Tag Archives: Latino vote

8/16 Sanders to be Guest On Sunday Bobblehead Shows; News & OT

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Can Biden win over the young Latinos who flocked to Bernie Sanders?

Energized by universal healthcare and free college tuition, enthusiastic young Latinos favored ‘Tio Bernie’ – and Biden has work to do to convince this crucial voting bloc

Thomas Kennedy remembers spending all day on the phone keeping up with excited new voters wanting to know how “el caucus” worked, ahead of the first Democratic primary contest in Iowa in February.

The most noticeable callers were highly motivated young mothers, part of a huge wave of Hispanic voters, activists and volunteers inspired to get involved in politics for the first time by passion for their candidate.

That candidate was Bernie Sanders. Kennedy, a progressive activist and former Sanders operative, has switched to support Joe Biden, who will next week become the Democratic nominee for president, but worries whether Biden can win over valuable young progressives underwhelmed by his moderate politics.

“Bernie talked directly to people’s material needs,” said Kennedy. The clear populist promises of universal healthcare and cancelling student debt in particular caught fire, Kennedy said.

And expansive outreach and slogans like ‘¡Nuestro Futuro, Nuestra Lucha!’ — Our Future, Our Struggle – clicked with the cohort who nicknamed Sanders “Tío Bernie” (Uncle Bernie).

For the first time, Latinos are poised to be the nation’s largest non-white ethnic voting bloc in the 2020 election, with a large young cohort among the estimated 32 million eligible to vote – a record.

Democrats know that their support is crucial to winning the White House – and potentially both chambers of Congress – but concerns remain over whether Biden can not only persuade young progressives who were energized by Sanders, but mobilize Latinos in decisive numbers at a moment when the coronavirus and economic crises are disproportionately hurting communities of color.

“The Biden campaign must reach young people,” María Teresa Kumar, the president of Voto Latino, a political organization focused on voter engagement. “Because if you’re not reaching young people, you are not reaching the Latino community.”

A survey published last month by Voto Latino and pollster Latino Decisions found that only 60% of Latino voters in six battleground states say they definitely plan to vote, and fewer than half say they are “extremely motivated and enthusiastic” about doing so.

Though the poll was conducted before many of Trump’s recent comments on immigration and the coronavirus, it found enthusiasm for Biden waning, particularly among young Latinos. His support among Latino voters slipped to 60% from 67% in February. By comparison, 73% of Latino voters supported Hillary Clinton at this point in 2016.

“When I worked for Bernie, it wasn’t about electing one person. It was about a movement,” Belén Sisa, a former Sanders press secretary, said. “I don’t feel that from Joe Biden.”

Since the primary, Biden has appeared to move to the left on key policies important to young Latinos. He has embraced a $2tn climate plan, though not the Green New Deal, and pledged an ambitious overhaul of Trump’s immigration orders, and an economic agenda centered on racial equality.

“We’ve moved the needle a bit,” Sisa said.

But, like many progressives, she is frustrated by Biden’s reluctance to embrace Medicare for All, the universal healthcare policy that she says would reduce health disparities for Latinos, who are among the country’s most uninsured. And he has refused to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the agency carrying out hardline Trump anti-immigration policies at the US-Mexico border and in raids in US cities.

Sisa also said Sanders’ campaign invested more, much earlier, to cultivate Latino voters.

Chuck Rocha, the architect of Sanders’ ambitious Latino outreach strategy, is now applying some of the tactics used to win Hispanics voters in primary contests from Iowa to California, to help Biden beat Trump in November.

After Biden won the primary, Rocha founded Nuestro Pac, a Democratic Super Pac that will target Latino voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

“Part of our work is spreading the message that Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden agree 75% to 80% of the time,” Rocha said.

The Biden campaign recently made other high-profile hires including Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of civil rights hero Cesar Chavez, and Matt Barreto, the founder of Latino Decisions, a top Democratic polling firm. The campaign has also hired Republican strategist Ana Navarro.

Biden’s platform aimed at Hispanic voters – “Todos con Biden” – focuses on healthcare, education and reversing Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. Biden has promised to reinstate the Daca program of rights and protections for undocumented young people, and send a bill to Congress “on day one” that would create a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

He has also pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations.

During the primary campaign, Biden was repeatedly confronted by immigration activists who demanded contrition for the more than 3 million deportations carried out while he was vice-president.

“You should vote for Trump,” Biden told one critic. Weeks later, he was obliged to apologize for the “pain” caused by the policies.

Earlier this week, prominent Latino politicians, activists and organizations applauded the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, represents California, which has the largest population of Hispanic voters in the nation.

Domingo Garcia, president of Lulac, the oldest Hispanic organization in the US, said: “She [Harris] knows what Dreamers are facing, the impact Covid-19 is having on black and brown communities, and the contributions immigrants are making to the economy of the United States.”

