The shift crystallized during last week’s debate as Democrats descended on the majority-black city of Atlanta and fanned out afterwards in campaign appearances designed to connect with African-American audiences.
Aides and allies of Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker — as well as Julián Castro — have increasingly sounded alarms about whether any other candidate can beat Trump. And Harris, Booker and Castro have been telegraphing for weeks that they would take their campaigns in a more race-conscious direction.
“What we need to talk about right now in this primary is which candidate can actually assemble the coalition we need to win, and that’s a big concern right now with who is leading the polls,” a Harris official said.
The new orientation is animated by doubts surrounding the durability of Joe Biden — a candidate with a broad-based coalition, anchored by his commanding lead with black voters — and a desire to blunt the momentum of a younger, white male candidate, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has failed to demonstrate any ability that he can win over black and brown voters, most starkly in a recent Quinnipiac University poll that pegged his support among African-American Democrats in South Carolina at 0 percent.
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