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NY Times, March 9, 2020
The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope
By Jennifer Medina and Sydney Ember
PHOENIX — “This is a campaign of the working class, by the working class
and for the working class!”
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont nearly shouted those words to a
raucously supportive crowd here last week. The line received thunderous
applause, as it always does.
At campaign events over the past year, Mr. Sanders has spoken to tens of
thousands of people who come to hear his message of political revolution
— who come to imagine a country with universal health care, no student
debt and a $15 minimum wage. Almost every line he says onstage rises to
a crescendo, inviting cheers of appreciation. With every promise and
policy proposal, the crowd becomes a sea of waving blue and white signs
with the “Bernie” logo.
The Sanders campaign has exposed a class divide within the Democratic
Party: His promises of a leg up are most alluring to those who need it,
and most confounding to those who do not.
Six more states go to the polls on Tuesday in what is now a head-to-head
matchup in the Democratic presidential race between Mr. Sanders and
former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. The path for Mr. Sanders to
retake a delegate lead is much narrower than it was a week ago, but no
matter how the primaries turn out for Mr. Sanders, he has built a fierce
following of voters who want and expect more from their party, from
their government, from their country.
That’s how Audrey Yanos views Mr. Sanders and this political moment. Ms.
Yanos, 39, has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential
election in her adult life. But Ms. Yanos has misgivings: Those
Democrats, she believes, have never done all that much to deliver the
promise of the American dream. She has begun to feel that the country
has betrayed people like her.
Mr. Sanders, she says, is different. Ms. Yanos voted for him in 2016,
and did so again last Tuesday in the Colorado primary, which he won
easily over Mr. Biden.
“We are struggling all the time, and what we have is not working,” she
said one evening last week during a brief break between dinner and her
son’s basketball practice. “We’re all scraping by, one disaster away
from real catastrophe, and we need someone who understands that.”
That sentiment — that Mr. Sanders understands the catastrophe looming
for so many people, and that so many other politicians do not — is
central to Sanders supporters, and crucial to understanding where these
voters might turn if Mr. Sanders is not the nominee. If the Democratic
Party wants to keep such voters engaged and committed to showing up in
the fall, leaders will have to speak more directly to them and better
address their needs.
Many of his supporters know what it’s like to struggle in one way or
another. They need prescription drugs but can’t afford them. They are
buried under relentless student debt. They juggle jobs with caring for
ailing parents or young children, or both. They want better lives, more
stable lives, and need some help.
When Mr. Sanders has asked people at his town halls to tell their
stories — often by prodding them to share their insurance premiums or
deductibles — their voices have sometimes shaken. Sometimes there are tears.
Audrey Yanos voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and again this year in
Colorado’s primary. “It’s not that I think it will be all rainbows and
sunshine if he’s elected,” she said. “Things won’t change
overnight.”Credit...Daniel Brenner for The New York Times
Ms. Yanos was the first person in her family to attend college. She
considers herself lucky because a scholarship paid for tuition and
books, so she graduated with about $25,000 in debt, which she paid off
last year. Financially, she is far better off than her parents were when
she was a child. And yet she sees no evidence of a booming economy in
her own life.
“I look around and see so many other people barely holding on,” Ms.
Yanos said, choking back tears as her kids did their homework at the
kitchen table. “It’s not that I think it will be all rainbows and
sunshine if he’s elected, things won’t change overnight. But people
younger than me, they are going to demand change in their lifetime.”
Everything seemed to be clicking for Mr. Sanders before last week. He
had finished at the top of the nominating contests in Iowa and New
Hampshire, then dominated in Nevada. But on Super Tuesday, a surging Mr.
Biden all but extinguished that momentum, winning 10 of 14 states with
the support of many black working-class voters. Mr. Biden and Mr.
Sanders are now heading into primaries in Michigan and other major
Midwestern states that are favorable in many ways to the former vice
president. But Mr. Sanders also enjoys plenty of support in these
states, particularly from white working-class voters.
In both of his bids for the White House, Mr. Sanders has shown that his
populist message resonates in some corners, even as it repels much of
the Democratic establishment, which has steadily lined up behind Mr.
Biden. Rallies for Mr. Sanders often resemble rock concerts, drawing
tens of thousands of people who come decked out in campaign gear, with
T-shirts that proclaim “Unidos con Bernie” and signs that say “Not me, Us.”
