THE PIONEER OF THE HISPANIC SURVEYS: A PERUVIAN MAN SERGIO BENDIXEN
Sergio Bendixen is the first Hispanic to lead a presidential campaign in the United States and who later led an opinion polling firm among Hispanics.
Bendixen not only specialized in surveys among Hispanics, but decided to survey them in Spanish was better for them, an innovation in the sector that is now considered the norm in multi-language surveys. He later extended his work to other ethnic groups and worked with political candidates from other countries, especially Latin America.
Bendixen’s survey work began after a rapid rise in the world of political consulting. In 1984, Bendixen was the national campaign manager for Democratic presidential hopeful Alan Cranston of California. He also helped with Bruce Babbitt’s 1988 presidential campaign.
Bendixen went into politics with George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972. His next project was with North Miami Beach Democrat Bill Lehman in 1974, first as a representative of a Miami district and then as an executive assistant in Washington. But it was his job of organizing conservative Dade County Democrats for Jimmy Carter in 1976 that earned him a place on the national political map: his efforts were a key part of Carter’s unlikely victory.
After moving away from Carter, Bendixen and Abrams led the movement to try to remove Carter from the presidency and replace him with Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, a campaign that Bendixen later considered his worst political mistake, Amandi said, because he thought he ultimately helped Republican Ronald Reagan defeat Carter.
Bendixen then moved to Washington and devoted himself to the polls, where he chronicled perhaps the most significant change in Miami politics: the rise of Cuban-American Republicans. Previously, Cuban Americans had fundamentally identified themselves as Democrats.
“The danger is that the time will come when a Cuban cannot be elected to anything in Dade unless he is a Republican,” warned Bendixen, a lifelong Democrat, in 1983. By the end of the 1980s, Cuban-American candidates began occupying positions in the Florida Legislature, and eventually in Congress, for the Republican Party.
Two years ago, Bendixen’s firm did what was long thought unthinkable: conduct a poll in Cuba – secretly, for Univision, Fusion and the Washington Post – to measure the popularity of then-President Barack Obama’s new U.S. opening to the island. It was the first independent poll conducted in Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.
Bendixen knew that polling in communist countries was complicated: he and other U.S. pollsters predicted an overwhelming victory for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua’s 1990 elections, who ended up losing by 14 percentage points.
Bendixen, who eventually returned to Miami, became a well-known figure on Spanish-language television, where he presented his poll results and explained U.S. policy to Hispanics. During his professional life, he worked for all major Hispanic networks: Spanish International Network (SIN), Univisión, CNN en Español and Telemundo.
He became the expert to survey the Hispanic community, said Cecilia Muñoz, an immigrant rights advocate and former director of the National Policy Council at Obama’s White House, who added that his strong push to include Hispanics in the political process changed the country.
“Before him, we weren’t visible in the political community,” she added. “He gave us a voice.
Born in Peru, Bendixen immigrated to the United States at age 12, Amandi said. Bendixen attended Christopher Columbus High School and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1970 in chemical engineering, according to his biography. But he never worked as an engineer.
Even when he was half retired, Amandi said, Bendixen followed politics closely. But he also devoted time to his other passions, following the professional baseball team the Detroit Tigers; the Peruvian soccer club Alianza Lima, and the Peruvian national team of that sport, which Bendixen hoped would be able to compete again in the World Cup.
Source: The New Herald
