“I congratulate Secretary Clinton on her victories tonight, and I look forward to issue-oriented campaigns in the 14 contests to come.
“I am proud that we were able to win a resounding victory tonight in Rhode Island, the one state with an open primary where independents had a say in the outcome. Democrats should recognize that the ticket with the best chance of winning this November must attract support from independents as well as Democrats. I am proud of my campaign’s record in that regard.
“The people in every state in this country should have the right to determine who they want as president and what the agenda of the Democratic Party should be. That’s why we are in this race until the last vote is cast. That is why this campaign is going to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia with as many delegates as possible to fight for a progressive party platform that calls for a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition free and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change.”
Thousands packed the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington on Tuesday night to hear Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
During his one-hour speech, Sanders shared his talking points with the energetic crowd.
"We are going to create an economy that protects the needs of our workers, our children, our seniors, our veterans -- all of the people of this country and not just the one (wealthiest) percent," Sanders said.
At one point the crowd chanted a variation of the "We are Marshall" cheer, replacing "Marshal" with "feeling the Bern."
Applause broke out when he talked about how he wants to implement free tuition at public colleges and universal healthcare. Sanders also talked about wanting to transform the energy system in America.
Sanders talked about how he wants to change the energy system in America and is opposed to fossil fuels because of climate change. It's a position that's not popular in coal mining communities in West Virginia, but Sanders says they won't leave those who lose their jobs behind.
"We have a moral obligation to make certain that those people who may lose their jobs get new jobs," Sanders said.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump has some free advice for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: Make an independent bid for president."Bernie Sanders has been treated terribly by the Democrats -- both with delegates & otherwise. He should show them, and run as an independent," Trump tweeted Tuesday.
Sanders' wife, Jane Sanders, quickly dismissed the idea in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Tuesday afternoon.
"We've been very clear right from the beginning that we will not play the role of spoiler," she said. "The reason that he was active and he decided to run in the Democratic Party was just that: We cannot afford a Republican in the White House. We cannot afford a Republican appointing Supreme Court justices. So Bernie will not be running as an independent."
Sanders, meanwhile, has said he would remain in the race at least until June 7, the final primary voting day.
"I think we've got a path to victory and we're going to fight this until the last vote is cast," he told CNN's Chris Cuomo Tuesday on "New Day." "So we're in this until the end."
Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has won Rhode Island’s Democratic primary for president, the Associated Press projects.
Sanders defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday night, despite nearly all of the state’s Democratic establishment backing Clinton.
“I am proud that we were able to win a resounding victory tonight in Rhode Island, the one state with an open primary where independents had a say in the outcome,” Sanders said in a statement. “Democrats should recognize that the ticket with the best chance of winning this November must attract support from independents as well as Democrats. I am proud of my campaign’s record in that regard.”
Clinton came out on top Tuesday in the primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.
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Tuesday’s primary was the culmination of a competitive contest between the two Democrats, in a year when both parties’ candidates spent significantly time and energy on Rhode Island – a relatively rare occurrence since the state began holding primaries in 1972.
Clinton won Rhode Island by 18 percentage points over Barack Obama in 2008, but in recent weeks it became clear her team was concerned about whether she could defeat Sanders this year. Bill Clinton visited the state twice to campaign, and Clinton herself spent Saturday in Central Falls and Johnson. Sanders held a massive rally in Providence on Sunday.
Despite a series of costly defeats on Tuesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) remains committed to seeing the Democratic primary through to the convention, his top aide, Tad Devine, told The Huffington Post.
“We are nowhere near the end game,” Devine declared. “The end game is going to come at the end.”
That doesn’t mean losses in Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Pennsylvania won’t prompt shifts in strategy and rhetoric. With a narrower path to the nomination, Devine acknowledged that Sanders, who did win Rhode Island on Tuesday, would likely place even more focus on policy prescriptions and a vision for the future of the Democratic Party, and less on personal contrasts with Hillary Clinton.
“I don’t think we will stop talking about the issues. I think a lot of the rhetoric that was more heated, in New York for example, was the product of that white-hot primary atmosphere,” said Devine, suggesting that the upcoming contests won’t be so vivifying.
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Devine said he has had no conversations with political supporters who have suggested that Sanders leave the race or even moderate his attacks. If anything, the sense of the campaign is that the Democratic Party writ large benefits from Sanders staying in the race (as more voters would be compelled to register to vote for him) and that the senator owes it to his supporters to run through the California primary to give them an opportunity to support his platform.
“It is not just a campaign. It is a cause. It is something much bigger than him,” said Devine. “We want to make sure that anybody who has been part of this campaign, the contributors and volunteers, has a chance to vote for him and what he represents.”
Devine didn’t concede defeat, either. He said the campaign remained committed to trying to persuade so-called superdelegates to change their support from Clinton by arguing that Sanders would be a stronger general election candidate. The argument would be aided, Devine said, by the upcoming primary calendar. Primaries in Indiana and California (which allow independents to vote), along with demographically favorable states like Kentucky and Oregon, would yield victories for Sanders and change the conversation heading into the convention, Devine predicted.
