In a show of continued enthusiasm on the ground, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders on Sunday drew more than 30,000 people to three rallies around Washington, a state key to his strategy for an improbable comeback against Hillary Clinton.
The senator from Vermont took the stage here 40 minutes late for his final event of the day, delayed by impromptu appearances before three separate overflow audiences that couldn’t fit into the room his campaign reserved at the convention center.
The scene was similar at earlier stops Sunday in Vancouver and in Seattle. In Seattle, Sanders addressed a crowd estimated at 5,500 people outside of an arena where he spoke to a crowd of more than 10,000 people inside the arena, offering his prescriptions to rebuild the middle class.
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“Please come out Saturday morning,” Sanders implored one of his audiences here, referencing the start time of the Washington caucuses. “Bring your friends, your neighbors, your uncles, your aunts.”
There was no shortage of enthusiasm Sunday as Sanders zipped around the state on his chartered jet, addressing the series of boisterous rallies and overflow audiences. In Vancouver, several people who waited outside in the drizzle held a sign reading “Jesus Would Vote for Bernie,” offering one of the more colorful expressions of support Sanders saw.
The crowd at Key Arena in Seattle was so large that it became impossible for the Secret Service to provide security checks in time for the venue to fill.
Even after the program was delayed by more than half an hour, about half of the upper deck remained unfilled. Yet an estimated 5,500 people waited outside to hear a separate address by Sanders, and another 1,500 left before he spoke, according to estimates by an official with the venue.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders brought his message of a “political revolution” to a boisterous rally at Seattle’s KeyArena on Sunday, avoiding mention of Hillary Clinton — his rival in this week’s Democratic caucuses — while trashing Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
Taking the stage at 5:40 p.m. to deafening cheers, Sanders immediately launched into an attack on Trump, saying the U.S. will never elect someone “who insults Mexicans, who insults women, who insults African Americans.”
“If we stand together and we don’t allow the Trumps of the world to divide us up, there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” Sanders said. “This campaign has enthusiasm and the energy to carry us to victory, because we are doing something very unusual in American politics: We are telling the truth.”
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His audience included many millennials, who have flocked to the Sanders movement and voted for him in big numbers over Clinton.
“He says a lot of stuff that needs to be said that no one else is actually saying,” said Fiona Nightingale, 25, citing Sanders’ denunciations of income inequality.
In his hourlong stump speech, Sanders railed against the political establishment, calling the U.S. political system rigged by corporate interests against the common people. He vowed to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which has unleashed new gushes of money into elections from donors like the billionaire Koch brothers.
“That is not democracy, that is oligarchy. We do not accept that,” he said.
I feel like Bernie can actually make a change for this country," said James Oram, 19. He was among the first of several thousand who lined up Sunday to hear Sanders speak at a campaign rally in west Vancouver ahead of Saturday's Democratic Party caucuses.
"He understands the people and what we need and what we want. The people don't have the power anymore, and that's what he wants to bring back," said Oram, from east Vancouver. Oram arrived at 6:30 a.m., more than four hours before the doors opened to the rally, and stood steadfastly in the rain as his white, hand-decorated T-shirt soaked through.
Many others waited for hours to hear the Vermont senator speak at Hudson's Bay High School, packing 5,800 into the gym, Vancouver deputy fire marshal Chris Drone said late Sunday. The campaign said 2,500 more looked in remotely from an overflow room.
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"The American people know that we have some very serious crises, and these crises are not going to be solved by establishment politics," Sanders declared. He describes himself as a democratic socialist and, like Donald Trump in the Republican campaign, has demonstrated that unconventional campaigns can thrive amid the current political upheaval.
Sunday's biggest applause line came in response to his call for free tuition at public colleges and universities, funded by a tax on Wall Street transactions. The Vancouver crowd skewed young, and Sanders remarked on his campaign's success with young voters – and lamented it hasn't gained more traction with older voters.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders implored an enthusiastic Spokane crowd Sunday night to give his campaign a boost with “political revolution.”
