Elections in Nevada are won by the cry of “yes, you can.” It is not a nod to Latinos. It is not a phrase that the candidate can release at the end of a speech in English as an anecdote. Connecting with the Spanish-speaking population is the very essence of any viable electoral campaign in a state with a third of the Latino population, mostly with a very recent immigration experience. In Nevada, the favorite to win this Saturday’s primaries is not Senator Bernie Sanders. The favorite is the Uncle bernie.
“In Nevada you can’t win if you don’t like Latinos. As simple as that, brother. ” Activist and trade unionist José La Luz was so resounding Thursday at the Sanders campaign offices in Las Vegas, where a group of volunteers were about to go out and knock on the last doors to make sure Sanders supporters are present on Saturday in the caucuses that these primaries can sentence.
Latinos are a third of the three million inhabitants of Nevada. More than 70% of the state’s population lives in the county where Las Vegas is located. 33% of all registered Democrats in Nevada are Latino. They are the hospitality workers, the first industry in the city. In Las Vegas kitchens Spanish has always been spoken. But in the last decade they have grown to be much more. Today, entire neighborhoods of the city only speak Spanish.
Four years ago, Senator Bernie Sanders found himself here with an electoral machine Oiled by Hillary Clinton since a decade before. Latino volunteers roamed Las Vegas neighborhoods and called lists of supporters on behalf of Clinton. Sanders campaign It was made up of a group of activists. The biggest event of the campaign was a rally in an auditorium in Henderson, just outside. Even so, Sanders stayed at four points in a state where polls said Clinton was going to raze.
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In 2020, the ubiquitous campaign in the city is that of Sanders. That guerrilla activist is today an army. Sanders has opened 11 offices throughout the State, 8 of them in Las Vegas. The first to open is in East Las Vegas, a neighborhood that has become the Mexican heart of Nevada. This office has been doing field work since May 2019. By then, Sanders was already issuing an announcement in Spanish in Iowa, eight months before it was voted in that state. In December, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to Las Vegas to speak at a forum in favor of Sanders entirely in Spanish. According to campaign data, they have organized 560 bilingual events and volunteers have made more than half a million calls in Spanish.
That army of volunteers are people from all over the country. Like Vaneik Echeverría, a 46-year-old actor and theater producer from New York who came to Las Vegas to help two days and has stayed two weeks. Ensures the campaign is global. “I have met volunteers in the campaign who have come from Germany or Slovenia. We have always been Americans who went to the sites to fix the problems. Now this country has problems and people from all over the world are coming to help. ” Last Thursday he knocked on doors to ask for the vote for Sanders for the third time at the same crossroads in East Las Vegas. Echeverría is one of those who supported Sanders in 2016 and refused to vote for Clinton. This year, he acknowledges that he will vote “strategically” and that the goal is to defeat Donald Trump, but warns the Democratic Party not to vote for granted.
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Lupita Arreola, a middle-aged Mexican lady from Arizona who helps with volunteer teams, was also in the East Las Vegas office. He was already supporting Sanders four years ago, when Latin ladies of his age were helping Clinton, because she was the natural candidate of the party. “In fact I lost a lot of friends because of that. And now they are with Bernie Sanders and they are my friends again. ” Sanders is now occupying the Latin support networks that Clinton enjoyed.
The brand Uncle bernie “It happened to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a rally in New York and he has had a tremendous punch,” explains José La Luz. “When we knock on the doors, the boys say: Son It’s Uncle Bernie’s people, mom! We have to talk to them! ” Interestingly, while the other candidates make more or less successful efforts to say a few words in Spanish or show closeness to immigrants, Sanders does nothing similar. He is a white Jew from New York who doesn’t say a word in Spanish. According to José La Luz, what makes him connect with Latinos is “the support of working people.” “It is because of its consistency. The Bernie Sanders of today is the same as 10 and 20 years ago. He has been a champion of working people and they are rewarding him, ”he says. Sanders does not connect with Latinos because he speaks in Spanish, but because he talks about helping them with health and education, which are the main problems they cite in the surveys.
Sanders won 66% of Iowa’s tiny Latino vote, according to an estimate by the University of California, and 42% of the also modest Latino vote in New Hampshire, according to CNN ballot surveys. In a recent Univision poll, 33% of voters who identify themselves as Latino would vote for Sanders. Next is Joe Biden, the closest candidate to what Clinton was four years ago, with 22%. The polls coincide in giving Sanders about 30% of the total votes this Saturday, a very big difference to have six candidates.
Nevada is the first state that resembles the rest of the United States, the first real test of who can aspire to broad support and who cannot. After drawing in Iowa (rural white vote) and win in New Hampshire (white vote from the suburbs), Sanders’ pull among Nevada’s Latinos would end up proving that their coalition of supports is the widest of all that come along. The next appointment is South Carolina, where support is measured among African Americans. There is second, behind Biden.
But immediately after comes the super Tuesday from March 3. There, the two most populous states in the country, California and Texas, will distribute between the two a third of the delegates needed to win the nomination (415 California and 228 Texas). And the two states have, like Nevada, more than a third of the Latino population. That is to say, by how the calendar of these primaries is configured, it can be deduced that if a candidate wins roundly in the Latino laboratory of Nevada he has everything in his favor to leave the super Tuesday with the nomination at your fingertips.
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