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Sanders Bringing The Bern To Boulder:
Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders is holding a rally in Boulder on Saturday, his campaign announced.
The Vermont senator, an Independent who has attracted large crowds in Colorado and other states and who is popular among progressives, plans to hold the rally at Potts Field at the University of Colorado at 2 p.m.
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The campaign says that tickets are free and offered on a first-come, first-served bases Thursday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at three CU locations: at the End of Engines Alley; at Folsom Field; and at the Math Courtyard.
Bernie Gets A Congressional Endorsement:
Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will receive his first congressional endorsement this week: Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva.
The liberal Democrat is set to announce his support for the Senator’s presidential bid during a rally in Tucson on Friday, just before Sanders heads to the first Democratic debate in Las Vegas next week.
Grijalva is currently in his seventh term representing Arizona’s third district. He is co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was co-founded by Sanders, and a long time member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Long Island Support:
The last time Gruber was inspired to pick up a phone for a candidate was during then-Sen. Barack Obama’s historic run in 2008.
It was her daughter who initially encouraged her to explore Sanders’ positions. A little bit of research then turned into pro-Sanders posts on Facebook. Now she’s all-in as a volunteer.
For Gruber, it was Sanders’ plan to tackle soaring student loan interest rates that caught her eye.
Her 21-year-old daughter, who, ironically, is named Hilary—with one “L,” she reminds this reporter—recently graduated college and is holding down two jobs in order to pay off thousands of dollars in crushing student loan debt.
“My big fear,” Gruber says, “is I’ve got two kids, and I’m afraid they’re not going to have what I have.” Gruber says her daughter wants to be an art therapist, and Hilary won’t be compensated with a six-figure salary.
“She wants to help people,” Gruber says. “People like that should be encouraged, not discouraged.”
The Campaign Has A Nevada State Director:
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is starting to build a formal campaign team in Nevada.
Political consultant Jim Farrell said he started working last week as Sanders’ Nevada state director. The hire marks one of the campaign’s first steps toward building a formal organization focused on winning the Nevada caucuses.
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Farrell is a former adviser to ex-New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and has experience with campaigns in the caucus state of Iowa.
Focus Groups Open To Sanders:
Growing momentum for Clinton’s chief rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, suggests he has a credible shot at picking up the key early-voting states. Reactions to Sanders in the focus groups reflected recent polls in the two states: In Iowa, they show Sanders behind Clinton but gaining ground, while a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of Granite State voters released at the end of September showed Sanders leading Clinton by 14 percentage points.
In the New Hampshire focus group, the registered voters who said they are likely to participate in the Democratic primary were unanimous in telling Halperin that Sanders will be the eventual winner of their state’s primary. “He’s in touch with I think a lot of things we’re thinking about,” said Ken, a school principal from New Hampshire. In Iowa, when Heilemann asked who would win the caucuses, likely caucus-goers split between Clinton and Sanders.
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Both focus groups expressed an interest in Sanders’s strong rhetoric about income inequality and a respect for his knack for raising large amounts of campaign contributions through small donors. “I think it shows broader appeal,” said Joe, a project manager from New Hampshire.
The focus groups were organized by independent polling firm Purple Strategies. Participants came from the Manchester, New Hampshire, and Des Moines, Iowa, areas and represented a variety of ages and socio-economic and educational backgrounds
The Secret To Bernies Success:
“There is no secret formula to winning in New Hampshire,” says Julia Barnes. “Volunteers recruited plus tactics equals the win number.” A native of Hollis, a town about 25 miles south of here, Barnes is the state director for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. By “tactics,” she means boots on the ground: the slow, unglamorous, persistent work of contacting likely primary voters and identifying Sanders supporters—and then making sure all of them actually vote.
By “volunteers,” she means people like Elizabeth Ropp. “I watched Bernie filibuster against tax cuts for the wealthy, and I really hoped that someday he’d run for president,” Ropp tells me. A community acupuncturist in Manchester—“We provide affordable acupuncture on a sliding-fee scale”—Ropp, with her husband, hosted the first Sanders house party in the state earlier this year. “I live in a small bungalow, and our living room, dining room, and kitchen were crammed,” she says. “We had about 130 people, and some of them had to stand outside.”
Or Janice Kelble, a post-office employee for 29 years who now works for the New Hampshire Postal Workers union. Last month, when it became the first union in the state to endorse Sanders, Kelble almost missed the announcement. “My husband has pretty advanced Parkinson’s disease,” she says, “and I didn’t think he could sit through the whole event. So I had to run home and then hurry back to Manchester. It’s kind of hard to juggle, but Bernie has been there for us, and I really wanted to be there for him.”
Obama Veterans Back Bernie:
If Sanders’s record-setting number of donors served as a wake-up call to establishment Democrats about the strength of the insurgent Sanders campaign, it was no surprise to those inside his operation.
Since May, a small guerilla-marketing team whose members have been part of some of the most successful insurgent campaigns in the Democratic Party have been working to translate grassroots enthusiasm for Sanders into dollars.
