Before nearly 3,000 people at the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena, Sanders started his hour-long speech arguing that he could still win the Democratic Party’s nomination because he is the strongest candidate to beat Donald Trump.
“We are all going to do everything we can to make certain that a Republican does not occupy the White House,” he said. “In order to do that, we need the strongest Democratic candidate possible. And you are looking at him. … We are the strongest candidate. If people are worried about that, as they should, we are going to work together to get the nomination.”
Washington will hold its Democratic caucus on Saturday, and Sanders made another swing through the state Thursday, starting at the Arena. Nearly 10,000 came to hear Sanders speak Sunday at the Convention Center, but only about 1,000 were allowed in the room for his rally due to fire code restrictions.
With the huge turnout Sunday and a lopsided victory in Tuesday’s Idaho caucuses - notably with 84 percent of the vote in Boundary County - Sanders clearly sees fertile political ground in the Inland Northwest.
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Besides Trump, he took on his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He noted that a Super PAC is working on Clinton’s behalf and vowed to never to allow a Super PAC to work on his. He also used an argument President Barack Obama used against Clinton for the Democratic nomination eight years ago.
“I voted against the war,” Sanders said referring to the Iraq War. “Secretary Clinton heard the same evidence. She voted for the war.”
Two days before Saturday’s state Democratic caucuses, thousands cheered presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at a Yakima rally, embracing his calls for immigration reform, Native American rights, entitlement programs and free college education.
“A country is judged not by how many millionaires and billionaires it has. It is judged by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us,” Sanders said to raucous applause during a 45-minute speech before thousands who filled the Yakima Valley SunDome.
“As people who were born in America, and people who immigrated, gay or straight, black or white, if we stand together there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” Sanders said.
SunDome officials deferred crowd estimates to the Sanders campaign, which placed attendance at slightly more than 7,000. They came from the Lower Valley, from the Tri-Cities, from Central and Eastern Oregon.
They wore their #FeelTheBern T-shirts and their Unidos Con Bernie stickers. They brought their friends, their parents, their children.
They stood for hours in a line that snaked in and around State Fair Park, waiting for a glimpse of history in the making as the first presidential candidate to visit in 17 years headed to Yakima.
“I always vote, but this is the first time I’ve ever been active,” said 47-year-old Thor Hanson, a cement mason and union finisher from the Tri-Cities. “I’m going to go to the caucus, all of that.”
In a new Bloomberg poll conducted by Selzer & Co., Bernie Sanders has a slight national edge over Hillary Clinton, earning 49 percent of support to Clinton's 48. This is only the second poll ever to show Sanders with a lead of any sort, and is at odds with other recent polls showing Clinton with a double-digit lead. But it's clear that it accurately reflects one facet of the Democratic race: Sanders and Clinton are in a tough, evenly fought contest and will likely continue to be.*
What's interesting about the new Selzer poll is why the race is so close. In theory, Clinton should have run away with it. This was the thinking a year ago today, when Clinton had a 54-point lead over Sanders. But over time that lead narrowed and narrowed and narrowed, leading us to this point. The reason? The economy.
Selzer asked Democrats who they thought would be better at handling a number of issues that will face the next president. Clinton came out on top on issues of foreign policy; Sanders on economic issues.
On the flip side, the pollsters also asked what bothered voters about each of the candidates. A sizable majority of Democrats aren't worried about the investigation into Clinton's private email server as secretary of state, but about half are bothered by her apparently flipping her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. And more than half are bothered by the money she took to give speeches to Wall Street.
For Sanders, there's not much worry about his identifying as a democratic socialist or his near-singular focus on the economy. But his lack of foreign policy know-how does give 6 in 10 Democrats pause.
A powerful West Coast union of dock and warehouse workers has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president, giving his campaign a boost heading into a series of primary contests there.
The International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union said its executive board voted on the endorsement Thursday. Its president, Robert McEllrath, said in a statement that Sanders is “best on the issues that matter most to American workers.” The union, known for its militant history, now represents roughly 50,000 workers in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii.
Alaska, Hawaii and Washington will all hold Democratic caucuses on Saturday, and it’s possible Sanders could sweep all three.
