Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders brought the carnival-like atmosphere of his campaign to Coney Island last Thursday, delivering a stump speech that hit on how to cope with climate change in a part of the city where Superstorm Sandy took lives and wiped away property.
“There will be more droughts, there will be more flooding, there will be more extreme weather disturbances,” Sanders told the crowd. “There will be rising sea levels, there will be more international conflict because people will fight over limited natural resources.”
Like his event two weeks ago in the South Bronx, the New York State Democratic Primary saw the Sanders campaign bring a message challenging the excesses of the wealthy to one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In Coney Island, yearly incomes hover around $30,000. Without the resources to respond to environmental calamity, this neighborhood is more at the mercy of the sea than extremely wealthy neighbors in the Hamptons. For these Brooklynites, this area isn’t their second home; it is their only home.
It’s a neighborhood many New Yorkers forget is a place where people also live and is more than just roller coaster rides, bumper cars and arcade games. Many of its 40,000 residents recall weaks of power outages after Sandy knocked out elevators in tall, sprawling apartment complexes, stranding the elderly and ill on the higher floors.
After the Sanders event ended Thursday afternoon, hundreds of volunteers went into some of these enormous buildings, knocking on doors to remind Democratic voters about the primary on April 19, and making note of whether they were planning to vote for the Vermont senator. Three of these volunteer canvassers—doing it only out of enthusiasm Sanders—headed out from Nathans’ hot dogs, down Surf Avenue, to a row of blocks the campaign had assigned them.
“These are just like the apartment complexes in Moscow,” Anna Umanskaya, 29, a school counselor, recalled as the group made its way across the grassy courtyard. “Every entrance goes to a different part of the building.”
She was born in Moscow but moved to New York as a girl. Her grandmother lives near where she was assigned to canvass. She said many of her Russian friends are skeptical of Sanders and consider the democratic socialist too close to a communist.
She paired up with two other ardent Sanders supporters, Chuyen Huynh, 29, and her boyfriend, Sanford Wintersberger, 39. Both are artists. Wintersberger is from Virginia and Huynh was born in Vietnam but came to the United States as a child, like Umanskaya. All are Sanders supporters but were born in three different countries that only a few decades before had been mired merciless warfare. Now, two of them are a committed couple.
On this windy and bright early spring day in 2016, they crowded into the same elevator to knock on doors up and down the 19-story building, where almost all of the residents they encountered were African-American or Hispanic.
So far, polls show former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton leads Sanders among these groups, but most of the people of color the canvassers encountered in this Surf Aven apartment building said they were planning on voting for the Vermont senator.
“You don’t have to remind us, that’s our candidate!” One woman said from behind a door, referring to Sanders, when the three came by looking for a relative.
One young man, Julel Henry, 35, an electrician looking for work, said that Sanders message on drug policy reform—ending the federal ban on marijuana—and reducing the number of people in jail were what had won his vote. “I think that Sanders is the person we need in office,” he said.
Although a Sanders fan, Henry came at the canvassers with a tough question: “I know he does speak for the Black community. But my question is, what is his take on reparations?”
Sanders has called reparations for slavery divisive, saying the United States needs an increase in social welfare across the board.
“I’m not sure, but I know he fought in the Civil Rights Movement,” said Wintersberger.
“He was arrested for protesting,” said Umanskaya.
“He marched with Martin Luther King,” Huynh added.
Wintersberger moved the conversation to the subject of prison reform. The systemic mass incarceration of African-Americans has been called by some critics the modern manifestation of slavery itself.
“It makes more money them to put people in jail quickly,” Wintersberger said. “Prisons are just a business.”
“They have slave wages in prisons,” Huynh said, referring to jobs available to inmates that pay pennies an hour for services that go to private corporations, such as telemarketing. Although the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, it did not outlaw labor as a form of punishment.
“It’s modern day slavery,” Umanskaya said.
“People are in prison for no good reason and they’re working for nothing,” Wintersberger added.
“Let’s just hope Bernie Sanders can do something different,” Henry said.
His cousin Tammy Brown, 50, on disability, stood nearby as Henry spoke to the canvassers. She has been on the fence, but her cousin has been trying to convince her to cast her ballot for Sanders.
Hearing she was on social security. Huynh noted to Brown that Sanders in his speech that afternoon had said $11,000 or $12,000 is not enough to live on.
“I know I’ve got to vote for somebody,” Brown said. “Sanders, he sounds like he’s the man for the job. He’ll bring up wages.”
Sanders and Clinton have sparred in recent weeks over ownership of the $15-dollar-an-hour plan pushed by fast-food workers and the Service Employees International Union, which aims to increase the wage nationwide.
Other people in the apartment complex were Clinton supporters.
Michael Williams, 55, coming up in an elevator with his 4-year-old grandson, Sean, told the Sanders canvassers he was voting for Clinton.
“We wanted to ask you why?” Wintersberger said.
“Why not?” he replied.
“Because there’s a better alternative!” Umanskaya said.
Wintersberger repeated criticism of status-quo prison policies that let private prisons make money off inmate labor and Clinton’s comments on cracking down on urban crime in the 1990s, including using the word “superpredator” to describe youth lost to violence.
They also mentioned Sanders association with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
“I was hearing that a couple weeks ago,” Williams said as his grandson, bored, bounded around the elevator alcove. “It was on the radio. And I thought ‘wow,’” the soft spoken grandfather replied to the three enthusiastic canvassers. He thanked them for giving him more to consider.
Others were more staunchly loyal to Clinton.
“I’m voting for Hillary,” Amyomi Oki, 60, a retired teacher said. “Bernie just started. We have to stay with someone who been with us for years. I just know Bernie Sanders last year. Who would you vote for? You can’t just get someone you met yesterday.”
“Sanders is good,” he added. “But one is better than the other.”
