by Sabrina Rodriguez
Bernie Sanders has run up the score among young voters in state after state, but his efforts have hit a wall in South Florida.
In a place where young Cuban-Americans joined their elders in the streets with pots and pans to celebrate Fidel Castro’s death, the Vermont senator’s Democratic socialism and past refusals to wholeheartedly condemn Castro and other Latin American authoritarian leaders are proving costly.
“I’m more progressive than Biden, but I also don’t want to stand next to the dummy in the Che Guevara T-shirt at a rally, and that’s true here regardless of age,” said Carmen Pelaez, a founding member of Project Pastelito, a grassroots initiative in Miami that leads get-out-the-vote efforts for progressive candidates.
For Sanders, who posted big margins among young and Latino voters in places like California, Nevada and Texas, the resistance he’s encountering among young Latinos is a harbinger of a rough election night in the state that serves as the biggest prize among Tuesday’s primaries.
It’s not that Joe Biden is wildly popular among younger Latinos, just that he’s a more palatable alternative for many of them.
“Are we excited about Biden’s candidacy? I don’t think so. But it’s just what Bernie represents to those here in South Florida that could be catastrophic, especially in a general election matchup,” said Toni Rodriguez, national political director for College Democrats.
“Here in South Florida, Bernie Sanders’ message is disconnected. And that’s telling people, ‘No, we need to vote for Biden because Bernie won’t resonate here in Florida,” Rodriguez, a student at Barry University in Miami Shores, Fla., added.
Cuban-Americans — known for their high voter turnout rates — have for decades been the largest group of Latinos in South Florida, with more than half of the state’s 2 million Cubans living in the region. But it’s only been in the past 20 years that Cuban-Americans have started playing a big role in Democratic politics as voters under 50 — many born in the U.S. — have broken with the Republican Party and embraced more liberal views than their parents and grandparents.
That generational change was reflected in the last presidential election: In 2004, George W. Bush won 78 percent of Florida’s Cuban-American vote, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of exit polls. By 2016, Donald Trump only managed to capture just over half of that vote.
The red-to-blue evolution has its limits, however.
Pelaez points out that other Latino groups in South Florida, like Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, also favor Biden in the primary because of their family and friends’ history with socialist and authoritarian regimes — a sign of their different background and experience than Latinos in the Southwest, where Sanders had more widespread support.
“We come from countries where we’ve seen the slogan ‘Socialismo o muerte’ on the walls. We either survived socialism or have grandparents that did and have grown up with those stories,” Pelaez said. “Other Latinos don’t have that frame of reference.”
That difference was reflected in a Florida poll last week that showed Sanders trailing Biden, 48 percent to 37 percent, among Hispanic voters.
Only 18 percent of Florida Hispanics — from Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Central and South America — said they would vote for a self-described socialist, while 70 percent said they would not, according to the survey conducted for Telemundo Station Group by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy.
More than 50 percent of Florida Hispanic voters under 50 years old said they would not vote for a socialist candidate, compared with 31 percent who said they would.
To some Florida Latinos, those numbers are proof that Biden would be a stronger rival to Trump in November — and would provide more top-of-the-ticket protection for Latino down-ballot candidates.
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