Bernie Sanders is beating Hillary Clinton by a whopping 27 percentage points among Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire, according to a new CNN/WMUR poll.
The Vermont senator leads the former secretary of State 60%-33%, expanding his lead by nearly 20 points since late November and early December, when he led her 50%-40%.
Sanders has been the consistent leader in polls of the first-in-the-nation primary state recently, but this is his largest margin of any poll in the race, according to RealClearPolitics.
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Voters surveyed said they thought Sanders would be better on the economy, 57%-33%, and has characteristics a president should have, 58%-33%. In another troubling number for Clinton, some 55% of respondents said she is the “least honest.” Of the remainder, 36% didn't provide an answer, while 2% chose Sanders.
A majority — 55% — did say she would best handle the Islamic State threat, but only a fraction — 13% — said foreign policy and national security is the most important issue. Twice as many said jobs and the economy were more important.
Bob Robbins bought his home in 1995 amid a bout of long-term unemployment. Living with his wife and two kids in a rundown rental in Burlington, Vermont, he wanted to stabilize the family’s housing before his children started kindergarten.
Prospects seemed bleak. The family’s savings had dwindled after his unemployment insurance gave out. But in 1993 Robbins saw a newspaper advertisement for something called the Burlington Community Land Trust. He visited its offices and learned about its generous grants for low-income home ownership. The innovative offer would significantly lower the price by allowing the couple to purchase only the house, while the trust paid for the land it sat on. Within two years, his family owned a home in a small town just to the east of the city.
They’re far from alone. Across the land trust’s portfolio today, there are about 565 other homes that enjoy similar terms, not to mention 2,100 rental and cooperative units.
“We don’t understand why housing isn’t done this way everywhere,” says Robbins, who says the cheaper mortgage allowed his family to save money for college and retirement that otherwise would have gone toward housing. “It’s just such a logical thing to have land owned by a community and the house be your private property to do with as you wish. We’ve just had a terrific life here so far because of it.”
The man largely responsible for this good fortune? Bernie Sanders.
While mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, the democratic-socialist senator and current contender for the Democratic presidential nomination was an early champion of community land trusts. Today, the organization whose creation he made possible—now called the Champlain Housing Trust—is the largest and most influential of its type in the nation.
Fresh off a strong debate performance and buoyed by rising poll numbers, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders returned to Iowa with an air of vindication.
"We began this campaign some nine months ago. The media was saying, 'Bernie Sanders, he's an interesting guy, he has interesting ideas … but he's a fringe candidate. … We already have the anointed candidate, the inevitable candidate,'" Sanders told hundreds of supporters gathered Tuesday afternoon at a winery here.
"Well, a lot has happened in the last nine months," he said, "and the inevitable candidate is not quite so inevitable."
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"I don't represent the billionaire class; I never have. I don't represent corporate America; I never have," Sanders told about 200 supporters at a barn in Fort Dodge, Iowa, on Tuesday morning. He said when he kicked off his campaign, he was told he needed a super PAC to compete but refused.
"We decided to do it the old-fashioned way — reach out to middle-class families and ask for their help," he said, adding that he was stunned by the end result — 2.5 million individual contributions that averaged $27.
According to the Des Moines Register, which tracks the candidates in Iowa, Sanders has spent nearly twice as much time in the state as Clinton has. Sanders said he has spoken in front of about 40,000 Iowans, and he hopes to make it to 50,000 by the Feb. 1 caucuses. Indeed, many in the crowd, such as Mike and Terry McCarville of Manson, had seen him speak before and were committed supporters.
"There's no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans — they're all establishment politicians. He's not," said Mike McCarville, 62. "He's not bought and paid for. That's the biggest thing."
“There are only so many delegates that are going to come out of Johnson County, so if he wins by a little or by a lot, he could end up with the same number of delegates,” explained Selzer on Tuesday, referring to the home of the University of Iowa. “My speculation, upon hearing he’s in Fort Dodge heading to Underwood, is that there are a lot of delegates out in Western Iowa, so he needs to convince some Democrats who aren’t used to caucusing to get out."
The rapid-fire, four-stop tour of western Iowa on Tuesday included dropping in on small “town meetings” of between 200 and 400 residents at the same time his staff has been increasing its output of direct mail, according to Iowans who noticed the uptick. Western Iowa is the part of the state where Sanders boasts his widest lead over Hillary Clinton in recent polling, but it’s also the region with the smallest portion of likely Democratic caucus-goers.
In front of his brand-new campaign bus at a municipal hall in Underwood, where the wind chill made it feel like seven degrees outside, Sanders himself made the case, telling reporters, “we believe we stand a really good chance to win in Iowa and New Hampshire if there is a big voter turnout."
Sanders’ chief strategist Tad Devine acknowledged that “the schedule reflects that we understand we need to win votes across the state."
“I know Iowa has more significance than how many delegates you win beyond the precinct and county levels, but we’re focusing on targeting,” Devine said as the candidate rode from Fort Dodge to Carroll, to Underwood, to Sioux City. “In a primary, you go where the voters are. In a caucus, you spend a lot of time where the delegates are. We’re aware of that."
Sanders hasn't caused nearly the same amount of panic that Dean did among establishment Democrats in 2003-2004. That could simply be because the expectation is that Sanders' campaign will ultimately collapse like Dean's did in the weeks before the Iowa caucus.
