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Is the Democratic candidacy of Bernie Sanders inevitable? 2:12
Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) - Jorge Trejo Ibarra was excited when Bernie Sanders talked about medical care at a rally in Las Vegas over the weekend.
The son of 17-year-old Mexican immigrants, who was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin lymphoma in 2018, votes for Senator Vermont in large part due to "Medicare for all."
Trejo-Ibarra, after going into remission, decided to get more politically involved and will serve as a precinct captain for Sanders at the Nevada assemblies on Saturday. It has a double purpose: it wants to fight for people who cannot afford insurance, which covers their own cancer treatments. And he wants to help those who cannot speak English to participate in the next assemblies.
Sanders has young Latino voters like Trejo-Ibarra, who can participate in the committees because he will turn 18 before Election Day, to take him to victory in Nevada.
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Nevada will be the first real test of whether Sanders has been able to expand its appeal in the diverse universe of Democratic voters, particularly within the Latino community, where the Sanders campaign took a big push to connect with voters more than eight months ago.
"We believe that medical care is a human right for all people," Sanders said at a rally on Saturday. "We will assume the greed of insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and we will approve a Medicare for All program."
Sanders will have to deal with the powerful Culinary Union, which fought and negotiated excellent health benefits, due to its opposition to Medicare for All. The organization says it represents 60,000 hotel and casino workers in Nevada and provides health insurance coverage for more than 130,000 people. It is not clear how much Sanders' opposition to Medicare for All will hurt Sanders, as the union decided not to support any candidate by 2020 before partisan assemblies.
And Sanders' presidential rivals seek to stop the senator's momentum after his victory in New Hampshire and his strong performance in Iowa. Businessman Tom Steyer has invested heavily in the state, and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg and the Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar are also running ads in Spanish while seeking to woo Latino voters.
But in interviews with more than two dozen Latino voters in Spanish and English in recent days in predominantly Latino areas of Las Vegas, Sanders appeared more frequently, and younger Latino voters described a particularly passionate desire to choose Sanders. Voters of all ages said they liked Sanders' plans on medical care, education, the environment and free college education.
“As of today, it is very predictable that Bernie will be the first. I would say that it is not certain who will be the second, ”said Andrés Ramírez, a Democratic strategist in Las Vegas, in an interview with CNN on Friday.
'99% of the Latino vote has not yet spoken '
At the same time that Sanders was gathering voters and leading a march to an early polling place, former Vice President Joe Biden took the microphone in a high school gym that was only 10 minutes away by car. Attendance at his event, convened through telephone calls, focused on Latinos was limited, partly with supporters from California who had come to the state to campaign with him.
But among them was Rafael García, who decided to vote for Biden that day. "This man has done a lot for this country," Garcia said.
The 59-year-old boxing coach said he was not worried about the loss of Biden in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the former vice president ranked fourth and fifth respectively.
"It could have been the weather out there, or that new people wanted to be heard," Garcia said, noting that voters have many options in this cycle. “There were women competing. A war hero in Pete (Buttigieg). I love Bernie (Sanders). But I'd like to see everyone vote for Joe (Biden). ”
There, Biden reminded the crowd, "99% of the Latino vote has not yet spoken."
Biden beat Senator Vermont in two January surveys of Suffolk University and Fox News, and Sanders took second place. But the polls have been constantly wrong in Nevada, not only because it is difficult to predict who will participate in a partisan assembly, but because many casino workers work at unusual times and the state has a constantly changing population with movement in and out of the state.
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The age composition of Saturday's participation will also be a factor. Sanders has a great advantage among younger voters, while Biden does better among older ones. The Sanders team hopes to see strong participation among young voters. The fact that 56% of the first voters this weekend went to a party assembly for the first time was a good sign for the Vermont senator.
Sanders had the advantage among Latinos nationwide in a Pew Research Center survey of Democratic and Democratic-trend voters last month: 30% favored the Vermont senator, 22% supported Biden, 11% supported the senator of Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren.
Months of specific scope
The committees will be proof of the heavy investments of the Sanders campaign in Latin America. Collecting their data from the voter archives, the Sanders team estimates that more than 101,000 Latinos in Nevada have registered to vote since the last committees. That number is huge considering that only 84,000 Democrats congregated in Nevada in 2016.
More than 26,000 Nevadans participated in the first two days of early voting during the weekend, according to the party, which estimated that 56% were going to vote for a partisan assembly for the first time.
In 2016, the campaign recognized Sanders' popularity among Latinos, said Sanders senior advisor Chuck Rojas, "but we learned too late to capitalize on it, because we were building the plane and flying at the same time."
This time, he began to invest resources eight months ago, hiring from within the community through what Rojas describes as a multi-layered communications operation.
"If you can think in any way possible for a Latino of any age to consume information to know the elections, we are talking to them on that platform," Rojas said in an interview with CNN.
Beyond television, which included commercials, newspapers, Instagram, Facebook, Spanish radio, truck panels, text messages, telephone and announcements in music streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify.
“It helped us reconnect with a young group of Latinos who have been following Bernie since the last elections. It helped us start building a relationship with a larger demographic group of Latinos, who always vote, but may not have known or trusted Bernie at first, but their children do, ”said Rojas.
"So we had eight months to talk to them about Bernie when nobody else was talking to them," he said. "It also helped us begin to reach a new group of Latinos, which is the largest group that has recently registered, with which no one is talking."
