I want to start with two competing visions for how to put together a leftist electoral coalition. The first one says you put together a multiracial working-class coalition by laying out policies in people’s interest and then advertising those policies. The second says you start by connecting with people on their own terms and by using prior relationships to build personal ties with the candidate and campaign.
The second works better than the first. Or at least Chuck Rocha argues as much in his book, Tío Bernie, about his work with Latinx and immigrant voters on the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.
Jacobin, Trots, and Rocha
We find examples of the ‘interests’ view in many parts of the left. Most sectarian leftists – especially Trotskyists, but also others – build it into the way they talk. They think that if we just get working-class people to see the correct analysis of capitalism, the rest will click into place for them. They’ll join the real working-class party and overthrow their capitalist overlords and their GOP and Democratic political servants.
Will it happen that way? No. Just don’t try telling the sectarians that.
But it’s not just the sectarian left. We also see some version of this view from time to time in leftist outlets like Jacobin or Catalyst. In discussing the Bernie win in Nevada with Latinx voters, they ignore all the relationship building and talk merely about interests. Even in doing its own empirical work on elections, it tends to focus on interest messaging as the key.
As Rocha argues in Tío Bernie, this kind of interest messaging just doesn’t work. At least, it doesn’t work without first building relationships of trust. And those relationships run deeper than even core community interests.
Tío Bernie
Chuck Rocha, of course, actually ran the Sanders Latinx voter operation. He’d probably know how it all went down. What does Rocha say? He says he used the second strategy above. As Rocha tells it, many in the Bernie campaign wanted to lead with Medicare for All as an issue. It made sense. Latinx voters stood with Bernie on the issue, and it served a core community interest.
But here’s what Rocha had to say to that:
I reminded Jeff of the speeches he had written for Bernie in 2016, talking about Bernie’s immigrant roots…Jeff didn’t question me; he trusted me…
That decision meant Latinos in Nevada and other states were introduced to Bernie through his immigrant story. His father immigrated here, he had no money, he had working-class values and couldn’t speak English. I didn’t really have data backing me it was the right approach. If I’m a Latino casino worker in Nevada and the first. Mail piece I get is, ‘Hey, I’m this 78-year-old white guy from Vermont, Feel the Bern, come get your free healthcare,” I think I’d be a little skeptical. Like, “Who is this guy and how the hell is he going to get me free healthcare?”
The immigrant story, rooted in where Bernie and his family came from, allowed young and old Latinos in Nevada to say, “that’s just like my dad or like my abuelo or like me.” So Medicare for All was a critical issue that we used a lot, but we just didn’t lead with it.
In other words, it was the relationships and the personal connection that allowed Bernie to be a credible messenger to Latinx voters. And not just some rando sectarian lobbing theory or policy at them.
Next Steps
I thinking about where to go after Sanders, especially in building a working-class majority, the left would do well to learn some lessons from Rocha.
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Postscript
Like many other publications, even Jacobin and Catalyst aren’t completely one-sided on these issues. Even on the Nevada question, Jacobin published a solid interview with Belén Sisa that touches on the real reasons he won the state.
