"Let me make this clear, so there is no confusion: We are in this campaign to win, and become the Democratic nominee," he told a crowd at Purdue University ahead of Indiana's May 3 primary, insisting that he can still finish with more pledged delegates.
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He then previewed a more likely fight: a convention scrap over the party's platform.
"But if we do not win, we intend to win every delegate that we can, so that when we go to Philadelphia in July we are going to have the votes to put together the strongest progressive agenda that any political party has ever seen," he said. "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."
Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, echoed those remarks Wednesday, saying that he "absolutely" sees a path to victory for the Vermont senator.
Weaver said on CNN that he expects Sanders to have good performances in upcoming state contests, particularly in California on June 7, which he thinks the senator will win.
"This is a campaign for winning, and I think when you watch his speeches today in Indiana, they are going to look a lot like his speeches from Monday. There's not really any change in the campaign. The campaign is going forward, it has a plan," Weaver said. "This is a campaign for the nomination, for victory, and to transform as Bernie says the country and the party."
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders told supporters at two college town rallies in Indiana that he will stay in the race, because “the only way that we transform this country is through a political revolution.”
But even as Sanders said he was still seeking the nomination — with the help of super delegates if necessary — his campaign for the first time acknowledged a Plan B: a fight to influence the party platform when the Democratic National Convention is held in July.
“Our job is to think big,” Sanders said Wednesday night to 3,200 supporters at Indiana University-Bloomington. “Our job is to think outside the status quo.”
His fight will include a call for a $15 minimum wage, Sanders said, a Medicare-for-all public health care system, and an end to “disastrous trade policies” that he believes have sped the decline of American manufacturing. And he spoke at length about an issue that has become a signature of his populist campaign: income inequality, which he says comes from a “rigged economy” and a corrupt political system that gives wealthy donors more influence than voters.
“That is not democracy,” he said. ‘That is called oligarchy.”
“Together,” he added, “we are going to create an economy that works for all of us and not just the 1 percent.”
Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders didn't have trouble drawing a crowd of more than 2,200 at his town hall Wednesday at Purdue University, but he does face a challenge bringing in crucial votes.
The event marked Sanders' first visit to Indiana during his presidential campaign and came as his chances to win the Democratic nomination this summer continue to look bleak.
Still, Sanders urged supporters gathered at Purdue's France A. Córdova Recreational Sports Center to vote for him in the state's May 3 primary election.
"We have won, as of today, primaries and caucuses in 17 states throughout this country," he said to the crowd. "Indiana will be the 18th."
"I am very good in arithmetic and I can count delegates, and we are behind today," Sanders said. "But you know what? Unusual things happen in politics."
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Purdue students told the Journal & Courier earlier this week they were impressed Sanders would come to their campus and cares about their vote.
Sanders, who also held a rally at IU Wednesday night, is the first, and so far only, candidate to visit a college in Indiana.
"I feel like he definitely does have a chance because he's kind of targeting college students," said Purdue freshman Makayla Orr.
He went after Wall Street and corporations. He addressed economic inequality and student debt.
Bernie Sanders came out swinging in front of an enthusiastic crowd at Purdue University Wednesday, the first of two campaign stops scheduled for the day. Sanders positioned himself as an underdog who would fight for the middle class and stamp out corporate corruption.
He criticized the rise of political action committees that he said have fundamentally bought elections. He pledged to change the status quo but said he couldn’t do it alone, imploring voters young and old to bring about “a political revolution” where millions of people “stand up and fight back.”
Sanders spoke for more than an hour in West Lafayette. The crowd greeted him with chants of "Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!" when he took the stage.
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Sanders talked about transforming the Democratic Party and the political system itself, expressing disgust at "corporate greed" that's put billionaires ahead of the vast majority of Americans. Sanders wants a $15 an hour minimum wage, something he said will uplift the poor and middle class.
"What democracy is not is a corrupt system that allows billionaires to buy elections," he said, warning those in attendance that the U.S. was moving the direction of an oligarchy in which the rich controlled the economy and political system.
In some of his most pointed comments, Sanders criticized Walmart and the Walton family. After calling the Waltons the richest family in America, Sanders said the company didn't pay its workers enough. In Sanders' eyes, that creates an imbalance and a "rigged economy," something he referenced multiple times during his speech.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Bernie Sanders is an extremely interesting phenomenon. He’s a decent, honest person. That’s pretty unusual in the political system. Maybe there are two of them in the world, you know. But he’s considered radical and extremist, which is a pretty interesting characterization, because he’s basically a mainstream New Deal Democrat. His positions would not have surprised President Eisenhower, who said, in fact, that anyone who does not accept New Deal programs doesn’t belong in the American political system. That’s now considered very radical.
