"We must not have a Republican in the White House," Sanders told a crowd of 5,000 at Springfield's riverfront Island Park, according to the Register-Guard in Eugene.
The Eugene paper said Sanders accused Republicans of looking to cut Medicaid and Medicare, block access to abortion and thwart campaign finance limits.
"It's hard to imagine why anyone would vote for that agenda," Sanders said. "It's a fringe agenda."
But Sanders, making a play for higher voter turnout in Oregon, also gave no sign that he was ready to surrender to Clinton. Even as he urged supporters not to stray across the political aisle in the fall, he called for their votes now.
"I think the evidence is overwhelming," he said, "you are looking at the strongest Democratic candidate," he said.
Sanders repeated campaign themes that align with the views of many Oregon progressives, such as correcting income inequality through higher taxes on the rich.
Sanders was last in Oregon on March 25, when he spoke at a rally in Portland. During that visit, a bird stole the spotlight when it landed on Sanders' lectern. The photo of the bird and Sanders looking at each other went viral on social media.
Senator Bernie Sanders spent Thursday afternoon laying out in more detail than usual his views for shaping the Democratic Party’s agenda and the need for elected officials to focus on achieving progressive political goals.
At a rally Thursday in Springfield, Ore., Mr. Sanders spoke at length about how Democrats had not spent enough time trying to help working-class people obtain adequate health care and higher wages.
“The Democratic Party has to reach a fundamental conclusion: Are we on the side of working people or big-money interests?” Mr. Sanders asked the crowd. “Do we stand with the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor? Or do we stand with Wall Street speculators and the drug companies and the insurance companies? Now our job is not just to revitalize the Democratic Party, not only to open the doors to young people and working people — our job is to revitalize American democracy.”
Mr. Sanders criticized Democratic leaders on many of the core issues of his campaign. He questioned whether leaders were thinking about the concerns of voters rather than the economic fortunes of large industries. He also said the party needed to focus on a “50-state strategy” to win local elections and bring in new members.
“The problem we are having now is not, in my view, that the Republicans are winning elections,” Mr. Sanders said. “The problem is that the Democrats are losing elections. In November of 2014, the midterm elections, 63 percent of the American people did not vote; 80 percent of young people and low-income people did not vote. And I think the reason for that is the Democratic Party up to now has not been clear about which side they are on on the major issues facing this country.”
While it looks increasingly likely that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will not be the Democratic presidential nominee, his impact is already being felt — in Europe, as well as the United States.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said Sanders’ meteoric rise is evidence that unabashed progressive politics is an effective antidote to the far-right xenophobia on the rise across the developed world.
“Every time we have a spasm of capitalism, whether this is the 1930s or now, the seeds of vulgar ultra-right-wingness sprout into a very ugly tree,” Varoufakis said.
Bernie Sanders, he argued, “has succeeded” in appealing to the disenchanted voters hurt by a struggling economy, who might otherwise rally behind Donald Trump or politicians like Trump.
“I am very impressed by his capacity to rise from almost complete marginality to the center of the debate,” Varoufakis continued. “And if you look at the discussion he has invigorated, or reinvigorated, in the Democratic Party, that just goes to show that it is perfectly possible to excite young people, people who are apathetic, people who loathe politics, into participating in politics again.”
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Varoufakis also rejected the idea that Sanders is a “populist” who merely occupies a different place on the ideological spectrum from demagogues like Trump and his European counterparts.
“To describe Bernie Sanders as anything other than a typical Democrat New Dealer, who simply remained consistent in the principles of FDR, even LBJ, while the whole spectrum of the Democratic Party moved toward the looney right, would be inaccurate,” he said.
From both sides of the aisle, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy views have been consistently mischaracterized. A few weeks ago, Washington Post syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote a piece called “The Four Foreign Policies” in which he contrasted what he called Sanders’s “pacifism” with the “unilateralism” of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the “mercantilism” of Donald Trump and the “internationalism” of Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, Katrina vanden Heuvel, also a Post columnist, called him a “realist.” Others have dismissed or ridiculed Sanders as lacking any coherent national security agenda. Nineteen Clinton supporters released a letter earlier this month slamming Sanders for perceived lack of interest in global affairs.
On closer inspection, Sanders’s foreign policy views are clear, even though they defy conventional categories. In his debate with Clinton in New York, for example, Sanders articulated an alternative approach to climate change, the Middle East and multilateral alliances. He then traveled to Vatican City, where he gave a speech about global economic inequality. Before the Democratic presidential debate this month, his campaign responded to Clinton’s attack with its own letter of support signed by 20 foreign policy experts praising his foreign policy views.
These views are not pacifist, as Krauthammer argued. Sanders continues to argue for a strong military, the defeat of the Islamic State and the use of military force, albeit as a last resort. Nor are they purely “realist.” The letter circulated by members of Sanders’s foreign policy team stressed military restraint, rule-of-law-minded diplomacy and global economic justice — both as ends in themselves and as a means to strengthen U.S. national security.
