CNN anchor Chris Cuomo on Tuesday night asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) why he was still struggling with black voters compared to his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton during a CNN town hall in South Carolina.
“You know when we started in South Carolina, my message wasn’t
resonating with anybody,” Sanders replied. “Nobody knew who I was. I’m running against a candidate who’s one of the best-known people in the world, a candidate who ran here a very strong campaign in 2008, who knows a lot of people.”
Sanders painted his presidential campaign as an underdog that started with “no support.”
“Our support has grown, and it has grown in the African-American community,” he said. “What I believe to the degree we can get our message out, and the message is that we have a criminal justice system, which is broken. That there is something very wrong when African-Americans in South Carolina and around the country get nervous about walking down the street or going into their car and being stopped by a police officers. That should not be happening in America.”
Sanders went on to outline plans to demilitarize local police departments.
“We have very specific ideas about how the federal government–you know, local police departments are run by municipalities–federal government can play a major role in ending the militarization of so many of our local police departments,” he said. “They look like occupying armies, and we’ll make the police departments look like the diversity of the communities they are serving. There’s a lot to be done.”