Bernie Sanders Allies Criticize His Campaign’s Failures, Including a Lack of Early Outreach to Black Voters

This New York Times article exploring the failures of the Bernie Sanders campaign groups them into three major areas:

1) A failure to take his own campaign seriously early on.

2) A failure to directly point out Hillary Clinton’s flaws early on.

3) A failure to invest any serious time campaigning for the attention of black voters before it became clear he was losing them by huge margins.

Of those three failures, I’ve personally been most interested in the last one. How does someone who wants to usher in a “political revolution” fail to see the need to reach out to black Americans from the beginning of his campaign? (Or, really, from well before the campaign even begins?)

Cornel West, one of Mr. Sanders’s most visible African-American surrogates, said that he thought that Mr. Sanders could win the nomination but that the senator should have fought to be “well-known quicker and much earlier” among voters, especially blacks.

“He had to hit TV, radio and venues in black America much earlier,” Mr. West said.

In terms of delegate math, Sanders now has a very steep hill to climb in order to win the nomination. If he can’t do it, one additional positive legacy of his candidacy may be to underline—for those who still need it underlined—that you don’t launch a political revolution by taking the black vote for granted.