Stalking the icy neighborhood streets of Nashua with a clipboard and pen in his frozen hand last weekend, Alex Chilton stood out for two reasons: His bright red hair and rosy cheeks, which belied his English heritage, and his age.
At 17, the high school senior had forgotten his gloves in the 32-degree New Hampshire weather. But it wasn't stopping him from knocking on door after door in support of the man he wants to elect president: Bernie Sanders.
Chilton, a Massachusetts resident, is one of 6,300 Sanders volunteers swarming the streets and making phone calls as the primary quickly approaches. He embodies two of the main forces that have propelled Sanders ahead of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic polls.
"My parents are from the UK and they have a more subsidized education system," Chilton explained of the reasoning behind his dedication to Sanders. "As somebody who is looking at colleges and the future, that is pretty relevant to me. So I think Bernie is the candidate who has been proposing all of those things for years now - he hasn't gone back on that message, and even if it's difficult to get those policies through, I really want someone in the White House who is fighting for those things 24/7."
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Throughout the campaign, skeptics in the Democratic Party have questioned whether Sanders had the kind of professionalized campaign that could transform a groundswell of support into a well-oiled operation. His online fundraising put to rest much of those doubts: Sanders has raised over $73 million for his primary campaign, much of it in small dollars.
And at his Nashua campaign office on last Saturday morning, there were signs of a humming ground game. It was stuffed to the brim with first-time volunteers and veteran door-knockers offering them quick training sessions.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are shadowing each other across eastern Iowa, eager to carve out any advantage in a race that's deadlocked with just over a week until the state's lead--off caucuses.
The candidates' overlapping campaign schedules underscore the close eye the rivals are keeping on each other. They'll hold events in the towns of Clinton and Davenport within hours of each other Saturday, then continue circling each other as they work their way through the state's Democratic-leaning areas in the coming days.
Long the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Clinton is seeking to hold off a late surge from Sanders. She's launched a fierce flurry of attacks on the Vermont senator, casting his domestic policy proposals as unrealistic and his foreign policy positions as naive.
Sanders, meanwhile, has suggested that Clinton is the product of a political system that marginalizes the middle class. He's been particularly biting in highlighting the high-dollar speaking fees she received from the same big Wall Street banks he wants to break up.
Both Clinton and Sanders plan to spend most of the coming week in Iowa, where voters caucus on Feb. 1.
Bernie Sanders called for repealing a key piece of anti-abortion legislation Friday, the day marking the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
“As president, and as someone who has a 100 percent pro-choice voting record in Congress, I will do everything that I can to protect and preserve a woman’s right to an abortion,” Sanders said in a statement. “Women must have full control over their reproductive health in order to have full control over their lives. We must rescind the Hyde Amendment and resist attempts by states to erect roadblocks to abortion.”
The Hyde Amendment is a rider attached to government funding bills every year that prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to fund abortion, preventing government-backed health plans like Medicaid from covering the service for women who can’t afford it.
Attacks on Bernie Sanders by rival Democrats are likely to turn increasingly to his record on the economy and foreign affairs, according to a new dossier seen by the Guardian that accuses him of sympathising with communists and “not believing in capitalism”.
A ferocious war of words between Hillary Clinton and Sanders has erupted in recent days as polls showing the Vermont senator taking the lead among Democratic voters in both New Hampshire and Iowa have sent shockwaves through the party establishment and prompted growing personal attacks.
On Thursday, Sanders aides accused David Brock, a political operative who runs a Super Pac set up to defend Clinton, of “mudslinging” after he claimed Sanders was acting as if “black lives don’t matter” in a new campaign ad.
This follows a week of steadily mounting criticism from other campaign surrogates such as Chelsea Clinton, who accused the senator of wanting to “dismantle Obamacare”, and foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan who warned that Sanders’s proposals for tackling Isis would put Israel at risk.
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The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to the Guardian by a source who would only agree to be identified as “a Democrat”, alleges that Sanders “sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War” because he went on a trip there to visit a twinned city while he was mayor of Burlington.
Bernie Sanders picked a fight with the Democratic establishment, and the establishment is striking back. As he faces the toughest onslaught of his political life over the next 11 days before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders will have to go it nearly alone.
In a pitched battle, Sanders would be hopelessly outgunned. But the Vermont senator is waging the public relations version of guerrilla warfare. Instead of taking on Hillary Clinton’s superior forces head on, Team Sanders is betting on the ability to pick his battles, use the issue terrain to his advantage, and turn the Clinton machine’s size and strength against her.
It’s an unorthodox strategy that leaves Sanders often on defense, letting Clinton and her expansive communications infrastructure start new fights every day that could win over undecided voters. But it’s likely his best option given her superior resources, and it can help fire up his base. The more he’s attacked, the more it reinforces to supporters his narrative that he’s an outsider whom the establishment views as a threat.
“We’ve expected that this is the way they would react, by lashing out left and right, and we’re ready for it,” said Communications Director Michael Briggs. “We don’t think they’re doing themselves any good, but don’t tell themselves that.”
It’s almost impossible to watch it, regardless of political persuasion or candidate preference, and not feel a familiar tug at your heart. It’s rare for a political ad to evoke such universal emotions. But its power is in its universality. The images of everyday Americans doing everyday things set to a powerful song from perhaps the most unsettled time in our nation’s history taps into one powerful human sentiment: Nostalgia.
