Live from East L.A.: How the Latino vote became the secret weapon for ‘Tío Bernie’ | Will Bunch

EAST LOS ANGELES — After weeks in the claustrophobic cold of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic presidential primaries are opening up into a frantic, no-time-to-lose dash for millions of votes under an 85-degree February sun. Here on a quiet block of South Downey Road, down cluttered concrete alleys guarded by the grind of sliding metal gates and the yap of dozens of small dogs, lies the vast untapped sleeping giant of American politics.

With Super Tuesday and its mother lode of convention delegates now less than a week away, I walked the block — in the shadow of a massive King Taco sign on busy Olympic Boulevard, in the heart of the biggest Latino community in vote-rich Southern California — with Saúl Sarabia and Xiomara Corpeno. They are two veteran community organizers and activists, both in their 40s, and they’ve been working the streets of East L.A. for months in an underground campaign to make Sen. Bernie Sanders the next president.

In a season of political air wars, with billionaires carpet-bombing TV with slick ads, this is the equivalent of door-to-door urban combat — and it’s steadily gaining ground. The first voter we saw crack open her door was a 67-year widow. In Spanish, the woman told Sarabia and Corpeno that her late husband had supported Sanders in 2016 but now, four years later, she was unsure. She’d read in the Spanish-speaking press about Sanders’ tempered praise of the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and that worried her.

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“We told her that we are the children of immigrants and that Xiomara’s family is from El Salvador," Sarabia related after their long conversation. “The woman said, ‘I’m from Honduras!’ We told her that one of the things we find refreshing about Bernie is that....he has been willing to speak the truth about U.S. foreign policy.” As the two activists told the undecided voter about their own work at the Mexican border with caravans from her native Honduras that had been demonized by President Trump, her interest perked up.

Over the last few months, tens of thousands of conversations like this one have taken place not just in the heart of East L.A.'s barrio, but in off-the-beaten track Latino communities like Coachella or Sun Valley on the fringes of this endless metropolis — places where no presidential candidate had ever opened an office in anyone’s memory.

The payoff is becoming a game-changer in the fraught and often unconventional race to produce a Democratic challenger to Trump in November. Experts think Sanders’ domination so far of the Latino vote provided his narrow popular-vote lead in Iowa, powered his recent landslide in the Nevada caucus, and may now give him a firewall of protection on Super Tuesday in California, Texas, and Colorado.

The Sanders edge with Latinos — with a population pushing 600,000 in the greater Philadelphia region — could also prove pivotal when the race moves to Pennsylvania and New Jersey this spring.

The last big pre-Super Tuesday poll in California — released Friday morning by the University of California–Berkeley Institute of Government Studies — showed that the Vermont senator is getting half of the Latino vote in the eight-candidate field here. That is fueling a roughly 2-1 overall lead that could net a huge haul of as many as 200-300 convention delegates.

But how did this dyspeptic two-stent 78-year-old senator, from a small snow-covered lily-white state, come to dominate the vote among America’s Latinos, now the nation’s largest major ethnic or racial group and also by far the youngest, including a whopping 14.6 million Millennials, most with little or no history of voting? How to explain this unlikely re-branding as an avuncular Tío Bernie, or Uncle Bernie?

The answer begins at Sanders’ East L.A. office, tucked in a strip mall between a tax prep store, a day-care center, and a Peruvian restaurant, at the last stop on the Metro Gold light-rail line. It was a big deal when the campaign, mariachi band blasting, opened the office here in 2019, months before Super Tuesday was on most people’s radars. It’s an even bigger deal to see the bustle here on a Wednesday morning, with about 20 mostly volunteers working phones or getting last-minute tips on canvassing, underneath signs that show Bernie with the message “Rise Up” or a motivational shot of the president with the words, “Donald Trump Is An Idiot.”

A few of the volunteers are between-jobs 20-somethings from the L.A. metro area, while others are enthusiasts and or political activists who travel from state to state to organize for Sanders. Angel Montaldo, 27, is an immigrant rights activist from Miami who just arrived from Las Vegas, where he turned out Spanish-speaking taxi drivers from the Strip. He told me, “I think it’s ironic that the ones who’ve been marginalized and demonized by this administration are going to be the ones who give the election to a candidate who thinks that every person should be treated with dignity.”

