GOVERNMENT

Bernie touts Nevada win as Texas preview

Jonathan Tilove
jtilove@statesman.com
Sen. Bernie Sanders and wife Jane at presidential campaign rally in San Antonio on Saturday, Feb. 22, 2020. KEN HERMAN/American-Statesman

SAN ANTONIO - It was the high point to date of his now soaring presidential campaign, and Bernie Sanders, looking ahead to Super Tuesday March 3, shared his Nevada victory with a diverse and ecstatic Saturday night crowd of some 4,000 at Cowboys Dancehall in Northeast San Antonio.

“Based on what I have seen today in Texas, we were in El Paso, we’re here now, don’t tell anybody, it will get them nervous,” Sanders said, quieting to a stage whisper to the chanting crowd, “we’re going to win the Democratic primary in Texas.”

“And, you know,” Sanders continued, “this is also very, very important, the president gets very upset easily, so don’t tell him that we’re going to beat him here in Texas.“

Could it happen?

“It’s the Texas I want to know,” said Charlie (for Charlotte) Rouse, a 31-year-old Bexar County employee. “I’m really excited that he’s doing as well as he is.”

“I feel like he’s going to make changes to make America truly great. He’s going to really drain the swamp,“ Rouse said.

“You look at what the current administration has done and all it’s done is make things worse,” Rouse said. “But Bernie has been consistent his entire career. And you know, he sticks to his guns, he’s got a very good moral compass about he would do, not just for the working class but for all of America.”

Sanders’ four-rally weekend sweep across Texas continues Sunday with rallies in Houston at 1 p.m. and in Austin at 5 p.m. at Vic Mathias Shores, previously known as Auditorium Shores, at 900 W Riverside Drive. (Doors open at 3:00 p.m. It is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required, but an RSVP is encouraged.)

“The stars are aligned,” said Rick Treviño, a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, who believes Sanders should win the nomination and can defeat President Donald Trump.

“He could win,” said Treviño, a former high school teacher now in his first year studying law at St. Mary’s University. “There’s no doubt about it, the people that he can reach, he’s the only one who’s going to get the voters the Democrats need to win over Trump. And the elites and the DNC (Democratic National Committee), they are going to do what they are going to do" - Treviño believes they are out to ”sabotage“ Sanders, as he believes they did in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton - ”but I’m not voting for anybody but Bernie.“

In 2018, Treviño, with a homemade campaign built on his Sanders’ network and run on next-to-nothing, made it into a runoff with Gina Ortiz Jones in the 2018 contest for the Democratic nomination in the 23rd Congressional District. Jones prevailed, lost that November to U.S. Rep. Will Hurd R-Helotes, but is the favorite to take the seat in 2020.

"I think he’s holding together the coalition of non-voters and independents and the disaffected, and he has the coalition that Obama had of young people, of diversity, the working class,“ Treviño said.

“He’s our Trump - a brick through the window,” said David Vela, 56, of San Antonio, the drummer for High Voltage, which bills itself as the nation’s premier AC/DC tribute band.

It was Vela’s first appearance ever at a political rally - accompanied by his wife, Linda, 41, and their two children, ages 9 and 10. He said he was there to show solidarity with Sanders, who he supported in 2016 as well, in the face of what he sees as a reprise of establishment resistance to his rise.

“I see how they are treating Bernie,” Vela said. “People are against him so it makes me stand behind him. He’s the underdog. His own party is against him, so I’m in.”

Their fear?

“The word, `Communism,’” Vela said. “For the Trump campaign, it’s going to be Communism against the greatest capitalist there ever was, in their mind.“

Vela said he watched Sanders cry at the last convention. If the stop him again, he said, “it will be the end of this party.”

“I’ll get over it if they steal it from him. What am I going to do?” said Vela. But, “that’ll be my last straw.”

“I’m a diehard Democrat,” said Linda Vela, who works in community relations. “I will vote for whoever is on the ballot. At the end of the day it’s about getting Trump out.”

“I was thinking earlier today about people who are crazy enough to think that they can do something and then go out and do it,” said Valerie Dominguez, 26, who has been for Sanders since the last campaign. “And I think that’s the kind of spirit that he puts in people, that things can really change.”

“You see that in the way he raises money,“ said Dominguez, an El Paso native who moved to San Antonio to go to St. Mary’s University and now works as a grant writer for a non-profit organization that helps finance new small business and startup companies.

“I don’t have a whole lot of money but I’ll toss in $5, and my mom, I had her toss in $5. She just wanted to, and all that added up to more fundraising than any of the other candidates,” Dominguez said. “That’s amazing. That’s what everyone wanted to see for this country, that every vote and every dollar really counts. And with Bernie it’s like he’s really showing how it can be done.”

Dana Thompson, 36, a med tech, and longtime Sanders fan, brought her husband Jason, 40, a police officer, and their two young children, because, she said, they are a biracial family - he is white and she is Iranian - and because they are “middle class but barely making it.”

“We’re tired of the hate crimes. We’re tired of all the violence. We want fairness. We want our children to have a great future,” Thompson said.

“Me being Middle Eastern doesn’t help. I’m originally from Iran. That’s touchy already,” said Thompson who was born in Tehran but came to America as an infant.

But Thompson said of Sanders, “he doesn’t care what I am, who I am, what background I come from, and I love him for that.”

For Matt Saffle, 31, it was his second Sanders rally in Texas in eight days. A barista in Frisco, he worked as a volunteer at the Sanders rally at the Mesquite Rodeo a week ago Friday.

“Medicare for All is my big issue because I’m Type 1 diabetic and I’m currently uninsured,” Saffle said.

“I absolutely feel like we can crush Trump in November,” Saffle said. “Just judging from all of the rallies I've seen, people I've talked to, everyone just seems to be energized and fired up and ready to go.”

"He’s bringing in new voters. maybe even, I hate to say it, he might even bring over some Trump voters,“ Saffle said.

Like Julie Newton, 51, a few steps away on line to get into Saturday’s rally.

“I voted for Trump because I didn’t want to vote for Hillary,” said Newton, who lives in New Braunfels. “I was with Bernie before Hillary stole it. I despised her so much.”

But President Trump lost her.

“When he said it was OK to bring elephant tusks back into the United States, I thought, how is that helping the working people?” Newton said.

Newton brought her son, Myles Meyer, a senior at Canyon High School in New Braunfels who, on Friday, at 18, cast his first vote ever, for Sanders for president.

“To be honest I didn’ know what party I fell into until this week,” Meyer said. “In my government class we took a political party quiz and it told me I was a disaffected Democrat.”

In school, Meyer said, “most of my lunch table is for Trump. They say there’s no way Bernie is going to be elected president.”

And, he said, his lunch mates say, “under Communism, my lunch is everyone’s lunch.”

“They don’t understand what democratic socialism is,” said Newton, who offered her son lunch-table talking points. “Right now some people have really good lunches and some people don’t have any lunches. Under Bernie,, some people will still have good lunches, but at least everybody will have a lunch.”