How Bernie Sanders could help fix Joe Biden’s Latino voter problem
One of the legacies of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign is likely to be his success with engaging Latino voters, a constituency Democrats often take for granted that the Vermont senator invested in early and heavily.
Sanders’ triumphs in the primary with a group that’s projected to be the largest nonwhite voting bloc in the general election also exposed a glaring weakness for Joe Biden that many Hispanic leaders worry remains uncorrected heading into his battle against President Donald Trump.
But they also see a potent remedy to Biden’s deficiency: mirroring Sanders’ strategy by pouring exponentially more resources into outreach, hiring more Hispanic advisers as decision-makers, and clearly articulating how policy proposals will specifically impact their communities — and doing so sooner rather than later.
“We spent more money on Latino outreach than Sen. Biden spent on his whole campaign probably,” said Chuck Rocha, a senior Sanders campaign adviser. “When we had time to run an extensive organizing program, we devastated people and showed how the Latino vote should be prioritized in every election.”
“Anybody can rebuild what I did,” Rocha added. “They just have to start early, listen to the community and hire the community. Bernie Sanders’ campaign proved you can do this.”
From the outset of the race, Sanders empowered Rocha to plow considerable resources into the Latino community with specificity and consistency. The campaign spent $4 million in California, $3 million in Nevada and $1.3 million in Iowa on Hispanic outreach alone, far outpacing his Democratic rivals. Sanders won a majority of the Latino vote in both Nevada and California amid a crowded field of opponents.
“They know they need to do a lot more than what has been done to date. They need to speak to younger Hispanics,” Maria Cardona, a Latina Democratic strategist, said of the Biden campaign. “Frankly, they should hire Chuck Rocha to do the same type of outreach. … It was beautifully done. They put in the effort. … They did it early. That’s what needs to be done.”
Biden was hobbled by paltry fundraising early in the primary, but aides note the campaign eventually spent six-figures on Hispanic advertising in the Florida and Arizona primaries, where the former vice president significantly improved his standing.
Those performances were likely driven more by Biden’s national momentum. Still, the Biden team indicated it would be focusing on Latino outreach for the general election, including in places that are not Hispanic-heavy states. For instance, the campaign targeted an online ad to the growing Hispanic population in Reading, Pa., last May to promote Biden’s kick-off rally in Philadelphia, about an hour drive away.
“In Wisconsin, we’re going to have a focus on Latino voters there, which happen to be heavier Mexican. In Ohio, there’s a large number of Puerto Ricans … and other places where you wouldn’t automatically think, that’s a Latino state,” said Cristóbal Alex, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign and former president of the Latino Victory Fund. “But the Latino growth there is so substantial, they can make the difference.”
Hispanic leaders hope this is the case, but they’ve also heard countless campaign pledges fade before, especially as other other demands stack up, or an unforeseen crisis, like the coronavirus, strikes.
“Most of the time it’s an afterthought,” said Lizet Ocampo, the political director for the People for the American Way. “It’s, ‘OK, if we have money left over, we’ll do Latino outreach.’”
The consensus within the Latino political community is that Biden was already behind where he needs to be seven months out from the election, even before a national pandemic scrambled his plans.
Asked to evaluate the Biden campaign’s Hispanic strategy thus far, Lorella Praeli, who led Hilary Clinton’s Latino outreach in 2016, replied, “I think it’s been dismal.”
BIDEN’S CHALLENGE
There’s still time for Biden to make up ground, but interviews with more than a dozen activists, Hispanic elected officials and Biden allies outlined two core challenges: one organizational, and one on policy.
Praeli, now the president of Community Change Action, noted that Clinton hired her about a month after she launched her campaign in 2015, and quickly added a team for Hispanic paid media, constituency outreach and analytics. Parachuting into communities in the final months before an election yields limited results, and the later money is allocated, the harder it is to fully integrate into programs Latinos will trust.
“Biden is definitely behind in terms of building an organization,” said Gary Segura, co-founder of the research firm Latino Decisions. “They don’t have a brown pollster, they don’t have a brown ad writer and they don’t have a brown ground game yet.”
Biden campaign officials declined to answer questions about their staffing plans. Laura Jiménez, Biden’s Latino engagement director, is based in Florida. But Biden lost his most senior Latina aide in November over concerns about his rhetoric on immigration, according to Politico.
Praeli foresees Biden’s role in the Obama administration’s deportation program as an issue that will be weaponized by Trump, who performed marginally better than Mitt Romney with Hispanics, according to exit polls, netting about 29 percent of their vote.
“How does Biden own his deportation record and the kind of disillusionment that emanates from that with the Latino electorate?,” Praeli asked. “It’s both owning it and where you make good on it. … We saw the largest number of removals under his administration because he was the vice president.”
Biden has endorsed a 100-day moratorium on deportations, but has declined to support a more radical position espoused by some progressives earlier in the primary to completely decriminalize border crossings.
Kristian Ramos, who formerly served as the communications director for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, argued that Trump has overperformed with Hispanic men, in particular, because of a clear-throated economic message that stresses opportunity and advancement.
He said Biden is well-positioned to cut into the president’s advances by speaking about the importance of the Affordable Care Act, especially now. As the most uninsured population in the country, Latinos are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. But Ramos said conventional media won’t cut through.
“Just because Joe Biden says it on CNN does not mean this community sees that or hears that. It’s got to be in literature, it’s got to be on doors, it’s got to be on social media, it’s got to be everywhere,” Ramos said. “Democrats say this stuff. Do they take that extra step?”
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has begun holding virtual town halls aimed at Latino voters. On Tuesday night, Trump advisor Mercedes Schlapp spearheaded a discussion with a physician and CEO painting a rosy picture about how the president was harnessing the power of the private and public sectors to combat the coronavirus.
“Social distancing and being Latino — they don’t go hand and hand,” Schlapp said on the webcast. “This is new behavior that we’ve had to adopt in our families and our communities.”
SENSING OPPORTUNITY
Hispanics are statistically less likely to turn out than African-American and white voters. But most presidential campaigns typically spend only a fraction of their budgets on motivating them compared to other demographic groups. Under financial pressure, strategists are less inclined to try to gamble on expanding their voting universe.
The average age of a prospective Latino voter is younger — between 27 and 30, depending on the state — meaning they often automatically fall out of the campaign universe simply due to their youth.
Community leaders see the millions of Hispanics who have recently turned 18 in Texas and the hundreds of thousands of displaced Puerto Ricans in Florida as ripe opportunities for Democrats, but only if they are given good reason to turn out to vote.
Sanders, who is still a candidate despite a nearly nonexistent path to the nomination, could go a long way in helping Biden make inroads with this burgeoning voting bloc.
“That means having Bernie go out there and try to inspire these young folks,” Cardona said. “He said, and I take him at his word, he’s going to do everything he can in his power to beat Trump. If that means going out and stumping for Joe Biden, he’s got to do that. He can’t wait a month to do that.”
And once Sanders moves on from the primary, it will free up Rocha, who hired 150 Latino staff, dispersed throughout every department of the campaign.
“The biggest thing was I was at the table. So you had a Latino running the campaign. Not the Latino outreach. I’m a senior adviser for the entire campaign so I got to be in the room when there was like, ok where we going to spend this money?” Rocha said.
Asked whether he’d work for Biden, Rocha laughed it off, stressing that the primary wasn’t over yet.
“Joe Biden can’t afford me,” he said. “But we’ll see.”
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Join NowThis story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