But the newcomers — brandishing high-tech phone apps where an East L.A. map is covered with thousands of dots of voters who’ve been contacted and those who need to be re-visited — are building on months of work by local activists like Sarabia, a 49-year-old veteran community organizer and UCLA instructor. He supported Sanders in 2016, when he lost the California primary to Hillary Clinton, but said this campaign is different. Last year, the Sanders team reached out to create a network of Latino activists, including many not usually involved in elections. The most enthusiastic volunteers, he said, are the ones unable to vote — either because they are still in high school or because they are not U.S. citizens.

“This is a movement campaign in every sense of the word — the main draw for me is what it means to have someone who is so closely affiliated with being an activist so early in his life, putting his own body on the line for civil rights,” Sarabia told me, referring to Sanders’ arrest at a 1963 Chicago protest. In other words, Sanders’ stance on issues like a halt on deportations or Medicare for All is important, but not as much as this chance to organize the political power of Latinos.

Christian Arana, policy director of the California-based Latino Community Foundation, which encourages voter participation, said their late 2019 survey found 74% of the state’s registered Hispanics plan to vote in the primary, which would mean a substantial spike in turnout. Much of that comes in response to Trump’s stepped-up immigration policing, and his build-the-wall demagoguery around brown-skinned migrants. But of all the Democrats, it is Sanders who is capitalizing most on that voter determination.

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“They have gone out to communities to talk about the issues that we care about,” Arana — whose group is non-partisan — said of the Sanders campaign. “They are having a conversation — how can we work together to create solutions?” In inland California communities like Riverside, where Sanders opened an office months before his rivals, campaign staffers forged a close alliance with the mostly Latino workforce protesting conditions at Amazon’s vast warehouses.

As Sarabia and Corpeno marched up and down South Downey, fumbling with their phone app, they focused heavily on voters in the 18-30 age bracket, since most are eligible to vote even if their parents are not. Angel Espinoza, 19, whom Sarabia engaged across his home’s white metal gate, has never voted before. He said he recently dropped out of East Los Angeles Community College because he can’t afford it.

Sarabia told him that Sanders and his local allies have fought to make ELACC free for low-income students and are fighting for the same at state universities, so that “people don’t leave just because you can’t pay.” Still, it wasn’t clear at the end whether Espinoza would pull the lever for Sanders. Other on-the-fence voters voiced some of the same concerns about the democratic socialist that one hears from the broader electorate.

Gilbert Velasquez, 47, told Corpeno that when he hears about free college proposals, his first worry is that his property taxes will go up again. The Sanders volunteer tried to allay those fears and turned the conversation around to racial profiling by police, which led Velasquez to talk about the night he and some friends were pulled over by cops. As Corpeno left, Velasquez blurted out: “Take Donald Trump, kick him in the rear.”

Yet the widespread desire to boot Trump in November has also caused something of a divide between rank-and-file Latino voters and their elected officials, many of whom have endorsed either Joe Biden, with his decades of Democratic Party ties, or Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire who’s backed causes and candidates. At the Southern California headquarters for Sen Elizabeth Warren — second here in most polls — veteran activist Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights told me the Massachusetts senator has the political skill to get her reforms passed. “It’s not for the lack of good ideas,” she told me of stalled immigration reforms. “It’s for the lack of tenacity and organizing political will to get those plans over the finish line.”

But while campaigns like Warren — who will benefit from a large super-PAC-funded ad buy in California this weekend — and the free-spending Bloomberg scurry for last-minute deciders, they are competing on the turf that organizers like Sarabia and Corpeno have occupied for months. As Sarabia stood on the sidewalk telling me of the long conversations and sometimes repeated visits needed to sway a voter, a beaming Corpeno emerged from the alleyway where the Honduran-American widow lived. She’d just filled out her mail-in ballot -- for Bernie Sanders.