When asked about his post-primary plans, if Hillary Clinton clinches the Democratic nomination for president, Bernie Sanders was quick to tell ABC News in Rome last week that he would go back to his day job as a U.S. senator from Vermont.
But several of the advocacy groups backing his campaign have begun strategizing about the next phase of what many of them view as Sanders’ “political revolution.”
“Many are wondering, ‘What’s next?’ We want to get together and talk about it,” said Charles Lenchner, co-founder of People for Bernie, a grassroots organization that has been unofficially working alongside the senator’s presidential campaign from the beginning.
Lenchner’s group and National Nurses United, one of Sanders’ earliest and most visible union endorsers, have been working in tandem to plan a conference bringing Sanders’ supporters and progressive groups together after the final votes in the Democratic Party primary.
The event, titled “The People’s Summit,” has been scheduled for late-June in Chicago, just days after the final primary contest.
The explicit goal is to bring together people and organizations who have supported the senator's campaign and “have a conversation” about what comes after the primaries, Lenchner told ABC News.
“I think it will be an opportunity for people to meet each other outside of the specific groups and areas where they have been active for the first time,” Lenchner said in a phone interview.
Sanders’ campaign and volunteers have arguably built one of the largest and most effective grassroots progressive organizations in recent history. How exactly to capitalize on the energy surrounding the campaign and mobilize the social media community remains the million-dollar question for groups hoping to push Sanders’ policy platforms during the next administration.
But every time you ask that question it shows you don't get what Bernie is really about. Sanders is not waging a political campaign but rather a "political revolution."
He told us that point blank upon launching his campaign in May 2015 with the words: "We begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially and environmentally." Adding what has now become synonymous with Sanders (and often parodied on "Saturday Night Live"), "Enough is enough," as he called for "the people" to take back our government from the "handful of billionaires" and "Super PACs."
However, the media and even most Democrats dismissed Sanders' candidacy as being nothing more than a speed bump on the way to Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic nominee. Yet despite polls last year showing the Vermont senator down by over 60 points to Clinton, he continued to discuss the same issues he raised in his May 2015 kick-off: income inequality, raising the minimum wage, Citizens United, reforming Wall Street, and free public college tuition.
And as he traveled the country campaigning over the next year, Sanders didn't "evolve" or pivot to issues that were more popular. Instead he made the issues he was passionate about popular. He didn't chase voters, they chased him.
Well there are two reasons why Sanders should very much stay in the race. The first is practical. In addition to being only a handful of points behind Clinton in national polls, Sanders still has a passionate base of supporters and is raising money at a rate surpassing even Clinton, as he notched $44 million in March alone. People who are for Bernie just don't feel the Bern, they are on fire for him.
The best reason Sanders should stay in the race goes back to what he said that spring day in May 2015: This is not a political campaign, but a "political revolution."
Sanders winning the Democratic nomination and even the White House is truly not the prize that Sanders, or many of his supporters, are seeking. He wants to transform the system. This is a man who vowed when he launched his campaign that "we're going to build a movement of millions of Americans who are prepared to stand up and fight back." And he has done just that.
Watching this year’s presidential nomination process from Australia has been a very interesting affair. I can’t say I’ve followed every single speech or piece of news, but I’ve certainly kept abreast of what is going on and have seen plenty of articles and commentary from people on my feed putting their opinions forward. What interests me the most are the people and media pundits who emphatically denounce Bernie Sanders and his supporters. The reasons all generally boil down to the fact that he is the reincarnation of Karl Marx and he wants to turn the U.S. into a communist state. That he is so far left of centre that he’s basically off the chart.
For those people, here’s a reality check.
Around the rest of the world, Mr. Sanders represents a point on the political spectrum that is mildly left of centre. His “wacky” ideas of free (and we’ll get to that term a bit later) education, free healthcare, regulating banks and corporations and so on are all actually staple ideas of many of the happiest and most prosperous countries in the world. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the happiest countries in the world index for 2016. The U.S. doesn’t make the top 10—but almost every single country that does has the kind of policies Mr. Sanders is promoting at some level. Looking at the other candidates, Hillary Clinton would in most countries be considered right of centre, not left. Donald and Ted? Man, those guys are so far right of centre you couldn’t plot where they exist—they’re pretty much off the spectrum.
But back to Bernie. Throughout the nomination process, Bernie’s critics always seem to be asking the wrong questions. The most common one I see is “how is he going to pay for all of this?” This question misses the point entirely. Even if economists say that he can’t, does that really invalidate everything he’s aiming to achieve? If he can’t pay for all of it and the only thing that actually gets passed is universal college education and a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, is that such a horrible thing? Why does it have to be so all or nothing?
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Here’s the big thing about Bernie that makes so much sense to the rest of the world, but not to a lot of you. Our earliest ancestors formed tribes so we could hunt more efficiently and protect one another. We moved on to villages, then cities and finally nations for mutual benefit. We can do more together than alone, and when we band together we can put safety nets in place so if people are unlucky and get struck down, we can all help them back up. That way no one has to live in fear of losing out in the lottery of life. That’s what social democracy is, and those of us who live in them recognize that what we have is pretty damn great.
