Sen. Bernie Sanders is on track to be the 2020 Democratic nominee. What’s happening now in 2020 is what happened to Republicans in 2016. There was an anti-establishment candidate who was ‘scary’ to these folks and he just seemed unbeatable. The field is crowded like the 2016 GOP primary. And there’s the same talk about if this person or that person drops out, those votes magically will be transferred to the other candidate and then the person leading could be stopped supposedly. In 2016, that talk centered on Trump. In 2020, it’s Bernie. And need I remind Democrats who are peddling this analysis, it’s flawed. It didn’t work. This is politics. Egos abound—and no one wants to drop out even if they don’t have a shot in hell at winning.
Rahm Emanuel discussed how Bernie could be stopped if voters coalesce around a moderate. There are no moderates running for the Democratic Party nomination. It’s left-wing and communist, though Bernie describes himself as a “democratic socialist.” After Nevada, it’s truly his race to lose. And if he wins or does very well in South Carolina, the state that derailed his 2016 bid, then he’s pretty much unstoppable. There’s no way Joe Biden wins a decisive win and he needs one. Bernie is chipping away at Biden’s firewall concerning black voters. The momentum shift is just too great. And with Super Tuesday occurring shortly thereafter, Sanders could rack up a ridiculous delegate lead; forty percent of the Democratic Party’s delegates are set to be allocated on March 3. And if Bernie still has a lock on Latino voters in the same manner as Nevada, where he dominated the caucuses, then the Democrats should rename their party the “Sanderista” Party, it’s what some Florida Hispanics are calling Sanders supporters. How is Bernie doing so well with this key voter bloc? Well, that would be thanks to a self-described “Mexican redneck” Chuck Rocha, President of Solidarity Strategies and a senior adviser to the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign (via Yahoo! News):
It was Memorial Day weekend 2015, about a month after the Vermont senator launched his long-shot challenge to Hillary Clinton. Sanders was short on resources; his staff was a skeleton crew, with no one who could translate Spanish. So the campaign summoned Chuck Rocha, the founder and president of Solidarity Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in reaching Latinos and blacks that was launched by Rocha in 2010. He charged Sanders triple his usual rate to work on the holiday.
“I remember sending him an invoice for $824, which was a big invoice for me,” Rocha told Yahoo News in an extensive interview five days before the Nevada caucus. “Little did I know that that $800 invoice would turn into millions and millions of dollars of work for Bernie Sanders.”
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Now Rocha, a 51-year-old self-described “Mexican redneck” who campaigns wearing a cowboy hat and driving a rented pickup truck, has become a leader of Sanders’s 2020 operation.
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To date, the Democratic Party has awarded only 2.5 percent of its 3,989 pledged delegates, so Sanders’s growing strength with Latinos hasn’t made much of a dent in the delegate math. But that’s about to change on Super Tuesday (March 3), when nearly 40 percent of the remaining pledged delegates will be doled out.
The good news for Sanders is that Super Tuesday’s two biggest prizes are California (415 pledged delegates) and Texas (228 pledged delegates) — states that also boast the largest Latino primary electorates in America (31 percent and 32 percent, respectively).
The calendar, in other words, is about to heavily favor the candidate who’s leading among Latinos. Mathematically, it could even make that candidate unstoppable.
The Sanders campaign has been preparing for this moment since last summer. On Saturday, the candidate skipped the usual in-state victory party in Nevada and traveled instead to Texas for a series of rallies. Two polls released this month show the senator leading in the Lone Star State for the first time. The day before the caucus, Sanders opted to leave Nevada to campaign in California, where the latest surveys show him ahead of the competition by more than 10 points overall and by more than 20 points among Latinos. Along with Texas and California, Rocha noted that Florida and Arizona primaries are both coming up, are heavily Latino, and are “loaded with delegates.”
“The math is right,” he said.
If Sanders wins both California and Texas, he will likely amass an insurmountable lead in the delegate count — and Rocha’s innovative Latino outreach effort will be a big reason why. Rocha believes campaigns have long botched their Latino outreach efforts by relying on largely white teams, insufficient investment and messages that aren’t “culturally competent.” He has sought to mount a push for Sanders that is historically diverse, large and involves a tailored advertising blitz.
“People say Latinos don’t vote. It’s because motherf***ers don’t ask them to vote,” said Rocha.
Yeah, so keep an eye on how Sanders does in Texas and California.
The publication noted that the increase in Latino outreach from Sanders this cycle was based upon the Nevada 2016 polls, where it should that the Vermont left-winger could attract these voters. As for Rocha, well, he has quite the story. He was born to a Mexican father and a white mother. His family got by on welfare for a period of time, he later had a child of his own at 18, which Yahoo! News said led him to reconnect with his father, who had left the family when he was five, that landed him a job at a local tire factory in East Texas. That led to union work and his entry into politics. The rest is history. The piece also notes that Rocha stresses diversity in his staffing, warns white politicians not to speak Spanish while on the trail because it’s often been a disaster—just look at Beto O’Rourke’s attempt. The dude was one of the whitest guys around—and his prolonged Spanglish looked like pandering. And it was. It was actually very cringeworthy. The story Rocha is putting into the ads is Sanders’ own story, one where the Vermont lefty’s father came to this country without any money and unable to speak English—that resonates with Latinos. Then, there’s the usual break up ICE, revamping DACA, and halting deportations for an immigration policy audit, according to Yahoo!
Raising the minimum wage and Sanders’ college debt proposal, which is insanely expensive and one that could trigger a populist backlash, is also included. It’s a lengthy piece, but one that offers insight into how the Sanders machine has been re-worked and one that could win. Don’t sleep on the “socialist” label as the poison pill for Bernie.
But not all Latino voters are the same. Democrats in Florida, fellow Hispanics, are appalled at his Cuba remarks, which were horrific. Bernie isn’t all that horrified by the atrocities committed by Fidel Castro because his brainwashing—excuse me—literacy program was good. If Trump wins Florida and Wisconsin again—that’s the ballgame. It’s still too early. But if Sanders gets Latinos, young people, and union workers behind him—things could be messy. That’s the Obama coalition, one that tormented conservatives for a decade. For now, Bernie is poised to clinch what could be an insurmountable delegate count, much like Clinton did in 2016. Let’s see what happens.
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