At one time, nostalgia was viewed negatively. It’s derived from two Greek words, nostos, meaning home, and algos, meaning pain. It was associated with people longing for the past and feelings of homesickness.
But modern research has found that reflecting on the past can provide more comfort than hurt. Constantine Sedikides, a psychology professor in England who has extensively studied the positive impacts of nostalgia, told the Guardian in 2014 that the mental state was the “perfect internal politician, connecting the past with the present, pointing optimistically to the future” and “absolutely central to human experience.”
The softness in our hearts for the past explains the popularity of articles and TV segments that list toys or music or phrases from previous decades. It’s why reboots of shows like “Full House” or new installments of movies like “Star Wars” using the original cast are so exciting. Harkening back to a simpler time, even if it was only simpler in your rose-tinted memory, can actually make us happy.
On his final day in New Hampshire before shifting his attention to Iowa, Sen. Bernie Sanders stuck to his presidential campaign’s core themes and largely avoided calling out his chief rival.
In fact, Sanders only referenced Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady, once when discussing his plan to boost Social Security.
His town hall meeting Friday morning at the North Conway Community Center Gymnasium was a more intimate affair with about 650 supporters than some of his previous rallies that have drawn thousands of supporters. But his message was the same.
Sanders promoted his plan to force more regulations on Wall Street, called for a single-payer health care system that covers all Americans and again called for tuition-free colleges and universities.
Sanders promoted his plan to lift the income cap on Social Security so that wealthy Americans will pay a greater percentage of their income into the program. In his only direct reference to Clinton Sanders said she has not embraced his idea.
In the war for endorsements in the Democratic presidential primary, there is a clear trend.
Every major union or progressive organization that let its members have a vote endorsed Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, all of Hillary Clinton’s major group endorsements come from organizations where the leaders decide. And several of those endorsements were accompanied by criticisms from members about the lack of a democratic process.
It’s perhaps the clearest example yet of Clinton’s powerful appeal to the Democratic Party’s elite, even as support for Sanders explodes among the rank and file.
For example, Clinton got an endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign this week. That decision was made not by a vote of HRC’s membership list but instead by a 32-member executive board that includes Mike Berman, the president of a lobbying firm that works for Pfizer, Comcast, and the health insurance lobby. Northrup Grumman is among its list of major corporate sponsors.
For the last year, media pundits and commentators have suggested that the Bernie Sanders campaign is “naive,” “unrealistic,” and “misguided” for a range of reasons and on a range of issues. But it’s really the media who are missing the mark.
Most recently in the Boston Globe, Michael A. Cohen asserted that Sanders has a “simple-minded understanding of American politics” because he has made getting big money out of politics a central issue of his campaign. This assertion is itself misguided, the product of a media environment that has largely missed the defining narrative of the 2016 election.
That narrative is the rapidly-rising importance of money in politics as an electoral issue among voters of both major parties. The evidence could not be clearer. A June 2015 New York Times poll revealed 85 percent of Americans support fundamentally changing or completely rebuilding the system for funding elections. In Iowa a Bloomberg News/Des Moines Register poll of likely caucus-goers found that 91 percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats are unsatisfied or “mad as hell” about money in politics. Seventy-two percent of Americans support citizen funded elections. These numbers are staggeringly large when you consider that only 70% of Americans can tell you the year that the 9/11 attacks occurred. Or that 30% of GOP voters recently polled support the bombing of Agrabah, a fictional city.
Yet despite the overwhelming public demand for getting big money out of politics, the ten presidential debates hosted by the media have failed to ask a single question about solutions to this threat to our democracy. When an issue has broad bipartisan support, across ideology and demographics, it’s not naive to campaign on it – it’s common sense. It should be common sense for the media to discuss it too
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders plans stops in Duluth and St. Paul Tuesday, looking for votes in Minnesota's March 1 precinct caucuses.
The Duluth "A Future to Believe In" rally is set to take place at 3 p.m. at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center Arena. Doors will open at 2 p.m.
He will speak at 7 p.m. in St. Paul's RiverCentre, with doors opening at 6 p.m.
Both events are free and open to the public.
More details are under the event listings at go.berniesanders.com.
His campaign said little about what Sanders might say when in Minnesota, other than he will discuss "a wide range of issues."
Prominent Latino leaders, including a U.S. Congressman from Arizona, are stumping for presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in an effort to build support among minorities.
Tucson U.S. Representative Raul Grijalva joined Nevada congressional candidate Lucy Flores and Jesus "Chuy" Garcia, a Cook County commissioner in Chicago, on a conference call recruiting Latino volunteers — particularly those who speak Spanish — to spread the word about Sanders’ campaign in Arizona.
Less than two weeks before the crucial Iowa caucuses, Sanders is gaining on front-runner Hillary Clinton. Thirty-seven percent of Democratic primary voters nationwide support Sanders while 52 percent support Clinton, according to a Monmouth University poll released this week. But when it comes to rapport among Latinos, Hillary still is firmly in the lead: 71-21.
Part of the problem, according to Grijalva, the first member of Congress to throw his support behind Sanders, is that Latino voters aren’t familiar with Sanders and his platform (That claim is supported by a recent Noticias Univision poll that showed 68 percent of Latino Democratic voters either didn’t know Sanders or hadn’t yet formed an opinion about him.).
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“The role for the Latino community is not to be left watching on the sideline,” Grijalva said. “The role for the Latino community is to be driving change.”
Sanders’ campaign, he said, is "nurturing a new crop of Latino leadership.”
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