A self-described “Mexican redneck” hired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) after a near-disastrous racially charged meltdown at a rally has proven to be key to the candidate’s subsequent success in wooing minority voters, according to a new report.
Sanders’ easy, momentum-increasing victory in Nevada over the weekend was partly fueled by the democratic socialist’s ability to attract nearly four in ten (37%) Latino caucus-goers. His success among Latinos in Nevada followed strong performances in the demographic in both Iowa and New Hampshire, where he won around 40% of the nonwhite vote. Nation-wide, Sanders leads the field with the Latino vote, drawing about 30% overall, besting all other Democratic candidates.
So how is Sanders doing it? According to Yahoo News, the seeds of Sanders’ newfound success among minorities “were sown five years ago when a staffer on Sanders’s first presidential bid had trouble reading a Spanish website.”
“It was Memorial Day weekend 2015, about a month after the Vermont senator launched his long-shot challenge to Hillary Clinton,” Yahoo News’ Hunter Walker and Andrew Romano explain. “Sanders was short on resources; his staff was a skeleton crew, with no one who could translate Spanish. So the campaign summoned Chuck Rocha, the founder and president of Solidarity Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in reaching Latinos and blacks that was launched by Rocha in 2010. He charged Sanders triple his usual rate to work on the holiday.”
What started with an $824 invoice has now turned into “millions and millions of dollars of work” for Sanders, Rocha told Yahoo News.
As Walker and Romano highlight, Sanders’ campaign was experiencing more than just some struggles with translations — it was being rocked by Black Lives Matter activists. Rocha proved essential in reversing the campaign’s racial fortunes:
In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted two Sanders events, claiming the candidate wasn’t paying enough attention to racial issues. Jeff Weaver, the 2016 campaign manager, hired Solidarity Strategies to ensure that the senator’s work was, as Rocha put it, “reflective of the larger diverse communities.” Soon Rocha was consulting on minority hiring, outreach and advertising for Sanders. By the end of the race he was in charge of all of the campaign’s print communications.
Now Rocha, a 51-year-old self-described “Mexican redneck” who campaigns wearing a cowboy hat and driving a rented pickup truck, has become a leader of Sanders’s 2020 operation. While he remains in charge of his firm, Rocha officially joined the campaign last year as a senior adviser with a broad purview that includes general strategy, hiring staff and overseeing print ads and merchandise. Rocha also crafts the campaign’s Spanish-language ads on television, radio and the internet. If anyone is responsible for the huge Latino outreach effort that has helped propel Sanders to the front of the Democratic pack, it’s Rocha.
After struggling mightily to convince minorities to back him, Sanders’ campaign “invested” substantially in their outreach program headed up by Rocha. The Sanders team “are the ones who have consistently shown up at community events, in radio ads and newspapers,” a former Clinton staffer told Yahoo. “It’s very different from what they did in 2016. You have to understand the community first and then build your program around it — and I think they’ve done that.”
Along with Sanders’ success so far in the primary contests, Walker and Romano point out some other “good news” for the socialist regarding the Latino vote: “Super Tuesday’s two biggest prizes are California (415 pledged delegates) and Texas (228 pledged delegates) — states that also boast the largest Latino primary electorates in America (31 percent and 32 percent, respectively).”
The importance of the Latino vote for Sanders’ electoral chances, however, make his widely criticized comments on Sunday all the more glaring. During an interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” Sunday, Sanders praised murderous Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
Pressed by Cooper about his past praise for oppressive communist regimes, Sanders said, “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
As The Daily Wire reported, the blowback to the comment has come from both the right and the left, including from left-wing CNN commentator Ana Navarro, who tweeted: “Castro regime’s been in power in Cuba for +60 yrs w/o free elections. They’ve killed, jailed, tortured thousands. They confiscated assets, expelled priests & nuns… And let’s be clear, Cubans weren’t exactly communicating by grunts. Most knew how to read.””
“I was in 2nd Grade when Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua,” Navarro added in a follow-up tweet. “They adopted Cuban education model. The books/curriculum taught ideological indoctrination. Children had to recite communist, revolutionary, anti-American slogans. That’s how communist teach people to read and write.”
Castro regime’s been in power in Cuba for +60 yrs w/o free elections. They’ve killed, jailed, tortured thousands. They confiscated assets, expelled priests & nuns… And let’s be clear, Cubans weren’t exactly communicating by grunts. Most knew how to read. pic.twitter.com/kKGM66a8ci
— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) February 24, 2020
Related: Sanders Praises Fidel Castro; Kaepernick Did Same Thing; WATCH How Miami Fans Responded