Results are still trickling in from the Nevada caucuses. After Iowa’s debacle, the state party there would rather be slow and accurate than fast and wrong. What’s clear is that Bernie Sanders won a blowout victory there, leaving his Democratic-ticket rivals in the dust.
While the state is small, turnout of over, 100,000 is considered “enormous,” Politico reports:
But the Sanders victory still exploded a lot of myths. He was said to have a ceiling of 30% or so. Remarkably, against a much larger field of candidates Sanders is poised to come close to the same level of support as he did in 2016 in a one-on-one race against Hillary Clinton, to whom he lost 47%-53%. (He was at 46% with a quarter of precincts reporting as of this writing.) He was said to be unable to attract anyone outside his core base. But he held his own with moderate voters (22%) and won across every issue area except voters who cared most about foreign policy, who went with Biden.
Young, Latino and liberal voters delivered big for Sanders on Saturday. And after his public dispute with the leadership of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, Sanders won about a third of union members’ support.
Sanders won just under half (49%) of all caucus-goers who ranked themselves “very liberal,” per another Politico account. He won white voters (28%) and finished second behind former Vice President Joe Biden with black voters (27% to Biden’s 36%). There remains a gender gap, Politico’s Steven Shepard writes, with Sanders drawing “8 points better among men (38 percent) than among women (30 percent).” But he pulled in strong support from Latinos. “The more estimated Hispanic voters in a precinct, the better Sanders did,” Nate Cohn reported for the New York Times. In a state with a third of its people from racial minorities, Sanders won a majority (53%) in a crowded field of candidates. In second place, Biden won 16 percent.
Rather than simply tossing off a few phrases in Spanish, Sanders ran a campaign that drew the most financial support from Latinos ( $8.3 million in 2019) of any Democrat in the race. He not only knocked over 200,000 Nevadans’ doors in the last 2-1/2 weeks, he won support among Latinos with small-scale, direct contact.
The New Yorker’s Stephania Taladrid provides one example:
O n President’s Day, Daniel Parra met a group of friends at Eldorado High School, in East Las Vegas. The Bernie Sanders campaign was holding a soccer tournament there that a friend of Parra’s had posted about on Snapchat. Under a bright morning sun, with Frenchman Mountain soaring in the background, some forty mostly Latino soccer aficionados gathered on one of the school’s fields. Many of the players had brought their parents, brothers, and sisters along, and spectators sat on the scorched grass beneath the branches of an ash tree. A Mexican woman in her sixties with an ice-cream cart and two taco vendors with a spread of carnitas, asado, and pastor would soon be selling food, as arranged by the campaign. Dozens of cobalt-blue Bernie signs, including one, which read, “Unidos con Bernie” fluttered on the field’s wire fence. Parra, who is nineteen, tall, and slender, spoke with conviction about his support for Sanders. He hoped to transfer to Colorado State University from the community college he was attending nearby, and said that the senator’s promise of making university tuition free resonated strongly with him. But something else had drawn him to the field that morning. “I see that he’s actually trying to look after the smaller communities, not just going after the big audience,” Parra said. “Doing something like this means a lot to people like us, because we don’t really get looked upon.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City appeared for the campaign at the soccer field.
Sanders had used a similar approach in in Des Moines, Iowa. He won 430 of 480 Latino voters at Spanish-language satellite caucuses state Democrats organized for the first time. Statewide, he drew over 60 percent of the vote in Latino precincts. Food, music, and family are key elements to his campaign’s outreach. Other candidates hire Mariachi bands for campaign events. Sanders’ campaign recruits student bands. Their parents come to watch them play.
At a high-school rally over a week ago, Taladrid met a Sanders supporter from back east:
Belem Orozco, a single mother in her twenties, told me that she was a volunteer with Make the Road who had travelled from Allentown, Pennsylvania, for the event. A DACA recipient, Orozco was born in Mexico and had migrated north with her family in the early two thousands. “I think other candidates are dealing with us how they usually do, which is just tokens,” she said. “Bernie sees us. Especially with the current President right now, who is essentially dehumanizing us, he brings the human back in us.” She said that, as an undocumented person, she had dealt with uncertainty for her entire life. “I definitely want to see Bernie in office, because we believe that he will finally bring some peace of mind to immigrant folks like myself,” she said. “We’re not fighting for him, we’re fighting with him.”
Ryan Grim (via Twitter) points to Sander’s victory speech (from San Antonio) as demonstrating another element Sanders gets right. Sanders told his rally:
The American people are sick and tired of a government, which is based on greed, corruption, and lies. They want an administration which is based on the principles of justice. Economic justice, social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice. Now Trump and his friends think they are going to win this election. They think they’re going to win this election by dividing our people up based on the color of their skin or where they were born or their religion or their sexual orientation. We are going to win because we are doing exactly the opposite. We’re bringing our people together. We are bringing our people together, black and white and Latino, Native American, Asian, gay and straight.
Hilary Clinton in 2016 name-checked minority groups she would fight for in her speeches. Grim observes, “The list got so long that if your own identity wasn’t on it it became conspicuous, like the one cousin not invited to the wedding.” Sanders is doing something subtly different, Grim tweets. “It’s not that he’ll fight for somebody because they are X identity, but rather he’s calling out Trump for trying to use race, gender etc to divide and conquer working people.”
Sanders is employing the race-class narrative developed in 2018 by Anat Shenker-Osorio, Ian Haney López (author Dog Whistle Politics), and Demos.
The only age* demographic Sanders did not win Saturday was the 65-and-up vote. They vote heavily while younger voters historically do not. If Sanders can change that fact, expand the electorate, he changes the game. If he rallies supporters who in the end don’t vote, his support amounts to vaporware. The James Carvilles of the world will say I told you so, as he was doing on MSNBC Saturday.
Whatever the punditry’s and the party bigwigs’ misgivings, Sanders is clearly gaining strength. He’s doing something right while they stew. Next Saturday: South Carolina.
Update: Age demographic.
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