What Bernie Sanders Is Doing Differently to Win Over Latino Voters
On Presidents’ Day, Daniel Parra met a group of friends at Eldorado High School, in East Las Vegas. The Bernie Sanders campaign was holding a soccer tournament there that a friend of Parra’s had posted about on Snapchat. Under a bright morning sun, with Frenchman Mountain soaring in the background, some forty mostly Latino soccer aficionados gathered on one of the school’s fields. Many of the players had brought their parents, brothers, and sisters along, and spectators sat on the scorched grass beneath the branches of an ash tree. A Mexican woman in her sixties with an ice-cream cart and two taco venders with a spread of carnitas, asado, and pastor would soon be selling food, as arranged by the campaign. Dozens of cobalt-blue Bernie signs, including one that read “Unidos con Bernie,” fluttered on the field’s wire fence. Parra, who is nineteen, tall, and slender, spoke with conviction about his support for Sanders. He hoped to transfer to Colorado State University from the community college he was attending nearby, and said that the senator’s promise of making university tuition free resonated strongly with him. But something else had drawn him to the field that morning. “I see that he’s actually trying to look after the smaller communities, not just going after the big audience,” Parra said. “Doing something like this means a lot to people like us, because we don’t really get looked upon.”