Bernie Sanders's Surge Owes a Lot to Voters of Color

[Donkees]

By Giovanni Russonello
Jan. 31, 2020, 11:11 a.m. ET

Excerpt:


And with Mr. Sanders surging days before voting begins with the Iowa caucuses, an intriguing theme has emerged: Much of his momentum, polling shows, owes to the support of nonwhite voters — particularly African-American and Hispanic Democrats.

Most surveys of California voters over all now have him in a virtual tie or with an outright lead — and his support among Hispanic voters is foundational to that. A survey conducted for The Los Angeles Times by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, found Mr. Sanders with 26 percent support among likely primary voters statewide, putting him ahead... He had the support of 38 percent of Hispanic voters, including 41 percent of those living in households where Spanish was the dominant language.

In Texas, exit polls in 2016 found that Mr. Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, had lost the Latino vote to Hillary Clinton by a two-to-one margin. He now enjoys a commanding lead among Hispanic primary voters there, according to a Texas Lyceum survey released this week. (In Texas’ Democratic primary, white voters are expected to make up a minority of the electorate, as they did in 2016.) The Lyceum poll showed Mr. Sanders with 36 percent of the Hispanic vote...

Part of Mr. Sanders’s strength among Latinos can be chalked up to the fact that the Hispanic population in the United States skews younger than the rest of the country — and Mr. Sanders continues to draw by far his strongest support from voters under 50.

“Our population is so young that most of the people are in the 40-and-under category,” Matt Barreto, a founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions, said in an interview. “So in the aggregate he is doing really well” among Hispanic voters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/us/politics/latest-democratic-polls.html