanders Is Narrowing the Gap in SC

[Nanjeanne]

A very good analysis of the difficulty of breaking through in SC but the movement that can be seen in some areas.

He has an enthusiastic field campaign and growing support from black activists and politicians. Will it be enough?

SNIP
Yet two days ahead of the primary, election analyst Nate Silver gives Sanders a less than 1 percent chance of winning South Carolina. Brett Bursey, director of the South Carolina Progressive Network, sizes up the prospects only a bit more optimistically: “If there were six months until the primary, I think Bernie could win.”

It’s important to remember, however, that winning or losing a specific state isn’t as important as the slow accumulation of delegates—and because of that, margins matter.

In Silver’s projections, if Clinton won South Carolina by 11 points, she would be on a path to a tie. To achieve that, Sanders would need to beat the mid-February polling projections of 24 points by another 13 points.

SNIP

“We are closing the gap,” says South Carolina state representative Terry Alexander, a Clinton supporter in 2008, now a leading black supporter of Sanders. “We’re making a difference. It’s his message and how he gives people hope. Clinton is old style, change bit by bit.”

Sanders’ campaign has 10 offices in South Carolina with 240 staff, 80 percent of them African-American, compared to two offices with 14 full-time staff for Clinton, backed up by nine small get-out-the-vote offices.

Beyond recruiting volunteers from within South Carolina, Sanders is counting on some key backers from across the country—such as Martese Chism, a nurse for more than 23 years at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Illinois, and a member of National Nurses United, the first major national union to endorse Sanders.

While Sanders was speaking, Chism was riding through South Carolina in National Nurses United's red #BernieBus, drumming up support for him.

Chism is also the great-granddaughter of a grassroots civil rights leader, Birdia Keglar. In 1966, Keglar was returning home from Jackson, Miss., with four other civil rights supporters after testifying before Robert F. Kennedy about voting rights violations. White racists forced them off the road and beat and tortured them, severely injuring two of the three men and killing the two women in the car—including Keglar, who was decapitated.

With such a powerful personal connection, Chism says she’s felt a calling to work for civil rights since she was 5 years old. That’s what brought her out to campaign for Sanders.

“I knew Bernie because he was always for the union,” she says. “He always supported our issues. But it sealed the deal when I found out that Bernie was in the civil rights movement.”

SNIP

A debate within the International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 in Charleston, a major East Coast port, is one sign that black voters are still in play. The influential, predominantly African-American local has 600 members. In October, local president Ken Riley, endorsed Clinton as the practical choice—the candidate who could win and get things done. But then Charles Brave, Jr., a rank-and-file member of Local 1422 and vice-president of the state AFL-CIO, began drumming up support for Sanders within the local. He believes that now, if members were to take a vote, a clear majority would support Sanders.

MORE:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18914/bernie-sanders-narrows-the-gap-in-south-carolina

[Nanjeanne]

1. If only the "media" would talk to someone like Martese Chism about her support of Bernie and her

family's history with the civil rights movement. But why would they when they can get the Clinton surrogates on 24/7.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

2. I'm expecting a 20-25 pt loss there. An 11 pt loss would be amazing. nt

[Laughing Mirror]

3. It sealed the deal for me too

As a child in the civil rights era, who because of who and where I was, because of when and where I was living, had an inside seat into the movement as it played out in my schools and in my neighborhood, and how it produced a profound and lasting influence in my understanding of the world, it goes without saying that Sanders, a man who was in the movement, would have my vote. Without question.