In the back of a Concord, N.H., school gymnasium, as Bernie Sanders gave a triumphant speech after winning the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Kenneth Pennington stood staring at his smartphone, watching the numbers climb. Mr. Pennington, 24, the campaign’s digital director, saw thousands of people cramming onto the Sanders website at once, frantically trying to donate to his campaign. In one minute alone, 2,689 people had donated an average of $34.
“It was, obviously, a big day,” said Mr. Pennington, who found himself jumping up and down as the contributions rolled in.
Mr. Sanders has no official finance director, but with the help of people like Mr. Pennington, who built his first website at age 12, he has created a fund-raising juggernaut that has fueled his unexpectedly competitive race for president. The network his team built now threatens the once-daunting Clinton fund-raising model, which the family perfected over years of Beverly Hills dinners, Hamptons summer parties, and rewards for donors like nights in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator, has raised some $96 million to Hillary Clinton’s $127 million, but he is gaining ground after raising $5 million more than she did last month. His operation is also highly efficient — Mr. Sanders simply asks his small donors to give online, and they do, while Mrs. Clinton has left the campaign trail repeatedly to fly to other cities for receptions with bigger contributors.
In the 48 hours after his 22-point victory in New Hampshire, for example, the senator’s campaign raised $8 million online.
Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders promised Colorado voters he would fight to fix a rigged economy corrupt campaign finance system, universal health care and the rights of women, gays, middle class families and college students Saturday in Denver.
Sanders spoke to a packed Colorado Convention Center crowd as a prelude to the Colorado Democratic Party's annual dinner a few blocks away at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, where he shared the billing with his party opponent, Hillary Clinton.
In a 45-minute pep rally speech, preceded by a free concert by Colorado bands The Samples and the Flobots, Sanders fired up his supporters with his now-familiar campaign themes: the ills of big money in politics, climate change, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage.
He said he would continue to refuse super PAC money and would run his populist campaign on the strength of 3.5 million individual donors who gave an average of $27 each.
"We don't represent the billionaire class," Sanders said to the roaring approval of a crowd estimated at 18,000 by organizers. "We don't represent Wall Street. We don't represent corporate America. We don't want their money and we don't need their money."
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders late Saturday called conservative Justice Antonin Scalia a “brilliant, colorful and outspoken” member of the Supreme Court.
“While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court,” the Vermont senator said in a brief statement.
“My thoughts and prayers are with his family and his colleagues on the court who mourn his passing,” he added.
Scalia's death, during a hunting trip Saturday in Texas, will spark a mammoth fight over who should replace him in the heat of a presidential election cycle.
There is likely to be significant pressure on the Republican-held Senate to hold off on confirming anyone nominated by President Obama, who is in his last year in office.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told hundreds of volunteers gathered here on Saturday that his strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire were not flukes.
“We surprised them in Iowa,” Mr. Sanders said to cheers. “We surprised them in New Hampshire. We are going to surprise them here in Nevada.”
While Mr. Sanders was expected to beat Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, his 22-percentage point margin was still a resounding victory and one he hoped gives him a tailwind heading into next Saturday’s Democratic caucuses in Nevada.
He is hoping a win here will convince voters nationwide that he has broad appeal and can garner support from a more diverse electorate than in Iowa and New Hampshire, two predominantly white states. Mr. Sanders on Saturday focused his remarks on economic inequality, campaign finance reform and Wall Street regulation, topics at the core of his candidacy.
“People of Nevada know what Wall Street’s greed, irresponsibility, recklessness, and illegal behavior did,” Mr. Sanders said. “They did it all over this country but maybe no place more profoundly in terms of wrecking lives, than right here in Nevada.”
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont pointedly criticized Republican officials for recommending that President Obama hold off on nominating a successor for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who died Saturday.
Speaking on Saturday at an annual fund-raising dinner hosted by the Colorado Democratic Party, Mr. Sanders said Republicans are overlooking the powers given to the president in the Constitution. He chastised Republicans for trying to block President Obama’s ability to nominate a justice for partisan reasons.
