Meet the young voters who refuse to vote for Bernie

[wyldwolf]

Bernie Sanders has run up the score among young voters in state after state, but his efforts have hit a wall in South Florida.

In a place where young Cuban-Americans joined their elders in the streets with pots and pans to celebrate Fidel Castro’s death, the Vermont senator’s Democratic socialism and past refusals to wholeheartedly condemn Castro and other Latin American authoritarian leaders are proving costly.

“I’m more progressive than Biden, but I also don’t want to stand next to the dummy in the Che Guevara T-shirt at a rally, and that’s true here regardless of age,” said Carmen Pelaez, a founding member of Project Cafecito, a grassroots initiative in Miami that leads get-out-the-vote efforts for progressive candidates.

For Sanders, who posted big margins among young and Latino voters in places like California, Nevada and Texas, the resistance he’s encountering among young Latinos is a harbinger of a rough election night in the state that serves as the biggest prize among Tuesday’s primaries.

Cuban-Americans — known for their high voter turnout rates — have for decades been the largest group of Latinos in South Florida, with more than half of the state’s 2 million Cubans living in the region. But it’s only been in the past 20 years that Cuban-Americans have started playing a big role in Democratic politics as voters under 50 — many born in the U.S. — have broken with the Republican Party...

...other Latino groups in South Florida, like Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, also favor Biden in the primary because of their family and friends’ history with socialist and authoritarian regimes — a sign of their different background and experience than Latinos in the Southwest, where Sanders had more widespread support.

“We come from countries where we’ve seen the slogan ‘Socialismo o muerte’ on the walls. We either survived socialism or have grandparents that did and have grown up with those stories,” Pelaez said. “Other Latinos don’t have that frame of reference.”

More. And eye-opening.

[Happy Hoosier]

1. My daughter will vote for the first time this year...

And she refuses to vote for Sanders.

She was supporting Warren and was not thrilled with Biden, but she prefers him. His pledge to select a woman as a running mate sealed the deal.

[treestar]

2. You mean she will vote even if not thrilled?

Good for her!

[Happy Hoosier]

3. She is warming up to Joe...

She and I talk politics a lot, and though I encourage her to make up her own mind, I'm sure my expressed preferences influence her. I was a Harris then Warren guy. Joe did not impress me early on. But then after Nevada, someone must have worked with him because he came alive. I enthusiastically (more or less) shifted my support to him. But she really, REALLY wanted to cast her first vote for a woman. But she is encouraged by what she is seeing from Joe, and his promise sealed the deal.