Abstract
It wasn't big news in 1984 when Jesse Jackson got only 8 percent of the vote in Vermont's nonbinding presidential primary. By then, the media had just about written the obituary on the whole "Rainbow Coalition" idea. Though Jackson's strong appeal to blacks was widely acknowledged, the common wisdom was that whites—even those who shared many of the candidate's views—wouldn't support him. In Vermont, which has the nation's smallest percentage of nonwhites (just 1 percent of its half million residents), Jackson was never expected to do very well.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
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