Senator Bernie Sanders has named immigration activist Arturo Carmona as his head of Latino Outreach for his presidential campaign. Carmona adds to a growing effort by the Sanders campaign to reach out to minority voters. Sanders has done well in states dominated by white voters such as his home state of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire, closing and even breaking past rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. However, Sanders has poor name recognition among Latino voters nationally, according to polls conducted by Univision and Telemundo.
Carmona is hoping to change that. As Sanders’ first-ever Latino Outreach Director, the 37-year-old Los Angeles native will spearhead the effort to introduce the candidate to the important and growing Hispanic electorate.
“The reason I took on the job is because Bernie Sanders’ economic message will disproportionately benefit Latino and African Americans,” Carmona told the Latin Times in a phone interview.
Along with economic equality, Carmona pointed to the Senator’s support of health care, immigration and prison reform as other areas where his candidate would appeal to Latino voters.
Sanders once took flack for suggesting that immigrants dilute American wages. He later clarified his comments, but without the benefit of a dedicated Latino outreach team.
Like Sanders, Carmona is the son of immigrants. But while Sander’s immigrants were struggling Polish migrants, Carmona’s are from Mexico. That cultural fluency may give him an easier time communicating with the 21st-century base of pro-immigration voters, many of whom are from Mexico and Central America.
Sanders is off to a rough start -- significantly less Latino voters have heard of him compared to Hillary Clinton. But Carmona is says he won’t be starting from scratch.
The candidate has appeared on the same major Latino news networks who claim their viewers don’t know who he is. On Wednesday, he appeared in an interview with Univision, and it wasn’t the first time.
Carmona hasn’t started his job yet, but the new Sanders team is expected to form a strategy to introduce the candidate to Latino voters in key primary states.
Presente.org interim Co-Directors Faviana Rodriguez and Oscar Chacon congratualated Carmona on Friday, saying that they were glad to see such activists brought into the fold of mainstream political campaigns.
“An end to deportations and inhumane immigrant detention once seemed unattainable, but today they are key issues for any candidate,” Rodriguez and Chachon said in a statement, crediting such change to “the work of our hundreds of thousands of members and Latino communities nationwide who refused to give up in the fight for equality.”
Correction: this article has been updated to more accurately describe Bernie Sanders and his Vermont constituents, who are primarily white. A previous version of this article referred to the candidate as “Anglo,” which is inaccurate according to representatives of the Sanders campaign.
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