The Democratic presidential caucuses in Nevada were supposed to be an afterthought: lost in the shadows of high-profile battles in Iowa and New Hampshire, and fought in a state far off in the West where voters have a long, warm history with Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Instead, after Mrs. Clinton’s overwhelming defeat in New Hampshire by Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, eight days after she barely won the Iowa caucuses, Nevada is looming as a turning point in their increasingly competitive contest, offering critical tests of the two candidates’ strengths.
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“A month ago, who would have thought this would be such a competitive race?” said Rebecca Lambe, the senior strategist for Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the minority leader. “Nevada will either be a potential firewall or a potential tiebreaker.”
“It really is the first test there is of how effective you are going to be in mobilizing the Democratic coalition in a general election,” she said.
Mr. Sanders’s senior adviser, Tad Devine, said Monday that campaign workers from Iowa, where Mr. Sanders nearly tied Mrs. Clinton, were being flown into Nevada to beef up a 90-person operation already in place. Mrs. Clinton’s advisers declined to disclose the size of their paid staff here. Mr. Sanders began advertising here in early December; Mrs. Clinton began in early January.
“It has become more competitive,” Mr. Devine said. Nevada, he added, presents a “fair test” of Mr. Sanders’s potential national appeal. “Now we are moving into a different region in the country, a much more diverse group of voters.”
After his resounding victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, we wanted to know more about Bernie Sanders. He served four terms as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, eight terms in the U.S. House and was elected to the Senate in 2006.
But he grew up in Brooklyn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants from Poland. On Wednesday, Sanders took "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley on a tour of his old neighborhood.
So, most of the kids lived in the apartment houses. I grew up in that one," Sanders pointed out. "Good friends across the street. It was my mothers dream to get out of the apartment and get a home of her own, but she died young and she never achieved that dream."
"How old was your mother when she passed away?" Pelley asked.
Sanders replied, "46."
He was 19 years old at the time.
"How did that affect you?" Pelley asked.
After a pause, Sanders answered simply, "Significantly. Significantly."
Civil rights activist Al Sharpton met with Bernie Sanders in Harlem Wednesday, part of the Vermont senator's effort to court support among the African-American community.
The two discussed affirmative action, police brutality and the Flint, Michigan, water crisis.
"The focus was to deal with the litany of issues that African-American and Latino voters are facing," Sharpton told MSNBC's Tamron Hall.
The meeting at Sylvia's, a famed New York City restaurant in Harlem, lasted about 20 minutes and was initiated by Sanders supporter and former NAACP head Ben Jealous, Sharpton said.
Sharpton declined to make an endorsement.
"I'm more about agendas than a candidate right now," Sharpton said on MSNBC. "The agenda must be front and center in South Carolina."
As they readied for a double-digit shellacking in New Hampshire Tuesday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff continued to point to a simple reason for Bernie Sanders’ success: his proximity.
The senator from Vermont is a well-known commodity in the Granite State and he was embraced as a front-runner early in the state. The lead he established in August ballooned to a 20-point advantage on primary night, thanks to New Englanders willing to see a front-runner where the rest of the country still sees a socialist.
At least, that’s the argument.
The numbers, though, tell a different story, as Sanders put into place an aggressive ground operation that swept through the state.
While the Clinton camp has not released employee counts, the Sanders campaign eventually deployed 108 paid staffers to New Hampshire. It established 18 field offices to Clinton’s 11, along with another 37 “Get Out the Vote” centers. (Clinton had eight.)
Sanders also seems to have used his impressive fundraising machine to eclipse Clinton in ad spending. Asked by ABC News how much money the Clinton campaign had spent on advertisements in the state, Clinton's New Hampshire spokesperson Julie McClain simply pointed to a Politico article showing Sanders totaling $8.5 million compared with Clinton’s $7.6 million. The article also detailed an overwhelming effort in the final three weeks of the race, with Sanders tripling Clinton’s spending on TV ads.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the award-winning writer who has become one of the nation’s most influential voices on cultural and political issues, particularly touching on race relations, said Wednesday that he would be voting for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The decision by Mr. Coates, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant” and the author of “Between the World and Me,” winner of the National Book Award, came as something of a surprise: Last month, Mr. Coates, author of a widely read 2014 Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations,” wrote two articles sharply criticizing Mr. Sanders over his opposition to reparations for slavery.
“I have tried to avoid this question, but yes, I will be voting for Senator Sanders,” Mr. Coates said in an interview with Democracy Now! that aired Wednesday.
Mr. Coates said he was “stunned” by Mr. Sanders’s rise and by his ability to compete with Hillary Clinton.
“Had you told me this like a year ago, I certainly would not have expected, you know, an avowed socialist to be putting up these sorts of numbers, and actually be contending for the Democratic Party nomination, but I think it’s awesome,” Mr. Coates said. “I think it’s great.”
Bernie Sanders stopped by for a victory lap during his second appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert Wednesday night, where the host made him defend his “revolution.”
Bernie Sanders continued his New Hampshire victory lap Wednesday night by making his second appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And while he was still a major underdog when he visited Stephen Colbert last September, this time he was riding high.
The senator from Vermont began by crashing Colbert’s monologue. When the host protested that the show should begin with him alone standing on stage and telling jokes, Sanders replied, “That’s what the elites want you to think.”
“You’ve got to go your own way, follow your own heart, the revolution is possible,” Sanders told Colbert before delivering the final line of the monologue. “Last night, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by 22 points. No joke!”
When Sanders entered as Colbert’s guest later in the show, he quickly faced questions about how he managed to win 86 percent of voters 18-24 in New Hampshire. “By definition, young people are idealistic,” he said. “And they look at a world with so many problems and they say, why not? Why can’t all people in this country have healthcare? Why can’t we make public colleges and universities tuition-free?”
