Fresh off three decisive caucus victories, campaign officials for Sen. Bernie Sanders said Monday he has the momentum to top Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates by June and can win over enough unpledged "superdelegates" to claim the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” said Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager. “We are on a path to victory.”
Clinton still enjoys a nearly insurmountable lead in delegates, but Sanders is pushing back against the notion that she has the nomination virtually locked up.
His campaign on Monday cast Clinton as a “weakened frontrunner” struggling to inspire young voters and draw interest from independents, who could play a crucial role in the general election. Sanders' campaign officials highlighted polls showing he outperforms Clinton in general election matchups against Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.
“This isn’t a blip in the data,” Sanders’ pollster Ben Tulchin said during a conference call with reporters. “This is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that Bernie is a stronger general election candidate than Hillary Clinton and these are things that Democratic voters in the states ahead and superdelegates, quite frankly, have to consider very seriously.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Monday sought to take some wind out of Bernie Sanders’ sails, hitting the airwaves and holding a conference call to emphasize that the former secretary of state is “dominating” the race for the Democratic nomination.
Sanders got a boost last week after scoring five blowouts, and has since tried to show that he’s still very much a contender. He’s emphasized that superdelegates could reconsider their support of Clinton and has tried to pressure her into a debate ahead of the New York primary on April 19.
Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Sanders, held his own call with reporters on Monday where he predicted a rosy path forward and called Clinton a "weak front-runner."
But the Clinton campaign quickly sought to shut down that talk.
Chief strategist Joel Benenson held a conference call shortly after Devine finished, where he projected that Clinton was "dominating" the primary and predicted she would continue right into the nomination.
"At the end of April there just isn’t enough real estate for him" to close Clinton's lead, Benenson said. April will "make clear who the nominee will be and that it’s gonna be Hillary Clinton."
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"I think what’s important to remember here is that superdelegates are kind of like football recruits," Sanders spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in an interview with CNN's "New Day” on Monday. "You know, they say they are coming but until they have signed on the dotted line and they’re in practice, you don’t know that they’re all the way with you and that they’re on your team. And so we think that we still have time to garner support from these superdelegates, especially when we’re winning.
Bernie Sanders, despite facing persistently long odds to overtake Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary delegate battle, quickly is moving to build on his momentum from a weekend caucus sweep -- looking to take the fight to the front-runner in New York, Wisconsin and beyond.
The next contest up is the April 5 Wisconsin primary, where Sanders will be hoping for another Michigan-style upset, despite a disappointing finish in other recent Midwestern primaries.
Sanders plans to kick off a two-day swing through the state on Tuesday; Clinton was campaigning there Monday, after holding a Chicago fundraiser.
But the much bigger prize is New York, which votes April 19.
“We are making a big commitment to New York state,” Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said on a conference call Monday, noting the Vermont senator was born there -- though Clinton represented the delegate-rich state in the Senate
Meanwhile, Weaver claimed grassroots fundraising has collected another $4 million since Saturday’s caucus victories which he said would “give us the resources to compete in Wisconsin.”
Hillary Clinton's top strategist said Monday her campaign isn't willing to entertain a new debate in New York next month -- yet.
Joel Benenson repeatedly dodged questions from CNN's Kate Bolduan on "At This Hour" regarding Bernie Sanders' call for scheduling a debate just ahead of the New York primary April 19th and he tried to turn the pressure back on Sanders.
"She's done well in the debates. The debates have been very good," Benenson said. "But Sen. Sanders doesn't get to decide when we debate, particularly when he's running a negative campaign against us. Let's see if he goes back to the kind of tone he said he was going to set early on. If he does that, then we'll talk about debates."
Sanders proudly speaks of never running a negative campaign ad in his political career, and his campaign has not run any advertising directly attacking Clinton.
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Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver told reporters Monday he believes the Clinton campaign will come around.
"The Clinton people have had previously said they would absolutely not debate in New York, our view is it will be extremely difficult for them to maintain that position as we get closer to the New York primary," Weaver said. "I think it's not going to be acceptable to voters in New York state. Voters there have a right to expect more and I think they will.”
Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.), one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress, says he’ll cast his vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president if he attends the Democratic National Convention in July.
Peterson told Forum News Service on Saturday that his vote at the convention would reflect the will of his constituents, who overwhelmingly supported Sanders in the state’s March 1 Democratic caucuses. Sanders won Peterson’s district with 63 percent of the vote, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 37 percent.
