But it was also nothing new. For the past 30 years, the Democratic nominee has won black voters nationally, a demographic whose growing electoral strength in the Democratic primary is due to black voters’ propensity to vote as a bloc and their geographic distribution in the southern states.

And yet, even though black voters’ electoral power was on clear display in the 2008 and 2016 primaries, they were largely ignored in favor of young white voters. The media spent an inordinate amount of time talking about how young white voters had moved to the left, and how the Democratic nominee would have to move along with them.

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But pundits had been primed to make this huge mistake by another one: learning the wrong lesson from 2016. One of the key post-2016 narratives was that Sanders was strong with the white working class because they were fed up with the Democratic establishment’s views on economics. Pundits believed that the only way to win this demographic was with a Sanders-style populist.

Link to tweet

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"But perhaps the biggest way the media missed the boat in 2020 was through never seriously questioning Sanders. It was always assumed that he’d grow his base beyond his core demographic of young white supporters. And by Nevada, Sanders had indeed improved with Latino voters, but he was doing worse with white voters, and he never improved his tepid black voter numbers from 2016.

The anti-establishment message was toxic for black voters who had seen the party establishment fight for civil rights protections and win. And the rhetoric around upending the economic system was never going to attract suburbanites who like their healthcare plans but don’t like Trump for social or cultural reasons."