When Bill O’Reilly was on Colbert’s show earlier in the week, he said Sanders and Donald Trump were essentially the same person with different haircuts. While Sanders acknowledged that his and Trump’s supporters share a certain anger, he criticized the “false message” that Trump is pushing that discrimination will somehow lead to a better America. Sanders also noted that O’Reilly has said he will move to Ireland if he becomes president, an outcome he referred to as a “two-fer.”
After running away with the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, Bernie Sanders in his victory speech made the case for why he can win a general election. Then MSNBC host Rachel Maddow did the same thing — only in a much more compelling way.
To be clear: Maddow, who co-moderated a Democratic debate last Thursday, hasn’t explicitly backed Sanders over Hillary Clinton. And during MSNBC’s primary-night coverage, she didn’t try to tell viewers why they should vote for the Vermont senator.
Instead, she followed Sanders’s address with a personal reflection that was all the more striking in its sincerity after hours of cable news blabbing. Her message was a vivid example of what Sanders had said moments earlier — that an unapologetically liberal candidate can actually turn out voters better than a center-left candidate whose more mainstream positions supposedly make him or her more “electable:
“If you really are a liberal, it’s been a long time in this country when you felt like mainstream politics had nothing to say to you, and that mainstream politics just was not about you. And I look at all these young people, in particular, out at this Bernie Sanders event: I was 19 in 1992 when Bill Clinton was running on the Democratic side, and at the 1992 Republican convention, Pat Buchanan got up there and gave his “culture wars” speech, where he basically declared a crusade against minorities and particularly against gay people. And as a gay person watching that in 1992, I didn’t feel like Bill Clinton had my back, right? I didn’t feel like the Democratic Party had my back. He was talking about agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government was the problem and all that stuff.
If you are a liberal, you are not a majority in this country, and you know it, and it always feels that way. But this Democratic race with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigning this way against each other — that happened because Bernie Sanders got into this race. And all these kids who are enthused about this race — whether or not they’re supporting Bernie Sanders directly — are never going to feel like mainstream politics isn’t about them.”
Bernie Sanders was railing against income inequality in Binghamton long before he ever set foot on the presidential campaign trail.
Sanders, now challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, spent the spring 1990 semester teaching college classes in upstate New York, including a masters-level course at Binghamton University.
And the Sanders of 1990 -- then coming off an eight-year stint as mayor of Burlington, Vermont -- sounded quite a bit like the Sanders of 2016.
"The gap between rich and poor is growing wider and wider," Sanders told a group of BU faculty and students, according to a May 1990 article in the campus' faculty newspaper. "The richest 1 percent of the population have one-half America's wealth, while the richest 10 percent control 80 percent of the wealth."
Sanders' BU class actually met in Norwich, Chenango County, according to the faculty newspaper. At the same time, Sanders was a visiting professor at Hamilton College in Oneida County.
The BU class -- Affluence and Crisis -- examined "fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth in the U.S."
"There is a steady decline in living standards for the middle class, with those in the lowest social class moving down and out to the streets," Sanders told the BU students and faculty then, according to the article. "We have 3 million people sleeping on the streets. Where is the moral outrage?"
It's finally a "Bill Maher election." And by that I mean it's a year of new rules — to borrow from Real Time — largely rewritten by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. No one thought a politician could survive, much less stay in the lead for as long as Trump has, based on a campaign of braggadocio and utter contempt for political correctness. But the younger generation is leading a movement to prize authenticity above all. Trump is a petulant child, but at least that's real, they seem to be saying. Bernie, too, is as real as real gets. (So real he doesn't even own a comb.)
Bernie tied in Iowa after starting 30 points down; as I write this, it looks like he's going to win New Hampshire, and that's not just, or even mainly, because Vermont is a neighbor state. [Sanders and Trump both coasted to easy victories in New Hampshire.] Rather it's because he is putting on the table something we've never seen before: the idea that America could be more like a Western European democracy, quasi-socialist (we're that already, of course, with Social Security, Medicare and farm subsidies) where you pay more in taxes, but you get more: free health care and free college. I call this his "New Deal," and we haven't really had one of those since FDR's.
But that's what it is — a platform that says the old deal just hasn't been working for a long time, and we need something else for the half of America that is desperate. We haven't seen a true leftist since FDR, so many millions are coming out of the woodwork to vote for Bernie Sanders; he is the Occupy movement now come to life in the political arena. These are people who have sat out for a long time because the Democrats became a corporatist, center-right party and the Republicans became radically right (and, of course, just plain nuts in many ways).
There's been enough "no one thought it could ever happen" stuff this year — Trump! — that until anyone proves otherwise, Bernie has earned the right to be considered absolutely viable. Will a conservative state like Indiana vote for a socialist? Probably not, but then again, as I say, this stuff has never been on the table, and these voters have never been activated. They're like a sleeper cell: Let's see if they can assassinate the old way of doing things.
Bernie Sanders raised $6.4 million in the 24 hours since the polls closed in New Hampshire, his campaign said Wednesday.
The large haul, which bests the $3 million he raised after his narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in Iowa, is further evidence of the digital fundraising juggernaut his campaign has built.
The Sanders campaign said Wednesday that $2.6 million of that haul had been raised in just the four-and-a-half hours after he was declared the winner in New Hampshire.
Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver sent an email earlier Wednesday setting a goal of $6 million, then sent a second appeal a little before 8 p.m. Wednesday pushing the new goal to $7 million.
"Well, you already crushed that goal in just a couple hours," Weaver wrote. "So, in the spirit of this campaign, we're going to reach for a bigger but difficult goal — raising $7 million by the end of the day today."
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