He's down but not out, and his supporters are charged up.
The math isn't on U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' side when it comes to securing the Democratic nomination, but thousands of eager supporters welcomed the underdog White House hopeful to New Jersey on Sunday and enthusiastically cheered on to "fight back and make a political revolution."
The cheers that filled the room and echoed off the walls of Rutgers University's Louis Brown Athletic Center in Piscataway turned into roars of support when Sanders preached fighting income inequality, the war or drugs and racial discrimination.
"We have come a very long way in the past year," Sanders said. "Real change is coming to America."
New Jersey, usually an afterthought in most modern presidential election cycles, was host to a political rally unlike anything most voters have seen here in recent memory. Thousands nearly filled the arena that can seat 8,000 people to support Sanders in his primary battle against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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The lawmaker argued he would be the best candidate to block Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, from ever occupying the White House.
"I am happy to tell you that Donald Trump will not become president of the United States ... (because) we will beat him by double digits," Sanders said.
"Trump will not be elected president because the American people understand that we're stronger when we come together than when we are divided up," he said. "At the end of the day, love trumps hatred."
Bennett Weiss, of Newburgh, N.Y., was doing a brisk business in buttons. His biggest seller: Sanders getting arrested in 1963 during a fair-housing protest.
"I was arrested in 1974 for a less noble cause," Weiss said, "but nobody wants a button of that. I had half an ounce. I'm still ticked off about that."
Weiss told his customers to wear their Bernie buttons beyond the rally.
"Wear it to the supermarket. Wear it in the shower. You got a crazy Uncle Lou supporting Trump? Wear it to his home."
Rob Bayait of Somerville, N.J., held a handmade safety-yellow poster that read, "The establishment never moves unless they are pushed by the people!"
"That's a Pete Seeger quote," Bayait said, smiling at the memory of the iconic folk-singing social activist. "If Pete were alive today, I know he'd be here."
Bayait said he came to the Sanders rally with his wife, Claudia, and daughter Sara, a Rutgers freshman. "Campaign-finance reform, getting the big money out of politics, is a big Bernie issue," he said. "Until that's done, nothing else gets done. I don't think anyone except Bernie is taking that seriously."
Bayait also said Sanders is "the only candidate talking about students saddled with college debt beyond belief."
One poll had him trailing by 28 percentage points with just over a month to go until the primary. And every Democratic county organization in the state is backing his opponent.
Yet Sen. Bernie Sanders is not conceding that New Jersey is Hillary Clinton territory, and there’s a few reasons why. He’s seen polls be wrong — really wrong – before. Even if Sanders does not win the Garden State, he is still likely to win delegates as he carries his fight to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
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A Monmouth University poll released last week showed Clinton led Sanders 60 percent to 32 percent among likely Democratic voters in the state, but Assemblyman John Wisniewski, Sanders’ New Jersey chairman, said that’s no reason to quit.
“If the election was decided by the Monmouth Poll, maybe you’d have a point,” Wisniewski said. “It’s just a snapshot, one poll, using one methodology. An earlier poll using a different methodology, the Eagleton poll, had him within 9 points. So you had two polls, and two different results.”
Robert Dempsey, who took over last week as Sanders’ state director, said Sanders has already proved polls wrong in several states.
“There was a Jan. 24 poll in Minnesota that had us down, I believe, down 34 points,” Dempsey said. Sanders won that caucus, on March 1, 62 percent to 38 percent, according to The New York Times.
The trip to the Atlantic City was booked primarily because Sanders wanted to speak to an audience in South Jersey, Dempsey said. He would not predict whether the senator would talk about the city’s looming bankruptcy, but Dempsey did say the city’s economic woes are the kinds of issues Sanders is trying to address in his national campaign.
A dozen or so Bernie Sanders supporters gathered in front of the Ocean City Music Pier Saturday morning to rally and canvass for the candidate ahead of his Monday appearance in Atlantic City.
It’s unlikely that the U.S. Senator will win the race against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. “It’s probably very hard right now,” allowed Jarrett Wright, 27, of Upper Township, who arranged Saturday's mini-rally – a grassroots effort not officially backed by the Sanders campaign.