“I’m voting my district,” he said. “I’m going to vote for Bernie.”
While it’s understandable that a congressman would vote for the candidate backed by his constituents, it’s a stunning state of affairs for the Democratic Party that Peterson is aligning with Sanders, the socialist from Vermont who supports same-sex marriage, abortion rights and gun control.
Peterson is a co-founder of the Blue Dog Coalition, the caucus of moderate House Democrats, and is known for his conservatism.
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“If my vote makes a difference, I’ll probably go,” Peterson told Forum News Service. “He’s got something going. He’s tapped into something.”
Bernie Sanders has picked up another superdelegate in the wake of his landslide victory over Hillary Clinton in the Alaska Democratic caucuses Saturday.
Alaska Democratic Party vice chairman Larry Murakami, who had previously donated to Sanders but formally had been uncommitted, decided to back Sanders after the Vermont senator defeated Clinton 82 percent to 18 percent in the state on Saturday.
"Yes," Murakami told POLITICO, when asked Monday if he was throwing his support toward Sanders as a superdelegate. "I only became the vice chair of the Alaska Democratic Party in January. So I decided to be uncommitted and to encourage the dialog and get people talking."
That changed after Alaska went big for Sanders.
"I'm going with Alaska," Murakami said. "I don't know that any other of the Alaska delegates have committed to one candidate or another, but I think it's totally appropriate if we're over 80 percent for one of us to step forward and say, "yeah, I'm voting for Sanders like everyone in my district, like most of the people in my district and most of the people in Alaska."
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Sanders also picked up two uncommitted super delegates after winning a spate of contests on Tuesday. In Idaho, Democratic Party chairman Bert Marley, previously an uncommitted super delegate, said he would support the Vermont senator.
Meanwhile, Utah Democratic Party chairman Peter Corroon, another superdelegate who said he would support whoever won his state's caucuses, is backing Sanders. Sanders won Utah 79.3 percent to Clinton with 20.3 percent.
On Sunday, after Bernie Sanders' commanding wins in the Alaska, Hawaii and Washington state Democratic presidential caucuses, Leslie Lee III, an American freelance writer living in Japan, tweeted, "I knew it. I knew if Bernie won Hawaii it would magically become a white state."
And then he tweeted again: "Ever since I voted for Bernie, I've been bingewatching Friends. #BernieMadeMeWhite."
Lee said he wrote that to contradict a narrative he sees playing out in the race for the Democratic nomination.
"There's always been these articles about how Bernie supporters are basically only white people," Lee told NPR.
He continued, "Me, myself, and many other POC, people of color, who support Bernie Sanders, feel like we don't get to be a part of the conversation. We get ignored. We get erased. It's assumed that the black vote, the Hispanic vote, and everyone is all behind Hillary Clinton and none of us really get Bernie Sanders or like Bernie Sanders."
So he decided to have fun with it. "Hey, if you're gonna ignore me as a black person, I might as well embrace my whiteness," Lee said. "I might as well start watching Friends, or enjoying pumpkin spice latte, or whatever. I just wanted to have a bit of fun with it while highlighting the serious issue."
In what may be the most striking campaign commercial of the presidential race, the Sanders campaign released an ad, entitled “The Cost of War” and featuring Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who endorsed Sanders not just as her preference for President but as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military.
“Bernie Sanders voted against the Iraq War,” Gabbard says. “He understands the cost of war, that that cost is continued when our veterans come home. Bernie Sanders will defend our country and take the trillions of dollars that are spent on these interventionist, regime change, unnecessary wars and invest it here at home.”
Gabbard also counters another strong point of the Clinton campaign, its contention that Clinton’s plans for incremental change are more realistic than Sanders’s calls for sweeping reforms – or a “political revolution” – to reverse the nation’s steady drift toward a country of lavishly rewarded haves and increasingly desperate have-nots.
The phrase “Commander-in-Chief” is one that Sanders has largely sidestepped in the early phases of the Democratic presidential race, conceding Clinton’s superior qualifications on foreign policy though questioning her judgment when she voted for the Iraq War in 2002. Yet, what the Gabbard ad seems to recognize is that Sanders’s campaign could rally a substantial part of the Democratic “base” and win over many “regular” Democrats by challenging Clinton on her hawkish proclivity for “regime change” wars. ..
Sanders’s hesitation to challenge Clinton on her perceived foreign-policy “strength” ignores a key football lesson often attributed to New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who reversed a longstanding belief that teams should look for their opponents’ weaknesses. Belichick instead focused on taking away his opponents’ strengths and making them play to their weaknesses.
