US Senator Bernie Sanders vowed Monday to draw deeper contrasts with his primary rival, Hillary Clinton, especially on trade and campaign finance, mounting what he described as a state-by-state primary “slog” that includes Massachusetts.
“What I intend to do over the next number of weeks is contrast my record to Secretary Clinton,” Sanders told reporters at a South Boston union hall. “People need to know the difference between hastily adopted campaign rhetoric and the real record and long-held ideas of the candidate.”
“This is a slog,” Sanders said of the several-month-long presidential nomination calendar. “A state by state by state by state contest, and Massachusetts on Super Tuesday is one of the largest states in terms of delegates and we hope to win.”
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On Monday evening, Sanders hosted a rally for 7,500 people at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, where the line of people snaked down several blocks outside the William D. Mullins Memorial Center in the hours before his appearance. In front of the rowdy crowd, Sanders did not hesitate to tick off the ways in which he said he differs from Clinton.
While his campaign is funded by large numbers of small donors, he said, “Secretary Clinton has chosen to go in a different direction — she has a number of super PACs.” When Sanders announced Clinton has received $15 million from Wall Street donors, the crowd erupted into a chorus of “Boos.”
With just over a week to go until the Massachusetts presidential primary, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders drew his largest crowd yet in western Massachusetts — 9,000 strong.
The Vermont senator nearly filled the 10,000-capacity Mullins Center at the University of Massachusetts on Monday to spread his messages of addressing income inequality, providing health care for all and, very popularly among the university crowd, making public institutions of higher education tuition-free.
“Are you ready for a radical idea?” Sanders asked the crowd, which responded with cheers. “Together we are going to create an economy that works for working families, not just the billionaire class.”
When Sanders took the Mullins Center stage with his wife, Jane Sanders, the room erupted in applause.
“We started 50 points behind in Iowa, 30 points behind in New Hampshire and 25 points down a month ago in Nevada,” he said. “We were way behind here in Massachusetts. That is changing as well.”
There was no shortage of college students at the Bernie Sanders rally on Monday.
Gathering in the cavernous hall where the University of Massachusetts basketball team plays its games, the students came in droves on the free bus line serving Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire and Amherst colleges, as well as from UMass. But Bernie Sanders supporters are a multigenerational bunch and the rally drew an impressive number of gray-haired baby boomers who cheered just as raucously as their younger counterparts.
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Holyoke City Councilor Jossie Valentin fired the crowd up with a chant in English and Spanish and a personal testimonial of her support of Sanders as a Latina and openly gay local politician.
“I’m proud to be an ambassador for Bernie. Next Tuesday, March 1, who’s voting for Bernie,” she asked, provoking wild applause.
“Folks, the time is now to get involved, really involved,” she said before introducing Sanders. “Remember that we are Bernie’s super PAC.”
Sanders appeared comfortable and in his element with the crowd, cracking jokes and engaging supporters.
“This campaign is based upon a very simple principle: Real change never comes from the top on down,” he said. “It always comes from the bottom up.”
The battle for African American celebrity backing and voters continues to be a major part of the Democratic nominating contest this week. Tuesday, the Bernie Sanders campaign will start running radio ads in South Carolina featuring another famous voice – Spike Lee.
“Waaaaake up! Wake up, South Carolina!” Lee begins in the new spot first obtained by ABC News from the Bernie Sanders campaign. “This is your dude, Spike Lee. And you know that I know that you know that the system is rigged! And for too long we’ve given our votes to corporate puppets. Sold the okie doke. Ninety-nine percent of Americans were hurt by the Great Recession of 2008, and many are still recovering.
“That’s why I am officially endorsing my brother, Bernie Sanders. Bernie takes no money from corporations. Nada. Which means he’s not on the tape, and when Bernie get’s into the White House, he will do the right thing!” the actor, writer and film producer continues in the ad. The line doubles as a reference to one of Lee’s most famous movies.
In the one-minute ad, Lee goes on to talk about Sanders' record fighting for civil rights, including the fact that he was arrested at the University of Chicago for protesting segregation and attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington. Lee praises Sanders for his consistency on the issues.
The campaign has a good shot at outright winning four or five states on March 1, a.k.a. Super Tuesday, when 11 states will hold primaries or caucuses and 880 delegates will be at stake, plus more later. In addition to the caucus states of Minnesota and Colorado, and the New England states of Massachusetts and Vermont, where he lives and serves, Sanders is targeting Oklahoma, where he will visit Wednesday.
Sanders is also eyeing caucuses later next week in Kansas, Nebraska and Maine. He’s also set to visit Kansas City Wednesday, and is likely to spend time soon in states like Illinois and Ohio, which already have early voting underway.
Meanwhile, states where Sanders falls short are not a total loss. While the Republican nomination process includes winner-take-all states, Democrats award delegates proportional to the vote total, so they often end up splitting delegates roughly evenly. Delegate allocations only get really lopsided if someone wins by more than 20 percentage points.
