In Thursday’s palindrome 6/16/16 address by Bernie Sanders to his supporters, he pledged to do all in his power to defeat Donald Trump and to make the Democratic Party more Progressive.
But another, unusually cool move he did was to ask his supporters to
ACTUALLY RUN FOR OFFICE THEMSELVES….
(full disclosure: I am a candidate for State House in Colorado — no Primary, just me versus the R in the General)
In his simple ask, according to the Press Release that was featured on the June 17, 2016 Rachel Maddow show episode, in less than 24 hours,
Bernie Sanders has gotten 6,700 people to sign up to say ‘YES’ I want to run as a Progressive for public office.
Now I can tell you, in my little neck of the woods here in Arvada, Colorado, nearly ALL of the Bernie supporters who are helping me on my campaign, and the campaigns of many other new Democratic candidates, are self described
“Independents” who crossed over to the Democratic party SPECIFICALLY because of Bernie Sanders, and I’d guess close to half, if not more, of the 6, 700 people who signed up to say they’d be willing to run as a candidate are former Independents who have become Democrats because of Bernie Sanders.
His request:
We need to start engaging at the local and state level in an unprecedented way. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers helped us make political history during this last year. These are people deeply concerned about the future of our country, and about their own communities. Now, we need many of them to start running for school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and Governorships. State and local governments make enormously important decisions and we cannot allow right-wing Republicans to increasingly control them.
I hope very much that many of you watching tonight are prepared to engage at that level. Please go to my website at berniesanders.com/win to learn more about how you can effectively run for office or get involved in politics at the local or state level. I have no doubt that with the energy, and enthusiasm, our campaign has shown that we can win significant numbers of local and state elections if people are prepared to become involved. I also hope that people will give serious thought to running for statewide offices and the United States Congress. We need new blood in the political process, and you are that new blood.
If that many people become involved as Progressives for the Democratic Party because of Bernie Sanders, it will be a great win.
We will be able to take back many of the State Legislatures, city councils, and School boards now run by Republicans…
And we do that by convincing Independents that the Democratic Party is better than the Republicans…
And it seems Bernie Sanders has done a great job of doing that….
And that’s a beautiful thing for us all….