“It appears that some of my Republican colleagues in the Senate have a very interesting view of our Constitution of the United States,” Mr. Sanders said. “Apparently, they believe that the Constitution does not allow a Democratic president to bring forth a nominee to replace Justice Scalia. I strongly disagree with that.” (Several Republican candidates said President Obama should let the next president choose the justice or urged the Senate to block the nomination.)
“I very much hope that President Obama will bring forth a strong nominee and that we can get that nominee confirmed as soon as possible,” Mr. Sanders said. “The Supreme Court of the United States has nine members, not eight. We need that ninth member.”
Hours after last week’s Democratic presidential debate, where candidates criticized money’s influence over politics, word leaked that the Democratic National Committee was overturning President Barack Obama’s ban on accepting campaign cash from lobbyists and political action committees. Now, Sen. Bernie Sanders is calling for the DNC to honor Obama’s policy and reverse its decision — and is demanding Hillary Clinton join him in that stance.
The Vermont lawmaker’s campaign late Friday echoed criticism of the decision by campaign finance watchdog groups. Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs said in a statement: “This an unfortunate step backward. We support the restrictions that President Obama put in place and we hope Secretary Clinton will join us in supporting the president.”
Clinton has increasingly predicated her candidacy on the assertion she is the best prepared to preserve Obama’s policies, and she has suggested Sanders has been insufficiently loyal to the president. However, Clinton so far has been silent on whether Obama’s DNC fundraising policy should be abandoned or honored: Her campaign did not respond to International Business Times’ questions about whether the former secretary of state will join Sanders’ demand for the DNC to preserve the president’s ban on lobbyist campaign cash.
Bernie Sanders is highlighting his previous support for two civil rights icons as he woos African-American voters in South Carolina.
Two videos released Saturday by the Vermont senator feature Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who Sanders endorsed for president in 1988 back when he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
"Tonight, many of us are going to give our support to a candidate for president who has done more than any other candidate in living memory to bring together the disenfranchised, the hungry, the poor, the workers who are being thrown out of their decent-paying jobs and the farmers who are being thrown off of their land," Sanders said back then in a speech supporting Jackson.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to place for nomination this evening the name of one of the great leaders of our time and a man who has waged the most courageous and exciting political campaigns in the modern history of this nation. I place for nomination, with a great deal of personal pride, the name of Jesse Jackson," Sanders says in the clip.
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Jackson also was an ally of King's, who is featured in an ad released by the Sanders campaign on Saturday entitled "Wheels of Inevitability."
The spot opens up with a quote from King: "Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle," then transitions to images of Sanders marching with African-Americans.
After letting Simon and Garfunkel speak for him in one ad, Senator Bernie Sanders has turned over his latest to his supporters, several of whom created a 60-second spot titled “Together.”
Only Mr. Sanders’s voice is heard, delivering a clarion call to unite Americans across every conceivable demographic line. But on the screen, portraits of scores of different faces appear and disappear in a blink. Many are ripped in half, as if to illustrate the danger of divisive politics. Old snapshots of families of every possible background flash by. Finally, the two halves of unrelated people’s portraits are merged, to signal the strength that comes from uniting people despite their differences.
Adding to its power is the ad’s back story: It was submitted by supporters of Mr. Sanders and chosen by curators of such content in an effort overseen by his wife, Jane. In a sense, then, others are already taking up the banner of the revolution Mr. Sanders is trying to foment.
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The spot began its life as a short video, shown on a big screen before the band Vampire Weekend performed an acoustic set at a Sanders campaign rally in Iowa City. The crowd erupted as the video reached its conclusion. Since then it has gone viral, earning millions of views and comparisons to President Obama’s 2008 “Yes We Can” ad. Seeing the video’s popularity, the campaign bought the ad on Friday and said it would begin airing it this week.
John Lewis, the influential congressman who this week appeared to dismiss Bernie Sanders’ credentials on civil rights issues, has sought to soften the ensuing controversy over his remarks.
On Thursday, as the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) political action committee endorsed Sanders’ rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, Lewis appeared to play down the Vermont senator’s involvement in the civil rights movement in its 1960s heyday.
“I never saw him,” Lewis said. “I never met him.”
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On Saturday, the Georgia representative issued a statement through the CBC, in which he said: “In the interest of unity, I want to clarify the statement I made at Thursday’s news conference.