But "the more delegates he has at the convention, the more push he’ll have at the convention to push his policies,” said Wright, who works at a hardware store.
Many of those policies revolve around Sanders’ belief that the U.S. government is unduly favorable to corporations, who, he says, aren’t sharing enough profit with workers.
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Atlantic City is ripe campaigning ground for Sanders, who pitches himself as the candidate most qualified to hold Wall Street accountable for what he describes as corporate excess. That platform jibes well with an increasingly loud rallying cry of the city's casino-workers union, which endorsed Sanders in April.
UNITE-HERE Local 54 on Tuesday started negotiating a new labor contract with Tropicana Atlantic City, and is expected to begin negotiations with other casino-employers soon. On Friday the union issued a report titled “Atlantic City Casinos Rebound While Workers Struggle.”
So far this year, Lenski's organization has conducted exit polls in 26 states, covering 34,866 voters in 24 primaries and two of the caucuses.
Among the findings:
- While Clinton is the clear favorite of minority voters overall, younger black and Hispanic voters, like whites, prefer Sanders in the Democratic exit polls. Clinton is leading Sanders with blacks 77 percent to 21 percent overall, but among blacks ages 17 to 24, Sanders leads her, 57 percent to 42 percent. Clinton leads Sanders with Hispanics overall, 62 percent to 38 percent overall. But Hispanics ages 17-24 go for Sanders 75 percent to 24 percent, and Hispanics ages 25-29 prefer Sanders over Clinton, 56 percent to 44 percent.
- About 15 percent of Sanders supporters expect to feel "scared" if Clinton wins the nomination according to the combined findings of Edison's findings in Democratic exit polls in three states, Wisconsin, New York, and Indiana, where voters were asked whether they'd be excited, optimistic, concerned or scared if either Clinton or Sanders is the nominee. If those numbers extend nationally, it is this bloc of Sanders voters that may be the most resistant to voting for Clinton. It's less clear how many of them would consider voting for a Republican alternative. Overall, the three-state findings show 48 percent of Democratic contest voters would feel optimistic about a Clinton win, while 19 percent said excited, 24 percent concerned and 8 percent scared. "There's grudging acceptance of Clinton among the Sanders voters instead of them being concerned," Lenski said. "There's not a lot of negative. It's more like 'Eh, ok, we can live with it.'"
- Asked what candidate qualities matter most, 46 percent of Sanders' backers said honest and trustworthy and 37 percent said caring about people like themselves, while 9% said experience and 6% said someone who can win in November.
- Ideology isn't as decisive as age or race. In the Democratic exit polls, those calling themselves very liberal chose Sanders over Clinton just 50 percent to 49 percent, while Clinton bested him with somewhat liberal and moderate categorizations. "It's really age and race that drives most of this," Lenski said.
- Sanders backers and Trump fans don't usually have much in common. The one overlap, Lenski said, is "that they feel the system is kind of rigged against them" with concerns about global trade and Wall Street. Trump's supporter profile tends tends to be white but lesser educated, more male, angry with government.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is applauding Maine Democrats who adopted a resolution at their party convention to ensure state delegations to the party’s national convention reflect the outcome of the popular vote.
“Maine is trying to make the Democratic Party more democratic,” Sanders said in a statement Sunday to WMTW News 8. “I hope other states follow Maine’s example. This is the kind of grassroots democracy that will help the Democratic Party grow and win elections.”
Sanders won the Maine Democratic causes in March with 64 percent of the vote.
Party leaders found that Sanders had won 17 unpledged delegates Saturday – not the 16 that many had predicted. Hillary Clinton's unpledged delegate count went from nine to eight.
Clinton leads the race for delegates nationally and with superdelegates.
“Superdelegates in states where either candidate has won landslide victories ought to reflect the decision of the people in their states,” Sanders said in a statement.
A year ago, when Bernie Sanders announced his run for president, few thought his bid would amount to more than a protest campaign. But today, after more than 2 million donors and 400,000 volunteers have helped Sanders build a highly effective political organization that has earned him victories in 18 states so far, activists are strategizing about how to turn his campaign into a long-term movement.