Craig Merrilees, an ILWU spokesman, told The Huffington Post that the rank-and-file backing for Sanders is clear.
“The support was significant at the grassroots level,” Merrilees said. “Many local bodies throughout the union had already recommended endorsements.”
The union plans to participate in an upcoming Sanders rally in Washington, Merrilees said.
Jon Healey (deputy editorial page editor): Can you talk about having been a senator through several presidencies? The last couple, George Bush and Barack Obama, have taken a certain amount of criticism for their use of executive power. Could you talk about your view of executive power, and how you see the limits or lack thereof on the office?
Sanders: I think what President Obama would tell you, and he’s a better lawyer than I am, is that using executive power is not the preferred approach. The preferred approach is legislation for all the reasons that you know. It’s more permanent. It cannot be changed by the next administration easily. But I think in terms of President Obama — and I am on the Senate floor, I’ve been there for as long as he has been president — what we have seen is an unprecedented level of obstructionism. I’m not telling you anything I think most of you don’t know.
Literally on the day Obama was sworn in, there was a meeting of Republicans who determined that their best course of action was to obstruct. And that’s what they did. Many people on the outside, you’ve gotta be in the Senate and on the floor to see what that means. It means that minor appointees — I’m not talking about Supreme Court justices, I’m talking about minor appointees — have had to get 60 votes. It was slow down, slow down, slow down. And the Senate was brought to almost a halt. And that was their plan. Their plan was to say to the American people, “See this guy Obama. He couldn’t do anything. Vote for us.”
I think the president finally caught on. I think that was unacceptable. And in immigration areas and in other areas, he used the powers that he had — and I strongly support that.
It’s not the best way. But I think it’s an appropriate response to that circumstance.
Bernie Sanders is often criticized for "pie-in-the-sky" proposals and impractical ideals, but his campaign argues the Vermont senator actually gets things done.
"Bernie Sanders passed more roll call amendments in a Republican Congress than any other member," according to a TV ad paid for by the Sanders campaign.
A version of this ad appears on Sanders’ YouTube channel, and Sanders has made this claim on Twitter and Facebook as well so we wondered if it was true.
The ‘amendment king’
Sanders served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 2006 and has been in the Senate since then. Republicans were in control of the House from 1995 to 2007 and of the Senate from 2015 to present.
In 2005, Rolling Stone named Sanders the "amendment king" of the House. At the time, the title held true with a specific qualification: amendments agreed to by record votes. (Amendments can also be passed with voice votes, in which the volume of yeas and nays dictates passage, or by unanimous consent, in which no one raises an objection.)
Out of 419 amendments Sanders sponsored over his 25 years in Congress, 90 passed, 21 of them by roll call votes. Here’s a breakdown (bold indicates Republican Congresses):
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign served the Democratic National Committee with a lawsuit on Thursday over the DNC’s decision to revoke the campaign’s access to party voter data. Sanders's campaign just made the deadline to file the suit — it reportedly had until Thursday to serve the DNC. If it hadn't done so in time, the case could have been dropped.
The Sanders campaign first filed the suit back in December when the DNC barred it from accessing its database of likely Democratic voters, which is shared among all Democratic campaigns, after a Sanders staffer viewed confidential voter information assembled by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The committee soon restored the Sanders campaign’s access, but the campaign refused to drop its lawsuit and still seeks an independent audit of the DNC’s data practices and their vendor, NGP VAN. The Sanders campaign maintains that its former data director, Josh Uretsky, who was immediately fired after the incident came to light, had only searched and downloaded Clinton data to understand the extent of a data security breach before reporting it, but the Clinton campaign believes the violation was deliberate.
However, it seems unlikely that the suit will proceed to trial. Thursday’s court filing says the Sanders campaign and the DNC "continue to engage in cooperative discussions in their efforts to resolve the pending litigation," and a source close to the Sanders campaign said they believed the issue would be "resolved amicably."
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she voted in the Massachusetts presidential primary on March 1.
"Ok, can you share with us who you voted for?" a reporter asked on Thursday, after the Cambridge Democrat toured a community health center here.
"No," Warren replied.
But asked whether Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist running in the Democratic primary, should consider dropping out of the race or stay in until June, Warren said she was "still cheering" for him.