At its helm is Scott Goodstein, a former music marketer who made a living hyping bands like Korn prior to his political career. In 2007, after “drinking beers and talking” with Obama’s main digital strategist at the time, he and his friend, videographer Arun Chaudhary, were hired by the famously innovative campaign to help create a groundswell of support online and in local communities.
In 2009, after Obama’s election, Goodstein took everything he learned from the campaign and launched Revolution Messaging, bringing on a “lean-and-mean” group of digital marketing veterans to help. Tim Tagaris, who cut his teeth on Sen. Chris Murphy’s successful campaign against Republican Linda McMahon, and on Ned Lamont’s netroots-fueled fight against one-time Democratic vice presidential nominee and incumbent Sen. Joe Lieberman, came on as a partner. He hired Michael Whitney, who had worked for Howard Dean’s pioneering 2004 presidential campaign as well as the cause-and-petitions site Change.org. Chaudhary joined up after leaving the White House, where he had been Obama’s first videographer.
Since July, Revolution Messaging has been tasked with overseeing social media, online fundraising, web design and digital advertising for Sanders, sending a steady stream of text messages, emails and issue-based ads urging supporters to donate or volunteer. The team also nurtures and helps grow the communities on Sanders’s already popular Facebook and Reddit pages.
Bernies Case: I was Right First:
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' bid to topple Hillary Clinton's front-runner status is hitting the marks of a serious contender: He's closed the fundraising gap. He's competitive and in some cases leading in early state polls. He's still drawing crowds of thousands to campaign rallies.
And Tuesday night in Las Vegas, when Democrats meet at the CNN-hosted debate, he'll face his biggest test yet: going toe-to-toe with the former secretary of state.
But don't expect fireworks, Sanders said Wednesday -- it's not his style.
"You're looking at a candidate who has run in many, many elections, who has never run a negative political ad in my life and hopes never to have to run them," Sanders said when CNN asked about his debate tactics. "And you're looking at a candidate who does not go about attacking people personally. I just don't do that."
He said he'll make one big point: He's held liberal positions on economic issues and civil rights for decades.
Opening Up On His Jewish Childhood:
“Sanders did say that two aspects of his upbringing had exerted a lasting influence. One was coming from a family that never had much money. And the other was growing up Jewish — less for the religious content than for the sense it imbued in him that politics mattered. Sanders’ father was a Polish Jew who, at the age of 17, came to America shortly after his brother, and struggled through the Depression in Brooklyn …
“Sid Ganis, a Hollywood producer who grew up in the same building as Sanders, described their neighborhood as an enclave of ‘ordinary secular Jews,’ adding, ‘Some of us went to Hebrew school, but mainly it was an identity in that it got us out of school on Jewish holidays.’ Sanders told me that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, his family ‘got a call in the middle of the night about some relative of my father’s, who was in a displaced-persons camp in Europe someplace.’ Sanders learned that many of his father’s other relatives had perished. Sanders’ parents had been fundamentally apolitical, but he took away a lesson: ‘An election in 1932 ended up killing 50 million people around the world.’
“Sanders’ close friend Richard Sugarman, an Orthodox Jew who teaches religious studies at the University of Vermont, said, ‘He’s not what you would call rule-observant.’ But, Sugarman added, ‘if you talk about his Jewish identity, it’s strong. It’s certainly more ethnic and cultural than religious — except for his devotion to the ethical part of public life in Judaism, the moral part. He does have a prophetic sensibility.’ Sugarman and Sanders were housemates for a while in the ’70s, and Sugarman says that his friend would often greet him in the morning by saying, ‘We’re not crazy, you know,’ referring to the anger they felt about social injustices. Sugarman would respond, ‘Could you say good morning first?’”
Vermont Teachers Stick With Sanders:
Vermont’s teachers union plans to actively support Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, even though the national organization, the NEA, has endorsed Hillary Clinton.
An effort by the Vermont NEA to postpone the endorsement of Clinton by the national union — the largest in the nation — was not successful.
The Vermont NEA was an early supporter of Sanders’ presidential campaign. Less than a month after his official announcement, the group formally endorsed his candidacy.
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“I don’t see how my membership could abandon Bernie’s campaign and jump on Hillary’s at this point,” she said.
The national union will be able to contribute money to the Clinton campaign through its political action committee. That’s something that a state union is not allowed to do. Nonetheless, Allen is confident that many of Vermont NEA’s members will make — or have made — personal contributions to the Sanders campaign.
Student Support Explodes:
Not all college students are Ready for Hillary.
Some 164 “College Students for Bernie” groups have sprung up in recent months on college campuses nationwide, according a chapter roster maintained by The Action Network. Students say he offers a more authentic, honest choice compared to frontrunner Clinton
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Jordan Incorvaia, president of the Penn State chapter, told The College Fix Sanders says what he believes, and what he’s fighting for will help the nation.
Sanders is a self-described “democrat socialist,” and some of his most popular stances with college students include advocating for a free college education at public universities, demonizing the corporate world, and decrying income inequality and racial injustice.
“We support Bernie Sanders for president for two principal reasons: his policies, and his authenticity,” he said. “We find Bernie to be more in-tune with what the average American needs.”