Former US vice president Joe Biden’s presidential bid got a boost on Monday from one of the leading Latinos in the US Congress, with US Representative Tony Cardenas endorsing Biden as the US Democrats’ best hope to defeat US President Donald Trump.
“People realize it’s a matter of life and death for certain communities,” Cardenas said in an interview, explaining the necessity of halting Trump’s populist nationalism, hardline immigration policies and xenophobic rhetoric that the congressman called “cruel.”
Cardenas is chairman of the Bold PAC, the political arm of the US Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
His announcement follows a weekend of mass rallies by US Senator Bernie Sanders, another presidential candidate, with US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a freshman congresswoman who has become a face of the progressive movement and a key supporter for Sanders’ second White House bid.
The dueling surrogates highlight a fierce battle for the Hispanic vote between Sanders and Biden, whose campaigns each see the two candidates as the leading contenders.
Biden leads the field among Democratic voters who are non-white, including those who are Hispanic, with Sanders not far behind, recent national polls showed.
Another top national contender, US Senator Elizabeth Warren, draws less support from non-white voters.
There are few recent national polls with a sufficient sample of Hispanic Democratic voters to analyze them independently.
The dynamics also demonstrate the starkly different approaches that Biden and Sanders take to the larger campaign.
Biden is capitalizing on his 36-year career in the US Senate and two terms as former US president Barack Obama’s vice president to corral Democratic power players across the party’s various demographic slices.
Cardenas joins four other Hispanic caucus members who have backed Biden, a show of establishment support in contrast with some Latino advocates who have battered Biden over the Obama administration’s dismal deportation record.
Sanders, true to his long Capitol Hill tenure as an outsider and democratic socialist, eschews the establishment with promises of a political revolution, just as he did when he finished as runner-up for the Democrats’ 2016 presidential nomination.
Sanders and his supporters like Ocasio-Cortez argue that existing political structures cannot help working-class Americans, immigrants or anyone else. That argument, they insist, can draw enough new, irregular voters to defeat Trump in November.
“We need to be honest here,” said US Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Biden supporter whose congressional district includes part of the US-Mexico border. “If Joe Biden loses the primary, Democrats will lose in 2020.”
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