Sanders surrogate: Unions worried about electability should look to polls

A surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Tuesday that any union workers or leaders who are on the fence about supporting Sanders’s White House bid should look at what polls have been showing.

“Some of them are worried about electability questions,” Eric Blanc, a writer for the left-leaning publication Jacobin, told Hill.TV. “So the responsibility for anybody who is supporting Bernie is to make it clear just what the polls are showing.”

The RealClearPolitics average of polls in New Hampshire shows Sanders leading the Democratic field at 19 percent, followed by South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 17.7 percent, former Vice President Joe Biden at 14.3 percent and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at 13.3 percent.

The average of Iowa polls shows Sanders trailing first-place Buttigieg by 3 points.

However, surveys show Biden consistently leads the field at the national level.

According to a new Suffolk University-USA Today poll, Sanders trails Biden by 9 points. Sanders garnered 14 percent, compared to Biden’s 23 percent. No other candidate was in the double digits.

While Sanders and some other candidates already boasts several union endorsements, Blanc argued that some challenges exist for the Vermont independent.

“Part of the difficulty here are just the long-term connections. Union leaders who have been doing this for decades are just used to a certain type of doing politics,” Blanc said. “It’s not just purely a strategic issue.”

His comments come as Sanders surges in key early voting states ahead of Thursday’s primary debate in Los Angeles.

Sanders was among the seven Democratic candidates who had threatened to boycott the upcoming debate amid a labor dispute. The California union at the center of the dispute, Unite Here Local 11, announced Tuesday workers at the university and food services group Sodexo reached a tentative agreement that will allow the debate to proceed as planned.

—Tess Bonn