“When voter turnout is high, we win,” he said near the end of his 45-minute speech at the Spokane Convention Center. “When voter turnout is low, we lose.”
Thousands of people lined up Sunday in hopes of getting into the event. Campaign officials counted nearly 10,000. Only about 1,000 were allowed into the rally. The rest were diverted to overflow rooms, where they watched Sanders on screens.
The line of those who waited to see him stretched from the Convention Center to Canada Island in Riverfront Park and to Spokane City Hall.
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Sanders made an array of promises. He praised Seattle’s approval of a $15-an-hour minimum wage and said he would push for that nationwide. He also said he would work for equal pay for women and the end of marijuana possession as a federal crime. He pledged to expand Social Security and college financial aid programs.
“Why is it when young people do the right thing they end up $30 to $50,000 in debt?” Sanders said. “Why on God’s Earth are we punishing people for getting an education?”
He said the Affordable Care Act doesn’t go far enough, and he called for universal health coverage.
“I’ve been criticized for saying this all my life, so let me say it again,” he said. “I believe health care is a right for all people.”
If it’s too late for Bernie Sanders to catch his rival Hillary Clinton and win enough delegates to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, someone forgot to tell Bryan Anaya.
Anaya, a 27-year-old construction worker from Vancouver, awoke at 5:30 a.m. Sunday because he’d heard on a radio talk show that Sanders had planned a rally in his city, in advance of Washington’s democratic caucus on Saturday. He and his girlfriend, 28-year-old Nichole Vega, dressed her two children, 6-year-old Julissa and 2-year-old Julian, and headed to Hudson’s Bay High School to wait in line in a blustery Pacific Northwest downpour, to hear Sanders speak. They waited for hours. “The kids are soaked,” Vega said.
The couple don’t exactly fit the image of young political activists: They’ve never even voted. But both Vega and Anaya are children of immigrants, they said; immigrants who paid so-called coyotes to be smuggled across the U.S-Mexican border from Tijuana, risking their lives for a chance to live in America. They earned their citizenship, and Vega and Anaya were born in the U.S.
While they may have come out to support Sanders on Sunday, there’s another presidential candidate who arguably played a bigger role in the family’s decision: Donald Trump.
“We’ve been hearing a lot of stuff about Trump this and Trump that. He’s not bringing something positive to our country. He’s bringing violence. People are fighting at his rallies. We heard Bernie Sanders talk. He sounds like a good man,” Anaya said. “I feel like now is an important time for us to get involved.”
In a candid campaign trail admission Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Sunday said that he is "not doing well with older people."
As the Vermont senator implored a rally audience about the importance of young people's involvement in his campaign -- part of his standard stump speech -- he paused a moment and added, "If I can make a political statement here, it's interesting as we go along this campaign, we are not doing well, we are working on it, I cannot tell you why, we are not doing well with older people."
The crowd, mostly younger attendees who turned out in drizzling rain, listened as he continued.
"But we are doing phenomenally well with younger people," he added.
"This is no small thing because the young people and their ideas and their vision and their dreams for America, that is the future for this country and that is what this campaign is doing," he concluded…
Recent CNN exit polls from Ohio, a primary that Sanders lost to Democratic front-runner Clinton by 15 points, confirms Sanders' view. He won the 18-29 year old demographic by 81%. In a near-mirror result, Clinton won voters 65 years and older in that state by 77%. The catch for Sanders is that more older voters turn out at the polls than youngsters.
Bernie Sanders thinks climate change poses an existential threat to the planet, yet the Republican he likes the most in the Senate is Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, a proud climate-change denier. Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor in February of 2015, his way of supposedly disproving that the previous year was the hottest on record.
He’s not a scientist, he likes to say, but if the planet is warming, how come it’s so cold outside that we’ve got snow?
