It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Friday, March 6th.

I call him Theo Bernie.

Maybe to my goddaughter, he'suelo, maybe to some others, he's brother, but he's

my Tio, Bernie Sanders.

That, if you don't know the voice yet, was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

In October, coining the term of endearment or term of endorsement,

T.O. Bernie or Uncle Bernie, the Sanders campaign has spent months courting Latino, Latinx voters,

leaning into that moniker, T.O. Bernie, organizing soccer matches and house parties that

are called tamales for T.O. Bernie, he has hired Latino staff,

who number more than 200 nationwide, and advocates say he's campaigning on the right issues. On Tuesday,

we saw Bernie Sanders ground game with Latino voters pay off, as it was the Latino vote that

helped insulate him to some degree from Joe Biden's

sudden surge. Bernie had 49% of Latino support in California and 39% in Texas, the two states

with the most delegates to offer. Those numbers way beat Biden, who had only 19% of Latino voters in California and 26% in Texas.

So that's a two-to-one Latino voter victory in California for Sanders, not quite that much in Texas,

but still a substantial win in that group.

And it's a meaningful counterweight, right?

To Biden's black support, the two candidates, by the way, are splitting the white vote about

evenly in the 2016 general election, according to Pew, blacks and Latinx voters each made up

about 10% of the electorate. So their influence compared to each other is similar.

With me now to talk about why Bernie is winning with Latinos and whether that's a trend

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