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?’ ”

The Sanders campaign’s East Las Vegas office is located between a hair salon and a women’s health clinic in a drab strip mall. Outside, dozens of volunteers mingled, ate tacos, and sipped Mexican hibiscus water. Inside, the walls were adorned with Mexican paper cutouts, including papel picado banners and colored paper fans, along with Bernie signs, Post-its, and hand-written placards, detailing the do’s and don’ts of canvassing. Campaign workers and field organizers arrived in groups and described the number of people they had reached and reported that voters had repeatedly expressed confusion about the caucus process. As a newly trained phone banker took a stab making his first calls, Rocha praised the operation. A self-described “third-generation Texas Mexican,” who wears cowboy hats and has a distinct Texas accent, Rocha spent decades as a union organizer before starting a political-consulting firm in Washington. “In most campaigns I’ve ever worked in, the Latino vote is an afterthought,” he said. “We have done things very differently.”

Rocha said that he drew important lessons from 2016. The Sanders campaign needed to invest not just heavily, but also early, in the Latino community. The campaign tries to avoid hierarchy and turf battles; it does not have a “Latino department.” Instead, Latinos fill positions that range from national political director to volunteers. A major difference this time is that Sanders is a household name. “We didn’t know the senator would have the longevity,” Rocha said. Other candidates in the race have taken note of Sanders’s strategy among Latinos, but have been unable to match his infrastructure in Nevada. The Latino Sanders supporters that I spoke to said that he saw them as more than a monolithic voting bloc—that he saw nuances in their concerns, which extend to issues other than immigration. They said they felt respected by his campaign, and praised it for not treating them as second-class citizens. This week’s Equis Research poll also showed that Sanders has a substantial lead in favorability among Latinos in states such as California, Texas, and Virginia. “For a long time, people have said that the answer to the Latino vote is to pay attention and show consistent interest,” Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, told me. “If the diagnosis is true, then there is a possibility that Sanders has gotten an answer here.”

In Iowa, where Latinos make up just six per cent of the population, the campaign invested over a million dollars in outreach efforts to them. It has tripled that spending in Nevada. For the past eight months, the campaign has been mailing Bernie flyers, both in English and Spanish, to voters’ homes. Bilingual campaign workers have knocked on thousands of doors. Last December, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, held a town hall, in Spanish, in Las Vegas, which proved to be a crowd-pleaser. The Sanders campaign’s first Spanish-language television ad, called “Nuestro Futuro,” aired earlier this year, and focussed on the candidate’s family story: his father’s arrival to the United States from Poland, with little money and no knowledge of English. “We know what the formula to win over the Latino vote is, but it does have to be sincere and sustained,” Mindy Romero said. “Sanders is talking about politics, but he’s also talking about equity, fairness, fighting for people. You don’t hear a lot of candidates saying that, very few are doing this kind of work among the community, and he’s also benefitting from that.”

A week ago, when early voting started in Nevada, Sanders held a rally at a public high school in central Las Vegas. Make the Road Action, a grassroots Latino organization, which recently endorsed him, helped organize the event. As more than a thousand people poured into the school’s main hall, four mariachis made their way to the stage. The musicians, who were in their teens, wore matching sequin outfits and bashfully introduced themselves as “Clave 702.” After the quartet played several songs, organizers escorted members of Make the Road Action to the risers behind the stage. They waved dozens of campaign signs, inscribed with messages such as, “#Housing not Handcuffs,” “#Cancel the Debt,” and “Families Belong Together.” Chants of “Se ve, se siente, Bernie presidente!” and “Sí se puede” echoed through the hall. After several other speakers, José Macías, a founding organizer of Make the Road Action, introduced “el candidato Bernie Sanders!” The senator stepped up to the stage, hugged Macías, thanked the speakers, stared around the room and said, “Brothers and sisters, this is what democracy looks like.” The crowd roared. Sanders called on the audience’s support to defeat a President “who is trying to divide our people up based on the color of their skin, or where they were born, or their religion, or their sexual orientation.” His movement, Sanders said, would prove victorious by doing the opposite: “bringing working people together.” After his speech, Sanders made his way to the street, to lead a march toward the closest polling station, which was less than a mile from the school. Swarmed by hundreds of people, he walked on, occasionally clapping. The crowd chanted, “This is what democracy looks like!”