Eric Gay/AP Photo
Bernie Sanders speaks to supporters in Texas after winning the Nevada caucuses, where Latino voters drove him to victory.
As I write, the official numbers in Nevada have only just begun to trickle in, but reports from the networks at about 10 percent of the polling places, plus the network entrance poll, have enabled media outlets to project Bernie Sanders in a decisive victory. The Vermont senator looks likely to pull down a little more than a third of the first-choice votes, and when all the caucus reshuffling is done, his share of the delegate haul will surely be a good deal higher than that.
The Sanders sweep was as qualitative as it was quantitative—that is, he did better in a range of constituencies where he hadn’t done that well before. Chief among those was Nevada’s Latino voters, who made up a fifth of caucus participants, and who according to the exit poll gave Sanders 53 percent of their votes.
As usual, some of my fellow pundits are expressing surprise at Sanders’s performance among Latinos. They shouldn’t be.
First, as in all communities throughout American history with a disproportionate share of immigrants, it’s the young—most born and schooled here, often more fluent in English than their elders—who not only are the most active politically but who also guide their elders through the labyrinth of American politics. As Bernie and Bernie’s policies speak more compellingly to the young than do any of his rivals and their policies, it’s no surprise that Latinos have tilted so sharply Berniewards in these caucuses.
Second, and even more fundamentally, the level of backing among Latinos for governmental support for economic equity and advancement has long exceeded that of any other demographic group in the electorate. One look at the exit polls on California ballot measures over the past quarter-century shows that, when voters have been asked to approve funds for schools or parks, and to decide on minimum-wage levels and the rights of unions, Latinos have been the most liberal voting bloc there is—more so, even, than African Americans. On one 1998 California ballot measure that would have greatly curtailed unions’ ability to involve themselves in elections (fortunately, it lost big), Latinos voted no at a higher rate than union members.
There’s an old conventional wisdom that says that because Latinos are supposedly more conservative on issues like choice or preserving the traditional family, they’re not all that liberal. It’s wrong. First, younger Latino voters aren’t conservative on those issues. Second, and more important, election after election has shown that when it comes to their choice of candidates, Latinos consider the candidate’s position on economic questions to be far more decisive than that on any cultural issue.
Bernie’s support among Latinos has implications—some clear, some not—for a number of upcoming contests. It surely put him in good stead in the largest state that will vote on Super Tuesday, California, where polls already show him with a commanding lead. It makes the outcome in Texas, the second-largest state to vote on Super Tuesday, all the more fascinating. The voting history of Texas Latinos places them to the right of California Latinos, and Sanders’s performance there will be a test of whether he’s able to narrow that gap. One spillover effect of his Latino voter mobilization effort in Texas may well be to help Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a dynamic organizer of both construction workers and young Latinos, whom Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) endorsed last Friday, advance to the runoffs in the state’s Democratic senatorial primary. And should Sanders win the nomination, his support among Latinos would certainly ensure that Arizona would be in play in the November general election.
In beating everyone else in the caucuses by at least a two-to-one margin, Sanders not only swept the Latino vote, but handily won the union vote as well, despite the well-publicized opposition to his campaign by the state’s largest union, UNITE HERE Local 226, the union of Las Vegas hotel employees. The entrance poll shows him winning 34 percent of the union member vote; his nearest competitor in that category, Joe Biden, won just 19 percent. In addition, Sanders took five of the seven caucuses held in the Las Vegas casinos, primarily for Local 226 members, suggesting that he had the support of the heavily Latino rank-and-file membership, if not the leadership.
Among the 10 percent of the electorate that was African American, Biden ran first with 36 percent of the vote, but Sanders finished a not-distant second with 27 percent. That result suggests a tight race between the two in next Saturday’s South Carolina primary, with Biden the slight favorite to prevail there.
How the so-called moderate lane shakes out after Super Tuesday is anybody’s guess. Amy Klobuchar looks to be the weakest mod-laner, but it’s certainly possible that the three mod-Bs—Biden, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg—will stay in the race. Of the three, Pete Buttigieg certainly is the only one who has to look to a political future beyond 2020, and he may conclude that if his continued presence in the race estranges both wings of the party—the left, for attacking Sanders, or the mods, for cluttering up the field—he could be first of the three to depart. Elizabeth Warren has shown that her stellar debate performances can generate the resources to soldier on, but she has to start getting better election-day results if she’s to remain.
It’s now, as I write, more than three hours since most caucuses concluded their work, and the state is reporting results from only 4 percent of those caucuses.
Not to be unduly nostalgic, but if Meyer Lansky still ran Vegas, we’d have had those numbers long since.