With the help of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Sanders appears to have finally grasped that lesson. With Gabbard praising Sanders as her choice for “Commander-in-Chief,” she implicitly seeks to neutralize Clinton’s supposed strong suit – her foreign-policy experience – and transform it into a weakness.
Fewer than a million Arizona residents turned out to vote in the primary, and just over 400,000 Democrats. However, there are over 3 million Arizonans registered. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders stressed that this is a much lower voter turnout than expected, and that fixing the issues behind it would be detrimental for upcoming primaries.
Today, protesters at the House Election Committee demanded the reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a complete count of provisional ballots, and a public random recount of unsorted mail ballots (of five precincts in both Pima and Maricopa county).
“In Arizona, 50.5% of all voters under the age of 30 are registered independent. Thousands of independents turned out and waited in line for hours, only to be told they did not have the right to vote,” stated Amanda Melcher, outreach coordinator for Independent Voters for Arizona.
For some Arizonans, however, memories of voter suppression stretched back decades.
“I stand outraged because what I witnessed on Tuesday took me back to the 1950s when voter suppression was at an all-time high," said Reverend Reginald Walton, a pastor at the Phillips Memorial CME Church in Phoenix. "It reminded me of the stories my grandmother would tell about living in Texas when her she wanted to exercise her rights as a young black woman in the United States of America and those rights were taken away from her.”
Arizona was one of three states that voted on Western Tuesday last week and was particularly problematic for voters, some of whom didn't even get to cast a ballot before the race was called. Bernie Sanders called the reported wait times for voters in Arizona "a disgrace" and held a press conference to respond to voters' anger with the process.
The ruling class of this country not only controls our political and economic systems, but also the mainstream media and in effect, the news that we consume.
Did you know that The Walt Disney Company owns ABC?
How about Time Warner? Did you know it owns CNN and Time Magazine?
Did you know that News Corp owns Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post? Did you know Comcast and GE own MSNBC, NBC News and CNBC?
What about this news source, here? Did you know Verizon, which now owns AOL, owns The Huffington Post? Did you know most people don’t know any of this?
As Bernie Sanders said in an interview on The Young Turks, “The media is an arm of the ruling class of this country.” We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves.
Sanders continued, “I think what you have is a corporate media, which by definition has conflicts of interest.” He went on to explain that companies like Disney pay their workers in Disney World $8 or $9 an hour. The terrifying reality is that these same companies own ABC and other major news outlets. No wonder you don’t see ABC or MSNBC running specials on the minimum wage or wealth and income inequality.
If the mainstream media began covering our nation’s asymmetrical distribution of wealth, if our electorate became more informed about the disintegration of the middleclass, maybe, just maybe, people would rise up and demand real change. That’s a notion that absolutely horrifies the executives of Comcast and Disney.
In 2008, Sarah Silverman promoted “The Great Schlep,” a campaign to get young Jews to travel down to Florida and convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama. Four years later, she made a seriously indecent proposal to Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson in an attempt to pry away his $100 million donation to Mitt Romney’s Super PAC.
Now it’s 2016, and Silverman is all about the man who has a long-shot chance of becoming America’s first Jewish president: Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In a new YouTube video, Silverman insists that she is not trying to convince anyone to vote. “If you vote or not, that’s not my business, I’m not your mommy,” she said
Instead, she directs her message at those who are already likely to vote in the presidential election. The New Hampshire native explains that as a feminist, she had always been a Hillary Clinton supporter—“Democratic woman president? Yes, please!”—but her neighboring senator from Vermont has helped change her mind.
Silverman says she always viewed Clinton’s decision to take donations from big-money interests as a “necessary evil” in the era of Citizens United. But now that Sanders has shown you can run a remarkably successful campaign on small donations alone, she has seen the light. “I’m not against Hillary,” she says, delivering a heavy sigh. “I’ve just met someone I have more in common with.”
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She goes on to describe Sanders’s campaign as a “giant fuck you to the above-the-law billionaire class” and tries to remove the scare quotes from the label “socialist.”
“He’s a Democrat,” Silverman says. “He just believes that people who don’t have the same advantages as you and me should be given the same advantages as you and me.” Under a President Sanders, she assures people they can still become “rich assholes, it’s just that your fellow hard-working citizens don’t have to feed their children cat food in order for you to do it.”