On Presidents’ Day, Daniel Parra met a group of friends at Eldorado High School, in East Las Vegas. The Bernie Sanders campaign was holding a soccer tournament there that a friend of Parra’s had posted about on Snapchat. Under a bright morning sun, with Frenchman Mountain soaring in the background, some forty mostly Latino soccer aficionados gathered on one of the school’s fields. Many of the players had brought their parents, brothers, and sisters along, and spectators sat on the scorched grass beneath the branches of an ash tree. A Mexican woman in her sixties with an ice-cream cart and two taco venders with a spread of carnitas, asado, and pastor would soon be selling food, as arranged by the campaign. Dozens of cobalt-blue Bernie signs, including one that read “Unidos con Bernie,” fluttered on the field’s wire fence. Parra, who is nineteen, tall, and slender, spoke with conviction about his support for Sanders. He hoped to transfer to Colorado State University from the community college he was attending nearby, and said that the senator’s promise of making university tuition free resonated strongly with him. But something else had drawn him to the field that morning. “I see that he’s actually trying to look after the smaller communities, not just going after the big audience,” Parra said. “Doing something like this means a lot to people like us, because we don’t really get looked upon.”

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Before the game, Jose La Luz, a Puerto Rican labor activist and Sanders surrogate, called on the players to crowd around him. La Luz has been urging Latinos across the country to support Sanders, and had flown in from Texas that morning. “Buenos días!” he said to the players. Half awake, many of them failed to reply. “I can’t hear you! Buenos días!” he insisted, prompting a louder response. La Luz is sixty-nine, with slicked-back hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He wore dark glasses and a blue linen jacket, and had a turquoise ring on each hand. His fervor, and the Mexican slang he wove into his Spanish remarks, prompted chuckles among the attendees. “We’ve gathered this morning because we’re going to see who scores the most goals for Tío Bernie,” La Luz said. He called for a show of hands to see how many players were old enough to vote. About a dozen raised their arms. “And who will you vote for?” he asked. “Bernie!” they exclaimed in unison. “For Tío Bernie,” he asserted. “Because he is our candidate.” After La Luz announced that a “very important” person was on his way, the crowd broke into whispers. Could it be Bernie? If not him, who? La Luz said that he wanted to make sure their guest would get a proper welcome. “I want us to receive him with a strong and warm Latin-American applause!” he said, gradually lifting his booming voice. “A strong and warm Mexican applause! A strong and warm Central American applause! Because we’re proud to be Latinos, and the Latino vote will decide this election!”

The players dispersed, and within minutes, Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York, walked onto the field. “O.K., let’s bring it in, bring it in,” La Luz said, in English this time. Parra and his friends approached the Mayor, although none of them knew who he was. De Blasio smiled widely and joined the crowd in a raucous greeting. “Se puede?” La Luz asked. “Si, se puede!” they responded. The mayor kicked off his remarks in Spanish. “Thank you so much, everyone. It’s an honor to be here,” he said, with a strong accent and a flicker of formality that seemed odd for the occasion. “Can I speak in English for a little bit?” The players nodded. Early voting had begun that weekend in Nevada, and the Sanders campaign had chosen Eldorado because it was within blocks of a polling location. De Blasio urged the players to go vote after the game. “You are, right now, the most important people in the United States of America. Because what is going to happen in Nevada, in these few days, could very well decide who is going to be the next President of the United States,” he said. “I came all the way from New York City to tell you this.”

De Blasio’s appearance before such a small crowd reflected the Sanders campaign’s methodical approach to attracting Latino voters. Days before the Iowa caucus, it tested the idea of holding a soccer tournament, in Des Moines. The campaign also targeted the four Spanish-language satellite caucuses that Democratic Party officials had organized in the state for the first time. Sanders earned the support of four hundred and thirty out of the four hundred and eighty-three people who voted. He went on to win more than sixty per cent of the vote in the state’s predominantly Latino precincts. In Nevada, an Equis Research poll released this week found that Sanders had by far the highest net-favorability rating among Latino voters who are registered as Democrats. Sixty per cent rated Sanders positively, while Joe Biden was a distant second, at twenty per cent. Elizabeth Warren, who was at four per cent in an Equis poll in December, had surged to nineteen per cent.

In the weeks leading up to Saturday’s caucuses, many candidates have stepped up their courting efforts of Nevada’s Latinos, who make up an estimated twenty per cent of the state’s registered voters. There has been a sudden uptick in Spanish television ads, and contenders for the nomination have been meeting with multiple mobilization groups, including the Culinary Workers Union and Mi Familia Vota. Last week, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer were tested on their knowledge of Latin American politics in interviews hosted by Telemundo. When they were asked if they could name the Mexican President, Steyer said, “I forget,” and Klobuchar offered a straight “No.” Only Buttigieg knew the answer. Yet, despite his adroitness and enviable Spanish skills, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, along with every other candidate, trails Sanders in polls of Latino voters.

The caucuses will be the most decisive test yet of Latino support for Sanders, who ran well behind Hillary Clinton among Latino voters in 2016. Chuck Rocha, a senior adviser to Sanders who also worked for the senator in 2016, said that Sanders has crafted an entirely new strategy to engage Latino voters in 2020. Last June, his campaign opened its first Nevada office in East Las Vegas, a largely Latino neighborhood. Sanders has since expanded his operation to include eleven offices statewide and has hired two hundred employees, of which seventy-six are Latino. Rocha said that the campaign’s events centered around soccer or tamales are a testament to its “cultural competency.” “Anybody who knows anything about the Latino community knows that there are a few things that really draw us together,” Rocha said. “Some of it is food, a lot of it is music, and a lot of it is our family.”

Sanders nonetheless faces challenges. The Culinary Workers Union, a majority-Latino group that represents, among others, casino cooks and housekeepers, declined to endorse a political candidate in the caucuses this year. Yet it has engaged in an active campaign against Sanders, spreading information among its fifty-seven thousand members, in Spanish and English, about how Sanders’s government-run health-care program could “end” their Culinary Health Fund. The Sanders campaign claims strong support among culinary workers, whom they have been courting for weeks, but it is unclear how this quarrel will ultimately play out in the caucuses. Like the other candidates, Sanders will need to convince Latino voters outside of the Culinary Union to show up to caucus for him. Equis Research estimates that sixty per cent of registered Latino voters in Nevada must be persuaded to vote. “The case has to be made among many Latinos for why voting is an actionable step, especially with the history of marginalization,” Mindy Romero, the director of the California Civic Engagement Project, said. “Otherwise people will wonder, ‘Why should I participate when I don’t even know if this politician is going to do something for me?’ ”