But if you talk to folks working on behalf of the senator, they don't see themselves at risk of Dean-like pitfalls. They're not even studying his playbook for clues.
“We haven't really used his campaign as a model or looked to it for lessons,” Sanders’ top strategist, Tad Devine, told the Huffington Post not too long ago. “I'm not sure if Bernie talked to him about this but I doubt it. It’s just so different now than it was in 2004.”
From a structural level, Devine is right. Sanders’ fundraising apparatus is more robust than Dean’s, in part because the nature of the Internet now allows easier access and certainty when it comes to recruiting online donors. The issues dominating the process are also fundamentally different from 2004 and, arguably, more suited to Sanders’ strengths -- more focus on economic policy than the prosecution of the Iraq War.
Dean ended up finishing third in Iowa and lost the New Hampshire primary to John Kerry shortly thereafter. His stumbles were largely his own making. But it’s certainly true that the party establishment helped facilitate the fall, with outside groups running ads and spreading rumors against him, and lawmakers warning of a perilous down-ballot calamity were he to end up atop the ticket.
A Democratic National Committee member from Mississippi says he's supporting Bernie Sanders for president.
Keelan Sanders tells The Associated Press that the Vermont senator has been a strong advocate for African-Americans, including supporting the Voting Rights Act. Keelan Sanders also says Bernie Sanders supports "fair pay for all workers."
Keelan Sanders is a former director of the state Democratic Party. The 41-year-old Jackson resident is one of one of five Democratic super delegates from Mississippi.
Nevada Democratic congressional candidate and former Assemblywoman Lucy Flores is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.
Flores said in a statement Tuesday that she would stand with the Vermont senator in the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and offer free college tuition.
The endorsement comes as many Nevada Democratic elected officials have publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, including her Democratic primary rival, state Sen. Ruben Kihuen.
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Sanders’ Nevada campaign director said Flores is fiercely dedicated to helping struggling communities, and is a role model for transforming from troubled teen to state lawmaker.
Bernie Sanders pushed back against global-affairs experts backing Hillary Clinton who questioned the Vermont senator’s grasp of foreign policy, touting his judgement over her experience as he surges in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“On the crucial foreign policy issue of our time, it turns out that Secretary Clinton – with all of her experience – was wrong and I was right,” Sanders told the Guardian after a campaign event on Tuesday in Underwood, Iowa, freshly condemning his then-senate colleague’s 2002 vote to approve the US invasion of Iraq.
While conceding that he has fewer foreign-policy credentials than the former secretary of state, Sanders said he maintains better judgement.
“It is fair to say, in terms of experience, Hillary Clinton was secretary of state for four years and has a lot of experience, no debate about that,” Sanders told the Guardian. “But there is a difference between experience and judgement. Not only did I vote against the war in Iraq, I helped lead the opposition to that war.”
Earlier on Tuesday, a group of 10 former senior US diplomats and national security officials who are supporting the former secretary of state released a letter calling Sanders’s foreign policy agenda “troubling” and “puzzling”. The letter-writers characterized Sanders’s strategy to defeat Isis as improbable and his plan to normalize relations with Iran as “out of step” with the current adminstration.
Argumentum ad nauseam refers to the logical fallacy that an argument is correct by virtue of it constantly being repeated. Argumentum ad hominem is the fallacy that a point is wrong because of personal critiques of the person making it.
A new logical fallacy should be added to the list: Argumentum ad centrum, or the flawed claim that an assertion is accurate because it is from the ideological center.
The argumentum ad centrum is increasingly popular in politics today, as working-class people all around the world become more and more frustrated with the status quo. The rapid rise of left-wing alternatives to an increasingly right-wing political modus operandi — with Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and more — has apologists for power on the ropes, desperately clutching for any argument that can beat back the dissent and discontent.
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Columnist Jonathan Chait lobbed a series of argumenta ad centrum at the Vermont senator in “The Case Against Bernie Sanders.” The article, published this week in New York magazine, went viral with tens of thousands of shares.
The crux of Chait’s argument is that Sanders is too extreme of a candidate, and that U.S. politics is too far to the right, for him to get anything done. It is not until the final paragraph of his piece that Chait, an unabashed Clinton aficionado, makes it clear that he does not endorse “Sanders’s policy vision.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, his points perilously teeter-totter back and forth between vapid political tea-leaf reading and baseless condemnation.
The New York magazine columnist’s piece is, in essence, an extended argument from the center. In painting Sanders’ candidacy as a dangerous and extreme political gamble, Chait tries to graft a superficially attractive sheen onto the asinine axiom that the truth necessarily lies somewhere in the middle.
Maine Democrats from across the progressive spectrum on Tuesday announced their decision to back presidential hopeful U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The list of Sanders’ backers includes four sitting state senators and 30 representatives, including House Majority Leader Rep. Jeff McCabe and Secretary of State Matt Dunlap. Former Maine Democratic Party chairman and noted lobbyist Severin Beliveau, former Portland Mayor Michael Brennan and former House Speaker John Richardson are included in the so-called Working Class Cabinet. Eight county chairmen and chairwomen of the Maine Democratic Party also announced their support.
The Bernie News Roundup is a voluntary, non-campaign associated roundup of news, media, & other information related to Bernie Sanders' run for President.
More information about Bernie & The Issues @ feelthebern.org
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