Can Bernie Sanders Win The Latino Vote?

Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) courted Latino voters in Iowa today at the Muscatine County Boxing Club. The Democratic presidential hopeful made it clear he isn’t ready to throw in the towel on the Latino vote despite poor name recognition, low poll numbers and a lackluster reception from the Hispanic press. Sanders scored an upset victory this week against Democratic primary rival Hillary Clinton this when he closed the gap polling of New Hampshire Democrats. In New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders is now a contender.

But New Hampshire is 91 percent non-Hispanic white and only 3 percent Latino. Muscatine county is 17 percent Latino, the same percentage as the U.S. That's eactly the type of place that Sanders needs to be, because he has a particularly poor showing in heavily Latino states.

In Florida, which is 23 percent Latino, Sanders trails Clinton by 36 percent. Nationally (17 percent Latino) Sanders is behind Hillary by 20 points. It’s only in New Hampshire (3 percent Latino), where Bernie is ahead by 3 percent. In Iowa, which is 5 percent Latino, he trails by 7 percent, according to the WSJ. Clearly there are other factors involved, but these statistics should be troubling for the Sanders campaign.

At the boxing gym in Iowa, Sanders met with Latino Democrats and pulled punches against GOP candidate Donald Trump.

“Clearly Trump is scapegoating the Hispanic community. Immigrants are not responsible," Sanders said "for the disappearing American middle class, the Wall Street collapse brought on by huge financial institutions' greed and illegal behavior, the war in Iraq, income inequality or climate change," in a follow-up statement.

The Vermont Senator also called for comprehensive immigration reform, including citizenship for in the country illegally.

“We need legislation which takes 11 million undocumented people living in the United States out of the shadows and puts them on a path to citizenship,” he said.

Sanders isn’t afraid to criticize Trump or support to legal status for immigrant in the country illegally. But that doesn’t necessarily separate him from his rivals. Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have pledged their support for the 11.3 million as well. Even Republican Jeb Bush has promised to bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadows.

Those candidates have all hired Latino outreach staff, putting Hispanic voters at the center of their campaign’s priorities.

Sanders has never needed minority outreach in Vermont, whose demographics are as homogeneous as New Hampshire. And he still doesn’t have a designated Latino outreach staffer. The Facebook group Latinos for Bernie is run by nameless staffers of a pro-Bernie PAC.

Meanwhile, Clinton has won a key Latino endorsement, that of former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and O’Malley has charmed Hispanic media with detailed policies on Latino issues like immigration, Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, and Haitian immigrant citizenship in the Dominican Republic.

A July 16 poll, Univision found that 68 percent of Latino Democrats voters didn’t know who Bernie Sanders was, and only 3 percent said that they would vote for him for president. Until we get another poll, we can’t say for sure if he’s improved his performance.

Much has changed since then. Just look at Trump, who has vaulted to the top of the Republican pack, drawing on the stop-speaking-Mexican vote. Since the Univision poll, Sanders addressed the National Council of La Raza, and brought immigration into his stump speech from Iowa to California.

But he was also accused of claiming that immigrants steals jobs, something that his defenders say got misinterpreted. He still hasn't released a plan on immigration that's as detailed as O'Malley's, though he got around to posting an overview on his website after negative feedback from media and advocates.

At the same time, he is building a formidable campaign of volunteers. Even if few Latinos are part of that campaign right now (as I've noticed anecdotally), door-to-door organizing might increase reach.

What do you think of Bernie Sanders? What can he do to attract the Latino vote?

Update: a Sept. 2015 Telemundo poll found that Sanders has chiseled down to 50 percent the number of Latinos who have never heard of him.