Bernie Sanders’s operation could make him unstoppable in California on Tuesday—especially if it can help him capture the support of voters of color who tended to break for Clinton back in 2016. The question now is whether it’ll work.
. Deanna Lepree, a 29-year-old nursing student, told me outside a polling place, where she had just cast her ballot for Sanders, that many of her friends from school had voted already. “After class today, they were talking about how they’d voted, and I thought, ‘Gosh, I’d better get to it,’” she said.
There were no candidates barnstorming up and down the coast. Instead, it was up to the organizers and volunteers to keep stolidly canvassing and phone banking — the way they’d been doing for weeks or even months. And in terms of their presence on the ground, Sanders and Bloomberg have a huge advantage over the other candidates.
As I started criss-crossing the city to see how the various campaigns were getting out the vote, it was clear that young Californians were a big part of Sanders’s push. He has the support of 61 percent of voters ages 18 to 29, according to the L.A. Times/Berkeley poll, and 53 percent of voters ages 30 to 39 — far more than any other candidate.
Henry Burke, 21, told me he volunteered for the Sanders campaign in 2016, while he was still in high school. As soon as Sanders announced he was running again, he signed up to help out. “In 2016, we were pretty much running just on enthusiasm,” he said. But this year, he thinks the campaign is more organized and streamlined.
Outreach to voters of color — particularly Latino voters — has also been an important part of Sanders’s California strategy. On Saturday night, as the results of the South Carolina primary trickled, I stopped by Sanders’s field office in East Los Angeles. The space was buzzing with volunteers and organizers who seemed unperturbed by
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