Sanders did not invent this vision. He is channeling an alternative viewpoint on foreign affairs articulated by many on the progressive left for decades and outlined in Foreign Affairs magazine last summer by members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the article, Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy (Conn.), Brian Schatz (Hawaii) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.) laid out concrete and specific policy proposals. These included increased funding for foreign aid; efforts to protect human rights and gender equality at home and abroad; renewed support for multilateral institutions; restrictions on the executive branch’s expanded power to wage war; and a strengthened socioeconomic base at home to more effectively project U.S. power.
Many of Sanders’s stated policy positions — on war and peace, diplomacy, inequality, and global crime — echo this menu of options.
“Our goal, whether we win or we do not win, is to transform the Democratic Party, to open the doors to working people, to senior citizens, to young people, in a way that does not exist today,” he added.
Sanders’ brain trust maintains that even though he would need to win roughly two-thirds of pledged delegates in the remaining states to catch up to Clinton’s total — an all-but-impossible task because of the Democrats’ proportional allocation rules — the front-runner almost certainly won’t have clinched the nomination via pledged delegates alone by the convention. The Sanders strategists expect Clinton will have to rely on her support from the party’s superdelegates to get her over the 2,382-delegate threshold to claim victory.
They are also counting on Sanders to be tied or slightly ahead of Clinton in national polling by July — at the moment, he’s within 4 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.
It’s possible the Sanders campaign will have momentum from the final weeks of the campaign. The May primary calendar is looking a lot friendlier to Sanders than the preceding weeks. Polls in next week’s Indiana primary show the Vermont senator is within striking distance of Clinton. Better still for Sanders, it’s an open primary format in which voters don’t need to be Democrats to participate.
With likely victories in West Virginia, Oregon, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota in late May and early June — capped by a potentially strong performance in California — Sanders could have additional political leverage on top of the implicit threat that his army of young supporters won’t fall in line behind Clinton come November.
“They’re misreading the convention that they’re going into. The delegates for Bernie are 45 percent of the Democratic Party [and] they don’t seem to have a recognition that 45 percent of the Democratic Party is different than them,” explained one Sanders strategist of the Clinton campaign, previewing the next three months. “She’s going to have to work.”
Sanders’ most ardent fans have not been surprised by their leader’s defiance. After all, the senator has been arguing all along that the country’s entire political system is fundamentally broken and platforms of the Democratic Party are too narrow. He has spoken since the beginning of building a movement, not just electing a candidate. To back Clinton now could look like a concession of ideas, not just delegates.
“It's not just about Bernie, It's about the mindset that Bernie has. He’s all about for the people not individual,” Mary Crow, 20, a student and Sanders’ fan said Tuesday night in at Sanders’ rally in Huntington, West Virginia.
“I firmly believe that there will be people just like him in the future. I don't think it's over. Even if he doesn't win, it’s just beginning,” Hall continued. “I can't believe how many people turned up today.”
For Sanders, a political revolution means in large part more active civil engagement, and Sanders reiterated today that whether he is elected or not he wants to see voter turnout increase substantially across the country. By continuing his speaking tour and delivering addresses mostly on college campuses, Sanders can in theory continue to gin up support and enthusiasm around his issues, though it remains to be seen where or how he will ask his fans to specifically direct their efforts should his campaign officially end.
Sanders has just begun using his email list and fundraising machine to back local candidates whose agendas align with his. In last few weeks, he has sent fundraising emails in support of three congressional candidates in Nevada, Washington State and New York, perhaps a sign that more of this will come as well.
The Sanders campaign hasn’t conceded anything, however, even stressing after Tuesday’s disappointing finish that he’s in the race for the long haul.
"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," Sanders said in the statement.
Indeed, the campaign has been well underway in Indiana, which holds its primary next Tuesday and allocates 92 delegates proportionally.
"His operation actually has been pretty impressive," political science professor Marjorie Hershey of Indiana University said. "I live in Bloomington [Indiana] and this will probably be one of his best areas of the state.
"His canvasing has been pretty thorough and I've seen a number of Sanders’ television ads, whereas I have seen only one [Hillary] Clinton television ad.”
Hershey said she saw her first Sanders ad a week before she saw a Clinton ad, which is consistent with his state director’s comments to ABC News that they started their operation there more than a month ago.
"We were sent here to win six weeks ago in a vacuum regardless of what else was happening," the Sander’s campaign Indiana director, Pete D'Alessendro, said.
"We are here to win Indiana."
Residents of some Baltimore neighborhoods are no better off than people living in impoverished North Korea and the violent West Bank, Bernie Sanders said during a campaign rally in Maryland ahead of that state’s primary.
"Poverty in Baltimore, and around this country — poverty is a death sentence," Sanders said April 24. He then laid out some rather unflattering and harsh comparisons:
"Fifteen neighborhoods in Baltimore have lower life expectancies than North Korea. Two of them have a higher infant mortality rate than the West Bank in Palestine. Baltimore teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 face poorer health conditions and a worse economic outlook than those in distressed cities in Nigeria, India, China and South Africa. We are talking about the United States of America in the year 2016 — a country in which the top 1/10th of 1 percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent."
While it would be wrong to take Sanders’ claim to mean that conditions overall are worse than Baltimore, we found that his specific comparisons are largely accurate.
