What Cuba controversy? How Bernie Sanders’ Florida campaign is ignoring the ‘noise’
Dozens of Bernie Sanders die-hards sit on wooden pews on a Sunday afternoon in an Episcopalian sanctuary on the University of Miami campus, waiting for direction on how to spread the good word in a potentially hostile environment.
They are armed with giant cardboard Bernie heads, backpacks, hats and sneakers — the equipment Sanders’ foot soldiers need for an uphill climb that is about to get steeper.
A few hours from now, a ”60 Minutes” interview will air in which Sanders says “it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad” about Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, drawing condemnation from Miami Democrats and tacit rebuke from the state party. And instead of apologizing, Sanders will double- and triple-down on that position in the following days.
But the controversy won’t disrupt a strategy that has been building since his failed 2016 presidential campaign.
“Don’t listen to the polls. Don’t feed the trolls,” Sanders’ Florida field director, Sanjay Patel, tells the standing-room-only crowd before asking them to thrust their fists in the air.
“Now take those fists and go knock on some doors!”
While Sanders can’t match Mike Bloomberg’s millions, or Joe Biden’s highly placed surrogates, the Vermont senator’s campaign says he has thousands of activists helping him court Florida’s 5 million Democrats ahead of the March 17 election. After helping Sanders in the first three primaries of the Democratic presidential race, the Florida volunteers have turned their focus on their home state, starting with the courtship of some 800,000 voters still sitting on their mail ballots.
They are Sanders’ not-so-secret weapon, unleashed upon one of the biggest prizes in the presidential primary calendar with a buoyancy that defies their aggressive online “Bernie Bros” alter egos. And they are larger in number than in 2016, and better organized.
“I’ll take an army of engaged dedicated volunteers to the cause any day of the week over an army that had to be paid to be there,” Patel told the Miami Herald.
Despite his victories in early states, Sanders needs all the help he can get in Florida.
Hillary Clinton beat him handily here in 2016, when they both competed for the Democratic nomination for president. And the Latino voter coalition that helped the self-described democratic socialist pull out a decisive victory in Nevada in 2020 will likely fracture in a state where the Hispanic community has deep connections to Latin American countries that have grappled with authoritarian brands of socialism.
He is consistently polling third in Florida, behind Biden and Bloomberg, and hovering around the 15% threshold needed to secure a proportional share of the state’s 219 pledged delegates. His campaign won’t say if it will spend money on TV ads as Bloomberg blankets the state in TV commercials, and it would not specify any Florida endorsements. Biden has many.
Sanders himself hasn’t visited Florida since the summer, when he attended a forum in Aventura by the National Association of Black Journalists. But unlike four years ago, when Clinton was beginning to look like the inevitable nominee by the time Florida rolled around on the calendar, Sanders is poised to emerge from the March 3 Super Tuesday contests with the delegate lead. He is reactivating a network that has expanded since 2016. And he is less than two years removed from helping Andrew Gillum score a surprise win in a multi-way Democratic primary for Florida governor that could bear some similarities to the crowded presidential primary should few candidates drop out over the next two weeks.
“South Florida may seem daunting,” says Geoff Campbell, a Miami activist who recently flew to Sioux City to help Sanders’ campaign in Iowa. “But overall the picture looks pretty good.”
Campaign never really left
To get a sense of how much Sanders is leaning on his supporters, consider that, in Florida, his campaign says he has “thousands” of volunteers and 16 paid staffers.
At the University of Miami gathering on Sunday, Sanders’ field organizers asked the roughly 150 people who showed up to commit to eight three-hour volunteer shifts — the equivalent of 3,600 hours of campaigning. The campaign wouldn’t say how many volunteers they have statewide, but placed its national network above 1 million people.
Sanders’ organization has helped him build an unprecedented small-dollar donor network, and has been credited with helping him win early primaries. And his supporters work across state lines. In Florida, supporters helped call and text voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Phillip Agnew, a Miami activist and Sanders surrogate brought in by the campaign Sunday to hype the crowd, said Sanders’ network remained in place in Florida after Sanders’ loss to Clinton in the Democratic primary.
“The campaign never really never left,” said Agnew, whose Dream Defenders social justice organization has endorsed Sanders. “The people who were dedicated in 2016, by and large, are still dedicated, ready and engaged and training to move [the campaign] this time.”
‘People are actually engaged’
Not everyone is impressed by the Sanders volunteer network. “I haven’t seen any organization,” said Democratic U.S. Rep. Donna Shalala, a Clinton confidant and former University of Miami president whose congressional district includes the school.
What Shalala says she has seen is outrage over Sanders’ Cuba comments. “What I feel now is anger in my community, in my district, about what he said, not just from the Cuban community but the Nicaraguan community and the Venezuelan community,” she said.
Shalala has not endorsed anyone in the Democratic primary.
Gwen Graham, a former Panhandle congresswoman who placed a close second to Gillum in 2018’s Democratic primary for governor, called Sanders’ 60 Minutes remarks “political suicide in Florida.”
“My theory is they don’t think they can win Florida anyway,” said Graham, who is supporting Biden.
Sanders supporters, though, don’t see it that way. While there are some who acknowledge Sanders’ challenges in Miami, many believe the view that Sanders is deeply unpopular in South Florida is a misperception held by pundits and the political class.
“Occasionally, you get a middle finger. I have to be honest,” says the 45-year-old Dawn Grayson, one of the many Sanders campaign volunteers still around from his 2016 campaign. “But for the most part, people are actually engaged. And they care.”
Lorenzo Canizares, a 72-year-old Havana-born Sanders supporter, says the controversy over the candidate’s Castro comments has been a made-for-TV controversy — “a lot of noise” — that hasn’t spilled over to real-life South Florida voters. He hasn’t felt any ire when he knocks on doors and promotes Sanders.
“I haven’t had any problem whatsoever. Nobody has called me a communist,” he said.
Earlier this month, Sanders volunteers threw an unofficial concert in his name at a gay dive bar in Miami’s Upper Eastside, where talk was less about ethnic demographics than the growing popularity in a community with deep economic issues of policies that Sanders has pushed from the fringes, like Medicare for All.
Avani Vijayalakshmi-Ramanathan, a 25-year-old Indian-American transgender woman helping Sanders’ campaign, said Florida’s Democratic voter base is shifting left as young people begin voting in larger numbers and government-run healthcare emerges as a mainstream political policy.
“In Florida, there’s a lot of young people,” she said. “There’s a lot of energy coming to these events — phone-banking, canvassing. I’m pretty confident we’re going to do really well.”
McClatchy DC reporter Alex Daugherty contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 28, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