Polling throughout the campaign has shown Mr. Sanders drawing some of
his strongest support from voters with household incomes under $50,000;
his numbers taper off as incomes rise. A month ago, when he was leading
in the polls, people with household incomes of $50,000 and under
supported Mr. Sanders twice as much as any other candidate. At that
time, he commanded the support of most Democratic voters making $100,000
and under.
Exit polls on Super Tuesday did not ask respondents directly about their
income. But in the three states where he won and exit polls were
conducted — Colorado, Vermont and California — Mr. Sanders performed
five to eight percentage points better among those without a college
degree than those with one. In Massachusetts and Minnesota, both states
he had hoped to win but ended up losing decisively to Mr. Biden, Mr.
Sanders’s numbers among college graduates lagged his showing among those
without degrees by double digits.
“Bernie is the only candidate I’ve ever felt a connection to, in a sense
that he genuinely cares about the working class in a way that no other
candidate has ever shown support to us,” said Andrew Hilbert, 26, who
came to see Mr. Sanders in Phoenix.
Mr. Sanders’s support this year has proved particularly enduring in the
West, where many communities remain visibly scarred by the Great
Recession. And his focus on the working class helps explain part of his
appeal to Latino voters, who are disproportionately young and are more
likely to come from a working-class background. Many such voters point
to the illusion of an “up by your bootstraps” mentality and strongly
believe that the only way to create a fair economy is to drastically
change the way the current one works.
“We’ve had decades of policies fail to meet our needs, and we’ve got to
break that cycle,” said Antonio Arellano, the executive director of
Jolt, a group in Texas that focuses on turning out young Latino voters
and that endorsed Mr. Sanders. “What we’re seeing for the first time
ever is the courage to break from the past and radically build the
future. Not taking us as a given entity, but as a constituency that is
demanding something more.”
Having spent her life in Orange County, California, Rita Xochitl
Estrada, a 39-year-old fitness instructor and student at California
State University, Fullerton, has seen countless examples of extreme
wealth and extreme poverty. Ms. Estrada calls herself a “romantic but
pragmatic” socialist, and said she was not all that optimistic that Mr.
Sanders would win the primary, let alone the presidency. Her biggest
hope, she said, is that he is ushering in a new era of politics with
more of a focus on the poor.
“If nobody pushes it, we will never get there, which is why we are still
stuck the way we are,” said Ms. Estrada, who came to the polls with her
21-year-old son, who also voted for Mr. Sanders. Like other Latino
supporters of the Vermont senator, Ms. Estrada views herself as part of
a movement of that will live on regardless of his political fate, and
that harks back to the Chicano movement of the 1960s and ’70s. “This is
a country that wants the current class structure to stay in place, and
it’s really hard to fight against that.”
Many working-class supporters point to Mr. Sanders’s opposition to the
Iraq war as the initial issue that drew them into his orbit. Having
watched many friends sign up for the military as a path to the middle
class only to come back with traumatic mental and physical injuries,
they are deeply skeptical of American intervention overseas, as Mr.
Sanders has been for his entire career.
There are also voters who are drawn to Mr. Sanders’s consistency in a
chaotic, punishing world.
Originally from El Salvador, Ruth Trujillo-Acosta, 59, and her husband,
Gustavo Acosta, 61, are just trying to make things work. They worry
about retiring, afraid that they have no savings. They worry that their
children are not even thinking about college because it’s too expensive.
They both went to college as adults, but still have student loans to pay
off.
The two now live in Holyoke in western Massachusetts. She is a mental
health clinician. He is an academic adviser at a community college. They
consider themselves independents, but are unequivocal about supporting
Mr. Sanders.
“We really are paycheck to paycheck and this is the guy — he really is
going to be able to change that,” she said as the couple waited for Mr.
Sanders to begin a rally last month in Springfield, Mass.
She was cleareyed that Mr. Sanders might not be able to carry out all of
his policy proposals — “I don’t think that he’s going to create a
complete revolution right away,” she said — but she said he at least
provided hope, and it was worth giving him a shot.
Their support of Mr. Sanders, she said, comes down to this: “Our values
are with this guy.”
Sydney Ember reported from Phoenix, and Jennifer Medina reported from
Denver. Giovanni Russonello contributed reporting from New York.
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