Sanders isn’t your typical losing candidate. By every other metric, he’s still in the game. Sanders out-raised Clinton each month of this year. He outspent her, too, putting up ads at a 2-to–1 ratio in the New York primary. And that machine hasn’t slowed down. Not only did Sanders outspend Clinton by the same ratio in almost every state that voted on Tuesday, but he’ll likely beat Clinton in fundraising for April as well, surpassing her total amount after starting the race at a huge cash disadvantage.
Even if Sanders is mainly capitalizing on existing trends and technologies, his swelling coffers are a remarkable and a dramatic change from the usual dynamic wherein challengers are more or less finished after Super Tuesday, and the ones who have the will to continue lack the money to do so. Sanders, by contrast, has both the cash and the will to press on. And he should. Far from packing up or giving in to any pressure to quit, Sanders should fight through the remaining primaries, and take his campaign to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.
Sanders still has an unprecedented opportunity to leave a stamp on the Democratic Party. By fighting in remaining primaries and caucuses—by raising huge sums and drawing massive crowds—Sanders can show the extent to which his message resonates with millions of Democrats, including the young voters and activists poised to lead the party in the future. He shows, in other words, the extent to which the party belongs to his ideas, even if it doesn’t belong to him—a fact he can underscore with new polls showing a large leftward swing among millennial voters, and a similar swing among Democrats writ large.
It’s also an opportunity to bring his support to down-ballot candidates. For the Sanders campaign to make lasting change as a Sanders movement, it needs to seed like-minded politicians throughout every office from the Senate to the school board. A presidential campaign of the size and scale attained by Sanders is a perfect opportunity to build a counterestablishment movement within the Democratic Party. Liberal groups like Democracy for America and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee have endorsed candidates vying for seats in upcoming states like California and New Jersey. Team Sanders can showcase them and even encourage donations to their campaigns, providing a tangible assist and building the kinds of political ties that last. And if Sanders can help elect these progressive Democrats, he has allies for when he returns to the Senate.
All of this, together, will build leverage for the convention, so that Sanders can shape the Democratic Party platform and win real concessions from the Clinton campaign, on everything from the shape and design of future primaries to actual policies.
In 2014, the Census Bureau reported that 42 percent of voting-age citizens in the United States actually voted, the lowest in a midterm since the Census began collecting the data in 1978. However, digging deeper, this number is even more worrying than it initially appears, because voting in the U.S. is deeply divided across race, age and class.
Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently drew attention to this issue, along with some criticism, by saying that “poor people don’t vote. I mean, that’s just a fact.” He went on to say, “That’s a sad reality of American society. And that’s why we have to transform one, as you know, one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major society of Earth.”
Both Sanders and Clinton have made voting rights core to their platforms (Clinton has pushed for automatic voter registration and ending felon disenfranchisement), as they should. The evidence suggests that more voting would lead to a more representative democracy.
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As my 2015 report at Demos (which uses Census Bureau data) shows, there are deep class disparities in turnout in presidential elections, and these gap are magnified in midterms.
However, turnout bias this dramatic is not the norm internationally. A 2009 study by Jens Alber and Ulrich Kohler finds, “The United States thus stand out for their remarkably high inequality of electoral participation.” Political scientist Henning Finseraas finds that the United States has dramatically higher income bias than any of the countries he studied. Political scientists Lane Kenworthy and Jonas Pontusson, after exploring the relationship between voter turnout and redistribution, write that, “low turnout offers a potentially compelling explanation why the American welfare state has been so much less responsive to rising market inequality than other welfare states.” This bias does indeed lead to policies that benefit the rich.
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The fact that low-income people aren’t registered means that they can’t vote, but it also means they’re invisible to campaigns, which use voter files to mobilize voters. A recent study by political scientists Simon Jackman and Bradley Spahn finds that individuals who don’t appear on voter lists report far lower levels of mobilization by campaigns. They also find,
“If unregistered and unlisted people voted at comparable rates to registered people with the same level of interest in politics, both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections would have been won by Democrats.”
Sanders is making his way to Purdue’s campus Wednesday. He will speak at the France A. Córdova Recreational Sports Center at noon.
“I don’t think anyone ever really understands how big these Bernie events are until they see the numerous amount of people lining up,” Purdue Boilers for Purdue president Dana Hazekamp said. “I’ve already heard my friends saying that they’re going to get here at the crack of dawn.”
Many Purdue students are anxious to hear him speak.
“I definitely want to hear him talk,” Purdue student Tyler Anderson said. “I think that he is a good guy, and that he genuinely does want to do the best for this country.”
Hazekamp added, “A lot of people love to hear him speak. A lot of people relate to what he has to say, so I think it’s a good location for him.”
“The biggest thing that I like to hear him talk about is getting the big money out of politics.” said Hazekamp. “I am a big supporter of that.”
People must have a ticket to attend. The event is open to the public. Tickets are free and available at the Cordova Rec Center.
Public transportation to the event is available by taking CityBus routes 13, 14 or 27 to the CoRec stop.