The Sanders campaign says it now has more than 250 employees on the ground in Nevada. It opened the first of its 11 offices in Nevada in the predominantly Latin area of eastern Las Vegas last July. In December, the representative of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, co-organized the first town hall in Spanish for Sanders and the campaign has conducted electoral training in Spanish, as well as in other languages such as Tagalog, Mandarin and Vietnamese.
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Candidates develop their operations in Nevada
Sanders is not just investing in Nevada. Buttigieg recently doubled his field staff and Steyer increased his operation at the end of last year, bringing together a team of Latino assistants to lead his operation.
Steyer, who spent $ 14.7 million on ads in Nevada over $ 1.9 million from Sanders, also appeared frequently in interviews with Latino voters, and most people said they had seen or heard an announcement of the bell.
Sanders, Steyer, Buttigieg and Klobuchar publish ads in Spanish in Nevada. Buttigieg, who speaks Spanish, narrates his own ad in Spanish. And Steyer was the first to have negative results in Nevada, criticizing Sanders for his support for Medicare for Everyone.
"There is a reason why people are nervous because Bernie Sanders discards Obamacare," says the narrator in Steyer's announcement. "The unions don't like it ... And Bernie can't or won't give us a price tag."
Armando Arciga, a 51-year-old construction worker in Las Vegas, said outside a Cárdenas supermarket that he is voting for Steyer because the climate crisis is the number one issue that Arciga worries.
Nick Maldonado, 37, is the CEO of the Latin franchise Toro Taxes, and told CNN at an event organized by the League of United Latin American Citizens that his company backed Steyer.
"I appreciate the fact that (Steyer's) is a businessman, but he is still a Democrat, and he still focused on local problems," Maldonado said. He promoted Latino-led Steyer staff in Nevada, and said Steyer's campaign was extended and asked for support.
Buttigieg, which seeks to build on its strong performance in Iowa and New Hampshire, now has more than 100 staff members in Nevada and more than 40% of them speak Spanish, according to the campaign.
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The former mayor quickly criticized Klobuchar on Sunday after she and Steyer failed to name the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, during interviews with Telemundo in Nevada last week. During a town hall on Sunday in Las Vegas, Buttigieg was asked what he says about Washington's experience that "an American senator in office could not name the president of Mexico."
"Guess what? He says there is more to be prepared than how many years you spent in Washington, ”said Buttigieg, who had answered the question correctly in his own interview with Telemundo.
Buttigieg's team began publishing digital ads in Spanish in December, as well as radio ads in Spanish, which were also narrated by the former mayor. He opened his office in East Las Vegas in mid-September, conducting assembly training in Spanish and providing Spanish scrutiny tools to his volunteers, including his "relational organization" tool that allows a volunteer to contact their own contacts. on behalf of Buttigieg.
Still, several Nevada political strategists noted in interviews that Sanders' volunteer footprint in Nevada was unmatched, while Biden's organizational infrastructure has been lighter than expected. Despite Sanders' apparent advantage, it is unclear whether friction over his health care plan with the Culinary Union will benefit more moderate candidates such as Buttigieg, Biden and Klobuchar.
"Bernie has huge investments of volunteers in Nevada," said Kristian Ramos, a political consultant who works with Latino groups like Mi Familia Vota, which focuses on expanding the voting population in Nevada.
But he noted that Latino voters over 45 have tended to dominate the committees in the past, so the age of the voters who will participate will be an important determining factor.
"The question is' Can Pete Buttigieg take all this momentum and turn it into something real in Nevada," Ramos said, 'and that is enough to defeat Bernie's army of young volunteers?' "
"He is a winner"
Although Sanders has younger voters, he has appealed to Latino voters of all ages.
William Chavez, 62, said he will vote for Sanders and cited the senator's support for the Green New Deal, unregistered universities and Medicare for all as reasons for supporting him.
“(Sanders) is that age, he could have retired and relax and enjoy life, but no, he is fighting for people. And he's trying to unite us, not divide us, ”Chávez, a retired casino worker who lives in Las Vegas, told CNN at a Sanders rally.
"He is a winner," Chavez said. “He had a heart attack, right? I have had two. Nothing stops me. Nothing stops it. ”
Rosie Beltren, a 65-year-old housekeeper who works on the Las Vegas Strip, supports Sanders because she believes it will raise the minimum wage and help the many immigrants who work in Nevada who don't have a path to citizenship.
“The most important thing for me: medical care. A lot of people need it, ”said Beltren while talking to a friend who sold tamales in a supermarket parking lot last week. “Last week I bought a medicine, only one. $ 248, ”said Beltran, who needed three medications to treat his cancer. "I need more than one, but I didn't have the money."
“There are many people who need their papers to work: they are good people, they work very hard, but they cannot get papers,” said Beltren.
Sanders has also received the support of Keila Eustaquio, a 24-year-old DACA recipient who plans to volunteer for her campaign even though she cannot legally vote for him.
“Many people I know are supporting Bernie; We were supporting her last time ... He has many plans to do many good things for our community, in terms of giving everyone citizenship, medical care, ”said Eustaquio, who was born in Mexico and runs his own business in Las Vegas. She cited Biden as her second choice because "I feel safe with him."
Eustaquio, after a shopping trip in the Cardenas Market with friends last week, acknowledged that it is unlikely that some of Sanders' plans go through Congress, a fact he knows will be used against him if he faces a confrontation in the general election with Trump.
"Trump has realistic goals and Sanders doesn't," he said, "but what (Sanders) wants to do is change the lives of all people."
Bernie Sanders