In nearly every state in the nation, autonomous grassroots organizations began campaigning for Sanders months before his campaign established any official presence on the ground. Ranging from state-level organizations such as Illinois for Bernie and Team Bernie NY to city and even neighborhood groups, they brought together thousands of volunteers—many of whom had never participated in electoral politics—to work together toward a common goal.
Now, those organizations are beginning to build coalitions with labor, socialist parties and progressive groups to set a post-election agenda for the political revolution. To that end, National Nurses United, which endorsed Sanders, is organizing a People’s Summit on June 17 in Chicago, while the People’s Revolution, a group founded by former Occupy organizers, is hosting a People’s Convention in Philadelphia two days before the Democratic National Convention in July. As with any project to unite the Left, however, these efforts must first grapple with long-standing divides around tactics and priorities.
“The advantage of a presidential campaign is that it unifies competing interests around a common goal,” says Charles Lenchner, cofounder with Winnie Wong of People for Bernie, one of the largest pro-Sanders grassroots organizations and a partner in the People’s Summit. “Without a candidate to rally around, the contradictions become more visible.”
One of the biggest open questions is what role Sanders and his campaign infrastructure will play. On a number of occasions, Sanders has expressed his desire to continue fighting for political revolution, win or lose. Larry Cohen, former CWA president and senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, says that Sanders will continue to be a “transformational force” in American politics well beyond the election. The Sanders campaign recently began fundraising for three progressive insurgents who are challenging Democratic incumbents: Zephyr Teachout in New York, Lucy Flores in Nevada and Pramila Jayapal in Washington. The campaign also plans to support other down-ballot candidates, according to Cohen.
Cohen thinks that Sanders will also support grassroots efforts to further his political revolution. “His own support for it won’t be centralized, but more of a facilitating role within that network,” says Cohen. “That is a characteristic of how this campaign has operated from the start, and that’s not an accident.”
Bernie Sanders wants everyone to be offered a tuition-free college education and he’s called crazy. America can’t afford it, naysayers scoff. He’s just pandering to young voters.
But too many of us in California forget: This state did provide tuition-free college for generations.
That helped California achieve greatness by broadening the middle class and providing opportunities for upward mobility not available in other states.
It was an economic engine. In return for investing in higher education, California gained a widening pool of professionals, entrepreneurs and innovators who repaid the state many times over with tax payments, consumer buying and product creation. It set California apart.
So Sanders’ idea is not loony.
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Paul Mitchell, who crunches voter stats for Political Data Inc., says: “When I grew up in the ‘80s, I didn’t want nuclear war. That forged my political view.
“Kids these days, their dominant political struggle is that their parents may lose their jobs, their house. Millennials go to sleep at night worried about not finding work or being laid off. They’re ticked about economic insecurity.”
That brings us back to free college. It’s no wonder the 74-year-old Sanders’ brand of socialism appeals strongly to young voters.
“It is insane and counter-productive … that hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college,” Sanders says. “Making college debt free is not a radical idea.”
The Bernie Sanders campaign is stepping up its efforts to win over Latino voters in Los Angeles as the California primary nears.
On Saturday night, actors Rosario Dawson and Luis Guzmán hosted a pro-Sanders panel discussion called “The New American Majority: A Conversation on Latinos, Social Change and the 2016 Election.” Held at the historic Pico House near Olvera Street, the event drew about 150 people, mostly Latinos in their 20s and 30s.
“This is not a roomful of Mexicans. This is a roomful of Latinos,” said Puerto Rico native Guzmán to a round of applause.
Sticking to the Bernie or bust script, Dawson urged the crowd to be united behind Sanders because he is the only choice when it comes to issues important to Latinos, she said.
“There’s one candidate who’s working with them and one candidate who’s promoting them,” she said.
Along with Dawson and Guzmán, the conversation featured Erika Andiola, Sanders’ national press secretary, and environmental activist Bill Gallegos.
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Heily Acicon, a 23-year-old student at Los Angeles City College, said she likes where Sanders stands on several issues.
“I think it’s the ideology that he’s bringing to this generation,” she explained. “Immigration reform is very personal to me and my family.”