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7/15 Progressives Have a Window in TX; AOC Punks Ivanka’s Goya Ad; News Roundup & OT

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Leave it to AOC to tee up for someone to jab the Trumps. Spoken in Spanish…nonetheless.

Texas gained some progressives wins for the GE this fall. Grim and Chavez at The Intercept write:

The recent wave of progressive primary victories rolled into Texas on Tuesday evening, with Candace Valenzuela and Mike Siegel pulling into strong leads against centrist opponents for the chance to flip Republican-held suburban districts. In the Travis County district attorney race, José Garza, an immigrant rights activist and former public defender backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, ousted incumbent Margaret Moore. The Democratic national party’s pick for Senate, M.J. Hegar, meanwhile, found herself locked in a much closer fight than expected with Royce West, though by the end of the night, she appeared headed for a general election race against Republican Sen. John Cornyn.

With well more than half of the precincts reporting, Siegel was leading physician Pritesh Gandhi by 9 percentage points and declared victory around 10 p.m., Texas time. Valenzuela was up nearly 20 points over veteran Kim Olson, and also declared victory.

Computer engineer Donna Imam was leading Christine Mann, a physician who backed single-payer health care, by almost 14 percentage points in a race where the ideological lines were less clearly drawn.

snip

The wins would be well-timed. Simply winning a handful of House races each cycle is nowhere near enough to change the structure of Congress fast enough to stave off cataclysmic climate change tipping points, to rescue the economy from a tailspin, or to address the unfolding health care crisis. But if the window for big legislative maneuvering opens in 2021, and House Democrats feel that their seats are in jeopardy if they don’t go big, the consensus within the party of what the most strategic move is could shift left.

SIEGEL, A CIVIL rights attorney who supports a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, first ran in 2018, when Democrats considered the district out of range, but surprised officials back in Washington by winning 47 percent of the vote. That blood in the water drew new candidates, notably corporate attorney Shannon Hutcheson, who was backed by EMILY’s List and was clearly the establishment favorite, even though she did not have the official backing of the DCCC.

But a super PAC backing Gandhi, 314 Action, spent heavily pounding away at Hutcheson, and she failed to make the runoff. The super PAC has continued to spend big — dropping close to $600,000 on the race — in the runoff. The PAC presents itself as pro-science, but endorsed John Hickenlooper, a champion of fracking, in Colorado, and Gandhi has called the Green New Deal and Medicare for All “fool’s gold.” 314’s main line of attack against Siegel is that his loss last cycle proves he is unable to win the general election. Ironically, of course, it was his surprisingly narrow defeat that coaxed Gandhi and Hutcheson into the race. The parallels with Levin’s 2018 race are notable, as Applegate, like Siegel, helped make the district competitive the cycle prior, and 314 Action helped power Levin over Applegate.

Sen. Kamala Harris had endorsed Gandhi, while Siegel had the backing of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Siegel’s outspoken civil rights record was a boon throughout June, as protests erupted after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Siegel noted that the district is more than just a stretch of suburbs, zeroing in on the closure of three rural hospitals in the district over the past 10 years. “We are in a district where the legacy of Jim Crow racism hangs heavy,” he said, noting the recent five-year anniversary of the death of Sandra Bland in the district.

The wave of protests also helped Valenzuela, who surged significantly following the March 3 primary. Last week, a survey, which was commissioned by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and conducted in July by Data for Progress, revealed a significant shift in the race, showing that Valenzuela was climbing, leading Olson by an 11-point margin. Early voting data from her campaign suggests that the surge was fueled by higher turnout among voters of color. If elected, Valenzuela would be the first Afro-Latina in Congress. And as someone who grew up homeless, at one point “sleeping in a kiddie pool outside a gas station,” Valenzuela would also be bringing this economic perspective to Congress, where many of the lawmakers are millionaires. She noted in her victory speech that, thanks to a newborn and another young child, “the majority of our campaign was run out of our master bathroom.”

Leading up to the March primary, Olson led the rest of the field in fundraising and as a retired Air Force colonel, fit the mold of the party’s preferred candidate. But her record, specifically that Olson was charged with war profiteering in Iraq, had the potential to be too big of a political liability in the general election, so the House Democrats’ campaign arm stayed out of the race. EMILY’s List, which doesn’t typically weigh in on races between two pro-choice women, backed Valenzuela.

Valenzuela also won endorsements from the Congressional Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Progressive Caucuses, and lawmakers like Warren and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. In the most recent fundraising quarter, The Intercept reported last week, Valenzuela outraised Olson, $465,000 to $438,000, with a smaller average campaign contribution.

Garza, executive director of the Workers Defense Project, ran on a progressive platform that focused on transforming the criminal justice system to decriminalize poverty. He was endorsed by Sanders, Warren, Julián and Joaquin Castro, the Austin DSA chapter, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, and the Working Families Party. One of the major highlights of Garza’s platform was a vow to treat substance abuse as a public health crisis and end the prosecution of low-level drug offenses, which he defined as the sale and possession of a gram or less of narcotics.

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