That means Sanders can collect plenty of delegates in states he probably can’t win, like South Carolina, which hosts a primary on Saturday, or delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like Texas and Virginia. With the potential to win up to five out of 11 states on Super Tuesday and hold his own in the other important contests, Sanders hopes to end the night with a “pretty solid haul of delegates,” Devine said.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has raked in a number of endorsements from former Texas politicians, but superdelegates remain elusive in his underdog bid to win the Democratic presidential nomination from opponent Hillary Clinton.
According to state campaign director Jacob Limon, Sanders now boasts the support of former Texas Democratic Party Chair Charles Soechting, former state Sen. Hector Uribe of Brownsville and former state Reps. Domingo Garcia of Dallas and Lon Burnam of Fort Worth, who is currently running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission.
He has also received nods from Rep. Marisa Marquez, the only currently-serving elected official who has endorsed the Vermont senator, and former state Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower.
During a fiery press conference in Boston Monday afternoon, Bernie Sanders went after Hillary Clinton and her super PAC for their fundraising tactics.
“Every candidate who has ever received special interest money always says that the millions and millions of dollars that they receive will never influence them. Never. Never. Never,” he said. “If these contributions from Wall Street and other powerful special interests have no influence over the candidate, why are these special interests making huge campaign contributions?
“Maybe they’re dummies and maybe they just think they can throw millions of dollars at a candidate and expect to get nothing from that. Maybe. I doubt that very much,” he continued.
While Sanders has made similar insinuations about Clinton in the past (and has been accused by her of running a negative campaign of innuendo), on Monday he was more forceful and blunt than he has been recently. He even named Clinton’s super PAC, Priorities USA, explicitly and spoke about how much money both Clinton and her super PAC have raised from Wall Street.
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is expected to be in Oklahoma on Wednesday, Feb 24.
The Democratic Party presidential candidate will host a rally at the Cox Business Center in Tulsa.
Sanders will discuss a wide range of issues, including getting big money out of politics, his plan to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and combating climate change and ensuring universal health care for all.
To RSVP for A Future to Believe In Tulsa Rally click here. Doors open at 4:00 p.m.
Sanders appeals to young voters, including young women, for a variety of reasons. As Hillicker noted, the economy is one of them; a December survey found that a full 72 percent of millennial women said bills and expenses are their greatest source of stress. Both Sanders and Clinton have proposed policies that would benefit young people and particularly women financially: college debt reduction, equal pay, and family leave among them. Likewise, both have strong records of supporting women's reproductive rights and the Violence Against Women Act. So why is Sanders such a stark favorite?
At least part of the answer lies in the fact that millennials have a strong anti-establishment bent. About half of millennials identify as Independent, more than any other generation, which indicates a distrust of major parties. Sanders, of course, is an Independent; he adopted the Democrat designation only for his presidential bid. Bloomberg View reported that young voters are also more wary than older voters of military action in the Middle East, something that doesn't play well in Clinton's favor, as her role of Secretary of State involved support for several interventions that destabilized the Middle East, and she, unlike Sanders, voted for the Iraq war. Overall, Sanders' talk of a "political revolution" makes Clinton's talk of building on Obama's policies weak-tea in comparison for today's young, sick-of-politics-as-usual voters.
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the length of time Sanders has spent fighting for the economic, social, and political rights of all people posits him as the more authentic anti-oppression candidate. This, plus his general anti-establishment bent, give him a clear advantage among young voters generally and young women in particular.
Imagine opening the sports page and reading the headline, “Baseball fans hate the New York Yankees.” That’s quite a powerful statement. If it emerged, however, that the reference group was composed of bar patrons around Fenway Park, this suddenly becomes a very different story. Baseball fans don’t hate the Yankees, Boston Red Sox baseball fans hate the Yankees. A reporter writing a similar story the next day could very easily come to a different conclusion if she were to make her reference group bar patrons in the Bronx.
The same thing is true of evaluations of presidential candidates’ economic platforms. I cringe every time I read something like, “Economists think Candidate A’s plan will never work.” There’s no such thing as “economists” and reporters taking this approach send a false signal. In point of fact, we come in many varieties, and by this I don’t mean liberal, conservative, populist, libertarian and so on. Rather, when it comes to an economist deciding whether or not a policy makes sense, the single more important factor is the theoretical model she is using to understand the economy.
Several squabbles have broken out over recent weeks regarding Bernie Sanders’ proposed policies. Some articles say that economists support them, while others claim that economists are less than impressed. But how are the evaluators evaluating the proposals? I have yet to see an article that provides any insight on this and so readers are left ill-equipped to sort through all the opinions.
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If you haven’t figured it out by now, the pattern that one sees in terms of which economists favor Sanders’ policies line up along Establishment vs. Business-Cycle lines. The former, since they don’t really see a serious problem in the first place, view his agenda as fixing what ain’t broke. Meanwhile, the latter see his plans as a major step toward revitalizing capitalism, especially for the middle class and the small entrepreneur. The reason Establishment Economists say his numbers don’t add up is because they are using different math from the Business-Cycle Economists.
I’m not telling you who to believe, but I am saying this: if you want to figure out whose side you’re on, the best place to start is in trying to figure out which of the above stories makes more sense to you.
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