Dalhi Myers, a black woman elected to South Carolina’s Richland County Council in 2016, announced Wednesday that she is switching her support in the 2020 Democratic primary from former Vice President Joe Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders because of the latter’s willingness to fight for the most vulnerable and his potential strength in a general election battle against President Donald Trump.
“I looked at that, and I thought, ‘He’s right,'” Myers said of Sanders’ electability argument in an interview with the Associated Press.
“I’m a 50-year-old-black woman, and I tend to be middle of the road. I’m not a left-wing liberal. I’m not even a left-wing Democrat. But I am a realist.”
—Dalhi Myers
“He’s unafraid and he’s unapologetic,” added Myers. “I like the fact that he is willing to fight for a better America—for the least, the fallen, the left behind.”
Myers’ decision to shift her support to Sanders comes just over a month ahead of the crucial South Carolina primary, slated to take place Feb. 29. While most Democratic primary polls have shown Biden comfortably ahead of his rivals in the early voting state, recent surveys have suggested that Sanders is cutting into the former Vice President’s lead.
Just last month, Myers joined more than a dozen other South Carolina elected officials in endorsing Biden as “the only candidate with the broad and diverse coalition of support we need to win.”
But Myers told AP she no longer believes that is the case. As AP reported:
Initially, Myers said she backed Biden because she saw him as a candidate who could possibly appeal to Republican voters disenfranchised by the president.
“It was a compromise choice,” she said. “I didn’t find anybody’s candidacy electrifying, but I did find Joe Biden’s candidacy to be reassuring in a sort of normal, American kind of way.”
But over the ensuing weeks, Myers said she started to feel that Biden’s candidacy, while familiar and perhaps comfortable, wasn’t going to be enough to inspire the young voters whom she sees as necessary to a Democratic general election win.
By her own account, Myers is no progressive firebrand—but she said she is “voting what I think is best for all of us, not just me.”
“I’m a 50-year-old-black woman, and I tend to be middle of the road,” Myers said. “I’m not a left-wing liberal. I’m not even a left-wing Democrat. But I am a realist.”
In a tweet Wednesday night, Sanders thanked Myers for her support.
“Together,” the Vermont senator wrote, “we will defeat the most dangerous president in modern history.”