"The comparisons fairly make the point that there are some parts of this rich country where conditions resemble those in much poorer countries," said Alan Berube, an expert on urban poverty at the Brookings Institution. "This isn't isolated to Baltimore; there are neighborhoods in nearly every big U.S. city and metropolitan area, and many rural communities, that perform just as poorly on these outcomes."
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Some of Sanders’ figures need to be updated, but the gist of his specific comparisons are accurate: 12 Baltimore neighborhoods have a lower life expectancy than North Korea; 11 have a higher infant mortality rate than the West Bank; and research shows health conditions are worse for poor teens than in Baltimore than in Ibadan, New Delhi and Shanghai.
Bernie Sanders is America’s most popular senator.
The least popular? Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader.
They top the list of most popular and least popular senators in their home states, measured by Morning Consult, a nonpartisan media and survey technology company. It surveyed 62,288 registered voters across the nation since January.
It found potential trouble for vulnerable Republicans this fall. The party now has 54 of the Senate’s 100 seats, but 24 GOP seats are up and at least six are regarded as potential pickups for Democrats. Ten Democratic seats are in play, but only one, Nevada, is seen as a possible GOP gain.
The shaky Republican incumbents all hail from states President Barack Obama won four years ago. The poll shows four are among the senators with the lowest approval ratings.
They include: Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., 46 percent; Rob Portman, R-Ohio, 44 percent; Ron Johnson, R-Wis., 43 percent; and Mark Kirk, R-Ill., 39 percent. Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., had 54 percent approval.
Sanders, on the other hand, has an approval rating of 80 percent among his Vermont constituents, a better showing than any of his 99 other colleagues. Only 17 percent disapprove.
Two lawsuits are brewing in New York state, seeking to stop the New York primary election results from being certified. The suits, one filed by attorney Mark Moody and one filed by attorneys for Election Justice USA, are approaching the same problem from two different angles. (Read more about Mark Moody here.) If either lawsuit is approved, what could this mean for the delegate count in New York? Could Bernie Sanders pick up any additional delegates from the primary?
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With the huge number of voters who had problems or weren’t able to vote at all in New York, an overarching decision that allows their votes to be counted or declares the primary unconstitutional could certainly change the delegate count, depending on what type of remedy is chosen.
In New York City, as many as 121,056 provisional and affidavit ballots were cast, according to SI Live. That includes 40,000 provisional ballots in Brooklyn, according to Inquistir. But these numbers don’t even include the people who didn’t vote at all because they were told they weren’t registered and were turned away from the polls without filling out a provisional ballot.
Supposing that every provisional ballot does eventually get counted, this could change the delegate count quite a bit. Here’s an example.
In the primary, Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders 58 percent to 42 percent, according to The New York Times. She had 1,054,038 votes in the state to Sanders’ 763,469 votes, giving her 139 delegates to Sanders’ 108. Since delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic primary, a change in vote numbers could certainly make a difference in the delegate count.
For example, in New York City, Clinton had 586,017 votes to Sanders’ 338,313, with a total of 924,330 votes cast, giving her 63.4 percent over Sanders’ 36.6 percent, according to the New York Times. If all the 121,056 provisional ballots in New York City went to Sanders and were counted, that would change the count to 586,017 votes for Clinton and 459,369 votes for Sanders. This would give Clinton a New York City lead of 56 percent versus Sanders’ 44 percent. She would still lead, but by less.
If all the provisional ballots throughout the state of New York were counted, Clinton would likely still win. But because delegates are awarded proportionally, she might win by a smaller margin, which would mean that some delegates would flip to Sanders.
Who cares if his policies seem fantastical in this era of broken government? Who cares if the bottom-line numbers show that it would take something equally fantastical to push him to the Democratic presidential nomination? And who cares if many people dismiss him as a socialistic joke?
Who cares?
I didn’t see anyone who did Wednesday night in Bloomington as I watched Bernie Sanders lift up a mostly student crowd of about 3,000 on the Indiana University campus, and as I witnessed some things that have been missing from this year’s political campaigns.
Happiness. Joy. Inspiration. You know, little things like that.
“Our job is to think big,” the Vermont senator told the raucous crowd. “Our job is to think outside the status quo.”
That’s definitely what Sanders’ overachieving campaign is doing. And even if you disagree with every bit of policy driving it, it’s hard to argue against the benefit of a campaign that has made so many people believe that this country can still do big things, and that politicians can still drive important change. Even if you think there’s a more qualified candidate in the race, as I do, you have to appreciate Sanders for pushing the debate forward on important issues and providing us with a needed reminder that all those reports about idealism’s death were somewhat exaggerated.
“He really tries to include everyone, and to make sure everyone has the same opportunities in life,” freshman Lauren Lad told me just before Sanders took the stage. “Bernie really is a unique man.”
In this so-called Year of the Angry Voter, a year that has been dominated by so much understandable dissatisfaction, Lad’s words were refreshing, as was the jovial scene in Bloomington. Thousands of students lined up on a rainy night hours before Sanders’ speech (most could not get into the modest-sized auditorium), cheering for a candidate who has made them believe in the art of the possible.