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Latinos in Florida likely to vote heavily against ‘socialist’ Sanders
MIAMI, March 15, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – In the living room of her Miami home,
Cuban-American Carmen Pelaez is losing patience with Bernie Sanders.
She wants the progressive Vermont senator to drop out of the race for the
Democratic presidential nomination before her state, Florida, votes on
Tuesday along with three others.
But Sanders, though he has fallen seriously behind former vice president
Joe Biden, insists he is not giving up. And so a frustrated Pelaez finds
herself shouting at her TV screen.
“Why is he staying in?” the 48-year-old artist demands to know. “For the
four votes he’s going to get in Florida?”
Pelaez, a filmmaker, writer and actor, was born in the United States to
Cuban parents. The demographic of the parents’ generation — made up of
people who fled the repressive communist regime of the Castros in Cuba —
traditionally has leaned strongly Republican.
But Pelaez, unlike her family, says she is a “die-hard Democrat” and plans
to vote in the primary election for the moderate Biden, who she sees as the
ideal candidate to defeat Donald Trump in November.
Sanders often describes himself as a “democratic socialist” — which in the
eyes of many American voters, including Pelaez, makes him too radical.
That feeling is widespread in Florida’s Hispanic community, with its large
numbers of exiles not only from Cuba but from other socialist-run Latin
American countries, including Venezuela and Nicaragua. For them, America’s
Democratic Party leans too far left.
Sanders did nothing to allay their doubts when he proved reluctant to
declare Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro a “dictator” or when he told a TV
interviewer last month that Fidel Castro had, at least, improved literacy
rates in Cuba.
“He has always said good things about the Latin American dictators,” Pelaez
said. “That tells me that he doesn’t see our humanity the same way as he sees
the humanity of the Americans. Why should we deserve dictators?”
“Every time Bernie opens his mouth and reaffirms his status as a socialist,
it sends more Hispanic voters to Biden in Florida,” Fernand Amandi, a
Florida-based political consultant, told Politico.
The latest polls in that populous state give Biden a huge lead of 30 to 40
points over Sanders. – Fears of socialism –
Those projections paint a bleak picture for Sanders, who is desperately in
need of the state’s 248 delegates to the party’s nominating convention.
After losing another big state, Michigan, to Biden last week, the senator
trails his rival by around 150 delegates in the race to amass the 1,991
needed to win the nomination outright.
In a speech Wednesday, Sanders said he was winning the “ideological debate”
but acknowledged that he was “losing the debate over electability” — that
is, the all-important goal for many Democratic voters of finding the
candidate best able to defeat Donald Trump.
The current consensus in the party points to Biden as the candidate best-
positioned to achieve that goal.
Sanders’s expected defeat in Florida — he also trails in polls in Ohio,
Illinois and Arizona, the other states voting Tuesday — should put an end to
his presidential hopes, for while his pro-immigrant language has attracted
voters in some states, Florida’s Hispanic community appears immune to it.
“The Hispanic voters of Florida are very familiar with Latin American
socialist extremism and clearly see in Bernie Sanders a candidate who favors
these regimes of the extreme left, which is totally incompatible with their
values,” conservative political analyst Giancarlo Sopo told AFP.
But not everyone agrees.
Andy Vila, a 21-year-old student who left Cuba at the age of six, is among
the many young Americans who fervently support “Bernie,” drawn by his
proposals on health care and education.
Unlike many other exiled Hispanics, the word “socialism” does not fill him
with dread.
“They want to use fear and intimidation to tell us that we can’t vote for
this candidate,” he said.
Still, Vila says he harbors no illusions: Sanders is going to lose, and he
knows it.
And at some point Vila believes Sanders will withdraw and throw his support
to his erstwhile rival.
“I think Sanders is finally going to rejoin the battle against Trump
because he understands which of the two (between Biden and Trump) is the
greater danger,” he said.
In any case, neither Biden nor Sanders appears to stand much chance of
defeating Trump among Cuban-American voters in Florida, a crucially important
state in the November elections.
According to a Telemundo poll, more than 70 percent of voters in the Cuban
diaspora prefer Trump over either Democrat.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0824 hrs