In the histories still to be written about the long, hard fight for federal cannabis reform, scholars will delineate between the only two epochs which really mattered: Before Bernie, and After Bernie.
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Until recently, elected officials have lagged far behind the will of the voters who enfranchise them. With one noteworthy exception, all of the states to pass medical marijuana reform in the first 10 years did so through the direct votes of residents on ballot initiatives. The exception was Hawaii, which in 2000 took the extraordinary step of passing a system to regulate medical marijuana through the state legislature, thus becoming the first state to provide a model for other state legislatures to follow. And eventually, follow they did; since 2010, 15 states have passed medical marijuana regulations through their legislative process. Hawaii’s example proved crucial, because otherwise the march of marijuana reform might have lost a lot of steam. It’s no accident that all of the earliest legalizing states have been in the western half of the country – states like Colorado, Washington and Oregon were chartered later in U.S. history and thus had the benefit of newer innovations in democratic process, like the ballot initiative (and, not coincidentally, women’s suffrage).
Among states east of the Mississippi, the options for direct citizen democracy are more limited, which is why a working model for legislative action has been so important. Without it, the prospects of getting reform in a state like, say, North Carolina – which has no citizen initiative process –would be minimal. Governor Pat McCrory signed Alabama’s medical marijuana bill into law in 2014. With adult use legalization passing in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Washington D.C. through citizen vote (and with eight more states likely voting on the question this fall), there is no question that these are historic times for cannabis reform. But, without an innovative state legislature willing to play the same role for adult use reform as the Hawaii legislature played for medical reform, the road to legalization could get lost in the mud. Twenty-six states allow for citizen ballot initiatives to go forward without legislative approval, and 23 states have passed medical marijuana reform; this means that sooner or later, a serious debate over the adult use of cannabis needs to migrate from the privacy of one’s home to the House of Representatives. That’s why a recent state Senate vote to legalize the adult consumption and cultivation of marijuana is so crucial, why it holds out hope to start a wave of new legalizations in the Northeast, in the Rust Belt, in the South. The bill passed the Senate by a handy margin and has the public support of the governor – of Vermont, Bernie’s home state.
The next president has yet to be chosen, but on the issue of legalization, Bernie stands out as the closest thing to a win we the people have got. For decades, Bernie has stacked up the kind of cred only obtained through experience taking principled stands for righteous causes, and that’s why, when he took action on cannabis legalization, it was just another example of Bernie Sanders changing the game. He has consistently shown real leadership – the kind of record few Americans can claim today. But on this issue, no leadership is really needed from our elected officials; the people have spoken, time and again. All that is needed is for officials to follow. So thank you, Bernie, for showing all the rest how it’s done. As for everyone else – we’re waiting.
Bernie Sanders will host rallies in Missoula and Billings on Wednesday.
The Democratic Party presidential candidate and U.S. senator from Vermont will discuss "a wide range of issues, including getting big money out of politics, his plan to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, combating climate change and ensuring universal health care," according to a campaign announcement.
The rallies, called "A Future to Believe In," are free and open to the public, but RSVPs are strongly encouraged, and admission is first come, first served. Due to limited parking, carpooling is encouraged; the Missoula pavilion is also accessible by bike or on foot.
The Missoula rally will open at 10 a.m. in the Caras Park Pavilion in downtown Missoula. The public entrance will be located on the north side of the pavilion.
Join Bernie Sanders for a rally in Sacramento, California.
This event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Admission is first come, first served. Crowd entrance can be found at the admission gate.
For security reasons, please do not bring bags and limit what you bring to small, personal items like keys and cell phones. No outside food or beverages are allowed in the facility through the security checkpoints. Weapons, sharp objects, chairs, and signs or banners will not be allowed through security. Paid parking is available on-site via main gate located on Exposition Boulevard and Heritage Way. Parking is $10 per vehicle and $5 per motorcycle.Public transit can be found via Franklin (67) and 44th Street (68) buses. Use stop #1086, Heritage Ln & Exposition Bl.
Doors Open: 5:00 p.m.
Date: Monday, May 9, 2016
Bonney Field at Cal Expo (Sacramento, CA)
1600 Exposition Blvd
Sacramento, CA 95815