Chuck Rocha, former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign, said the best decision the campaign made to win the Latino vote was to go against the status quo in voting priorities.
“Early on we knew that health care was the number one issue with Latinos in Iowa and in Nevada,” Rocha told Hill.TV in an interview. “But we knew that we needed to make a personal connection with Bernie and those voters.”
Sanders (I-Vt.) had 66.5 percent of the votes from majority-Latino caucus sites in Iowa and 51 percent Latino voters in Nevada, according to entry polls and an analysis of voting results.
Rocha, author of “Tío Bernie: The Inside Story of How Bernie Sanders Brought Latinos Into The Political Revolution,” emphasized how important it was to set aside time for establishing relationships with Latino voters.
“Nobody ever talked to this group of Latinos before because they’re not prime voters like most people talk about,” he said. “So we went in very early…and said, ‘Bernie Sanders is the son of an immigrant who came here from another country and could not speak English and he had no money.’”
Rocha added that despite the surface-level differences between Latino voters and Sanders, there are still plenty of similarities that help strengthen that bond.
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