Sanders has managed to attract an overwhelmingly white voter base that, by all measures, appears excited and convinced that Sanders's prescription of inequality busting, billionaire -humbling policy will fix all that is wrong with America. The thing is, Sanders's message hasn't quite caught the same kind of fire with non-white Democratic leaning voters -- voters that form a major and definitive share of the party's coalition that will become much more important after the New Hampshire primary.
Those who "Feel the Bern" invariably insist that those who don't are either dumb, don't understand their own political needs or what and who will truly help them. To some degree, that's normal when people get really passionate about a candidate or a campaign. But given the professed progressive leanings of those in the Sanders camp and what's widely known about the group's near-racial homogeneity, it's a response that seems like a rather large and telling contradiction. It is a response that seems devoid of any recognition that patronizing language, paternalistic "guidance" and recriminations are, at the very least, the active ingredients in modern and sometimes subtle forms of bigotry. Besides that, condescension is not often convincing.
In fact, that whole set of "they will eventually get it" arguments that Sanders supporters and even the Sanders campaign have readily made about voters of color is, truly, part of the Sanders campaign's problem.
Yes, Sanders fans, that reality did not matter much at all in very-white Iowa. And the polls out of even whiter New Hampshire suggest the same. But the rest of America does not look like Iowa or New Hampshire and has not for some time.