It’s that kind of anti-intellectualism that enrages liberals, but opposites attract in love, so why not on Capitol Hill? Even so, for Beltway insiders, it was a jaw-dropping revelation to hear Sanders name Inhofe as his favorite Senate Republican in a recent CNN town hall. How could he?
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“I can’t think of a time when one has brought the other one over,” says Donelle Harder, Inhofe’s spokesperson. “They either agree on an issue or they disagree.”
They first met when they served together in the House, and they are both on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, which Inhofe chairs. Their differences on climate change are “not a gap that they would ever bridge,” says Harder, but they are on the same side vote-wise, she says, when it comes to the nation’s infrastructure, funding and maintaining highways, bridges and ports.
She notes that in the small-town way that Washington works, Inhofe lives on Capitol Hill next door to two senior policy aides who have worked for Sanders for many years, and they often find themselves walking to work together. Things happen informally, and areas of difference are set aside the same way families avoid touchy subjects over Thanksgiving dinner.
You might only know her as a woman outlaw in the 1991 iconic movie, Thelma & Louise, or maybe you recognize her from any of the nearly 100 movies she's been in, but the country is collectively starting to see actress Susan Sarandon as a big supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential race.
She brought that support right to the Treasure Valley, as she spoke with canvassing volunteers for the Bernie Sanders campaign in downtown Boise on Sunday.
"I'm sure I won't see an opportunity like this again in my lifetime, where I can actually vote for a candidate that I want to vote for, wholeheartedly," Sarandon said.
The Oscar award-winning actress spoke of Sanders as a refreshing candidate to previous elections, explained why she supported him, and thanked the volunteers for their hard work.
"I care a lot about fracking. ...I care a lot about, you know, Wall Street's involvement."
"It's not being political, it's just being a citizen, being a patriot, being engaged with the process," Sarandon said. "It's not like a hobby or something that some people decide to do and other people don't."
To find out more about the Idaho Democratic caucus, you can visit their website.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said he would make a "massive federal investment" in Arizona solar to replace hundreds of jobs in the coal industry that would be lost under his environmental proposals.
His plan would provide $41 billion over a decade to help oil, gas and coal workers train for other jobs, while investing more than $500 billion in clean energy through 2030, his campaign said. The costs would be offset by repealing subsidies for fossil fuels and other corporate tax breaks, the plan says.
Sanders, the independent U.S. senator from Vermont, spoke with The Arizona Republic on Sunday, ahead of the state's presidential primary on Tuesday.
"I am not going to tell you a transition (away from fossil fuels) is not going to affect people. It will," he said by phone from Vancouver, Wash., where he planned to speak. "But I think with good job training, we can make sure those workers are protected and moved into other areas which are not damaging to our environment."
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Q: So you see federal investment to transition to solar?
A: Of course we do — massive federal investment. Arizona should be one of the leaders in this country, and one of the leaders in the world, in producing solar energy. And that means large numbers of new jobs being created.
I am not going to tell you a transition is not going to affect people. It will. But I think with good job training, we can make sure those workers are protected and moved into other areas which are not damaging to our environment.
TODAYS EVENTS
There Is A Salt Lake City Rally Today
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is returning to Utah.
The Vermont senator will host a rally Monday afternoon at West High School at the G. Ray Hale Field House. Doors open at 1:00 p.m. The start time of the event was undetermined as of Sunday evening.
Admission is first come, first served, according to the campaign. The line will begin at the entrance to the Field House.
The campaign says tickets are not required, but attendees are encouraged to RSVP. To do that and to find more information about the rally, click here.
A Return To Flagstaff
Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders announced he will make a second stop in Flagstaff Monday evening ahead of the Tuesday Arizona presidential preference election.
Sanders was at the Twin Arrows casino Thursday, attracting 2,800 to a rally that overflowed into the parking lot.
Sanders will be hosting a rally Monday at the amphitheater at Fort Tuthill County Park. Doors open at 5 p.m.