Sanders has repeatedly sought to pull former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, closer to the left wing of the party.
"He's out there, he fights from the heart," Warren said. "This is who Bernie is. And he has put the right issues on the table."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) insisted he’ll stay in the presidential race, but outlined conditions under which he would endorse Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton “if I can’t make it.”
Sanders, who badly trails Clinton in delegates for the Democratic nomination, said Wednesday that his chief priorities include making sure the party embraces his anti-establishment platform and expands its base.
“If I can’t make it — and we’re going to try as hard as we can until the last vote is cast — we want to completely revitalize the Democratic Party and make it a party of the people rather than one of large campaign contributors,” Sanders said in an interview on the progressive Web show “The Young Turks.”
Sanders also listed policy demands he would make of Clinton, including a single-payer health care system, a $15 an hour minimum wage, tougher regulation of the finance industry, closing corporate tax loopholes and “a vigorous effort to address climate change.”
“I am very worried. I mean, I talk to these scientists. This planet is in serious danger. You can’t cuddle up to the fossil fuel industry — you’ve got to take them on,” Sanders said, alluding to Clinton’s ties to oil and gas companies.
Beckman has released a similar analysis of the Democratic candidates' language patterns. So which words and phrases do Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton use most often?
For Sanders, "health care to all" and the "corrupt campaign finance system" rank high on the list. Sanders also frequently states that the United States has "more people in jail than any other country" and "the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," Beckman found.
Clinton, meanwhile, often pledges "to go after" and "to do more." You've probably heard her talk about comprehensive immigration reform with a "path to citizenship."
Beckman used data from the eight Democratic primary dates that have taken place so far to come up with this chart:
He sums up the findings pretty well: "Read from top to bottom, the former secretary of state's talking points resemble a cover letter put through a blender; the Vermont senator's list reads like a socialist stream of consciousness of American problems with Scandinavian solutions," Beckman writes.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who trails Hillary Clinton by a wide margin in the delegate hunt, picked up an additional superdelegate Thursday.
In the wake of the Vermont senator's landslide victory Tuesday in Idaho, Democratic National Committeeman Pete Gertonson announced in an email that he would be supporting Sanders.
"Pent-up frustrations of a red state, exploded Idaho Caucuses to historic numbers last Tuesday night, with 78% for Bernie Sanders! I'm proud to be an Idaho Democrat representing the people's choice," Gertonson wrote. "I'll cast our Super Delegate vote for Bernie Sanders!"
Gertonson's support is a small but important bit of good news for Sanders, who has lagged far behind Clinton in amassing superdelegates and has argued that unelected superdelegates should follow their states' popular vote.
The Brooklyn-raised, motorcycle-loving wife of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will make a campaign swing in Alaska this week, just in time for Saturday’s Democratic caucuses.
Jane Sanders will arrive in Alaska Thursday and meet with reporters in Anchorage that afternoon. She will spend much of Friday in Dillingham, one of the spots that anchored President Obama’s Alaska trip last year. On Saturday in Anchorage, she'll have coffee at the Bear Tooth Theatrepub at 8 a.m., an event open to the public. Then there'll be a march before the caucuses, which start at 10 a.m.
In Dillingham, the whole community is invited to a lunch and town hall Friday from noon to 2 p.m. at the Dillingham Middle School gym, according to Alannah Hurley, executive director of United Tribes of Bristol Bay. Sanders is scheduled to talk about the campaign and answer questions. Then, from 3 to 4:30 p.m., a second event will be held for Alaska Native women at the Dillingham women’s shelter, known as SAFE, for Safe and Fear-Free Environment. That event is framed around a variety of issues including child care, health care and education. But it also will be a listening session for problems rampant in rural Alaska such as domestic violence and sexual assault, and won’t be open to the press, according to Jill Yordy, who is managing the Sanders campaign in Alaska.
Sanders will also meet with Bristol Bay tribes, who plan to talk about protecting salmon-rich Bristol Bay from threats including the proposed Pebble mine, Hurley said. The tribes hope the Sanders campaign will take a stand on Pebble as a result of the visit, she said.
“It’s very exciting that one of the candidates is paying attention to Alaska Native issues, paying attention to tribal issues,” Hurley said. “It means a lot to us in Bristol Bay.”