“I was responding to a reporter’s question who asked me to assess Senator Sanders’ civil rights record. I said that when I was leading and was at the center of pivotal actions within the civil rights movement, I did not meet Senator Bernie Sanders at any time.
“The fact that I did not meet him in the movement does not mean I doubted that Senator Sanders participated in the civil rights movement, neither was I attempting to disparage his activism. Thousands sacrificed in the 1960s whose names we will never know, and I have always given honor to their contribution.”
When Keller Barnette started campaigning for Bernie Sanders about five months ago, the question he often got was, "Who is Bernie Sanders?"
Barnette never got discouraged.
He made campaign fliers. He worked the phones. He went to organizing meetings. He talked to anyone who'd listen about the wild-haired Vermont senator's background, what he stands for politically and how they could get involved in the political revolution he's leading.
Nobody asks him who Sanders is anymore. People are taking the "democratic socialist" senator and his campaign for president seriously now, especially after he crushed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in last week's New Hampshire primaries and came within a nose of beating her in the Iowa caucuses a week earlier.
"People know this is going to be a revolutionary campaign," said Barnette, 34, a self-employed accountant from Knoxville. "The question is do you want to be a part of the political revolution. And I think a lot of people are saying yes."
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Just in time to capitalize on the wave of enthusiasm, the campaign formally opened offices last week in Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville and will open two more next week in Chattanooga and Johnson City.
Each office will have three or four paid staffers and will allow the campaign to "connect the dots with the Bernie supporters that are out there," Kuhn said.
Fighting income inequality. Getting big money out of politics. Reforming Wall Street. Making college affordable. Health care for all.
Those are some of the many reasons Ann Arbor area Democrats said on Saturday they're supporting Bernie Sanders for president.
About 60 people were on hand for the opening of an Ann Arbor area office for the Sanders campaign at 4072 Packard Road.
Campaign staffers and volunteers plan to mobilize and work the phones over the next month to get out the vote for Sanders in the March 8 primary in Michigan.
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our speakers announced their personal endorsements of Sanders during Saturday's office opening celebration. That included Mike Henry, Ann Arbor Democratic Party chairman; Ian Robinson, Huron Valley Central Labor Council president; Ann Arbor school board member Simone Lightfoot; and Monica Ross-Williams, an Ypsilanti Township parks commissioner.
They were offering individual endorsements and not endorsements on behalf of their organizations, though Henry noted the Ann Arbor Democratic Party conducted a poll in October and 77 percent of the party's members who were present supported Sanders, while 11 percent supported Clinton.
Standing between a wall of retracted wooden bleachers and his turntables, Mel Sandico, a.k.a. Mel Cavaricci, a.k.a. D.J. Mel, looked up to survey the crowd filing into Senator Bernie Sanders’s New Hampshire victory party last Tuesday night.
“Can you hold on one sec?” he said, putting on his headphones, inspecting his laptop and playing a Roy Ayers hit. “We’re just kind of easing in.”
Ayers, the Delfonics, Southside Movement and other soul singers who provided the samples for hip-hop classics are pretty much what you would expect in the playlist of a guy wearing a Reigning Champ black hoodie under a Patagonia vest, a pair of Naked & Famous jeans over Air Jordan 1s, and a Supreme black cap over his clear framed glasses and fashionable beard.
Less so from a presidential campaign. And yet Mr. Sandico has become the house D.J. of Mr. Sanders’s parties, playing a mix of soul, funk and disco that is in equal parts laid-back lounge bar, alternative college radio and dancey early ’90s bar mitzvah.
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Mr. Sandico, the son of a career soldier, grew up outside Fort Hood, Tex., and eventually moved to Austin, where, over the last 20 years, he became a staple on the club scene. In 2013 he was inducted into the Austin Music Awards Hall of Fame.
Until recently, Mr. Sandico said he was only slightly aware of Mr. Sanders, whom he had seen on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and was torn between the senator and Mrs. Clinton. Then, Mr. Liipfert, who had begun putting together events for Mr. Sanders, contacted him and proposed the gig. “I was like ‘Hell, yeah, I’ll do it,’” Mr. Sandico said. Since then, he said, he has read up on Mr. Sanders, adding, “I feel the Bern.”
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