The other interesting aspect of Sanders’s positions is that they’re quite strongly supported by the general public, and have been for a long time. That’s true on taxes. It’s true on healthcare. So, take, say, healthcare. His proposal for a national healthcare system, meaning the kind of system that just about every other developed country has, at half the per capita cost of the United States and comparable or better outcomes, that’s considered very radical. But it’s been the position of the majority of the American population for a long time. So, you go back, say, to the Reagan—right now, for example, latest polls, about 60 percent of the population favor it. When Obama put through the Affordable Care Act, there was, you recall, a public option. But that was dropped. It was dropped even though it was supported by about almost two-thirds of the population. You go back earlier, say, to the Reagan years, about 70 percent of the population thought that national healthcare should be in the Constitution, because it’s such an obvious right. And, in fact, about 40 percent of the population thought it was in the Constitution, again, because it’s such an obvious right. The same is true on tax policy and others.
So we have this phenomenon where someone is taking positions that would have been considered pretty mainstream during the Eisenhower years, that are supported by a large part, often a considerable majority, of the population, but he’s dismissed as radical and extremist. That’s an indication of how the spectrum has shifted to the right during the neoliberal period, so far to the right that the contemporary Democrats are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. And the Republicans are just off the spectrum. They’re not a legitimate parliamentary party anymore. And Sanders has—the significant part of—he has pressed the mainstream Democrats a little bit towards the progressive side. You see that in Clinton’s statements. But he has mobilized a large number of young people, these young people who are saying, "Look, we’re not going to consent anymore." And if that turns into a continuing, organized, mobilized—mobilized force, that could change the country—maybe not for this election, but in the longer term.
Surprisingly, this week’s prize for “Stupidest Political Comment in the Presidential Race” doesn’t go to Donnie Trump or Ted Cruz. Rather, the honor goes to the clueless cognoscenti of conventional political wisdom. These pundits and professional campaign operatives have made a unilateral decision that Bernie Sanders must now quit the race for the Democratic nomination. Why? Because, they say: “He Can’t Win.”
Actually, he already has. Sanders’ vivid populist vision, unabashed idealism, and big ideas for restoring America to its own people have jerked the presidential debate out of the hands of status quo corporatists, revitalized the class consciousness and relevance of the Democratic Party, energized millions of young people to get involved, and proven to the Democratic establishment that they don’t have to sell out to big corporate donors to raise the money they need to run for office.
Bernie has substantively — even profoundly — changed American politics for the better, which is why he’s gaining more and more support and keeps winning delegates. From the start, he said: “This campaign is not about me” — it’s a chance for voters who have been disregarded and discarded to forge a new political revolution that will continue to grow beyond this election and create a true people’s government.
From coast to coast, millions of voters have been “Feeling the Bern.” That’s the campaign slogan that grassroots supporters created to express their passion for the unconventional presidential run being made by Bernie Sanders.
Yes, passion — an outpouring of genuine excitement that is (as we say in Texas) “hotter than high school love.” All this for a 74-year-old Democratic Socialist who is openly taking on the corporate plutocracy that’s been knocking down the middle class and holding down the poor. Sanders is the oldest candidate in the race — yet, politically, he’s the youngest candidate, exuberantly putting forth an FDR-sized vision and agenda to lift up America’s workaday majority. And, guess what? It turns out that workaday Americans really value democracy over plutocracy, so that’s where his passionate support comes from.
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As Sanders puts it: “I run not to oppose any man or woman, but to propose new and far-reaching policies to deal with the crisis of our times… It may be too late to stop the billionaire class from trying to buy the presidency and congress… But we owe it to our children and grandchildren to try…We need to face up to the reality of where we are as a nation, and we need a mass movement of people to fight for change.” That’s what real politics should be — not merely a vacuous campaign to elect a personality, but a momentous democratic movement fighting for the common good.
Bernie Sanders is planning to lay off hundreds of campaign staffers across the country and focus much of his remaining effort on winning the June 7 California primary.
The Vermont senator revealed the changes a day after Hillary Clinton’s victories widened her delegate lead and left her all but certain to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
Despite the changes, Mr. Sanders said he would remain in the race through the party’s summer convention and stressed that he hoped to bring staff members back on board if his political fortunes improved. But political experts say the layoffs signal Mr. Sanders is beginning to accept that he will not be the Democratic nominee and is now focused on pulling the party toward a more progressive agenda.
“We want to win as many delegates as we can, so we do not need workers now in states around the country,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “We don’t need people right now in Connecticut. That election is over. We don’t need them in Maryland. So what we are going to do is allocate our resources to the 14 contests that remain, and that means that we are going to be cutting back on staff.”
When asked how many people would be let go, Mr. Sanders did not give an exact number but did say, “It will be hundreds of staff members.”
“We have had a very large staff, which was designed to deal with 50 states in this country; 40 of the states are now behind us,” he said “So we have had a great staff, great people.”
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Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Mr. Sanders, said in a statement that the campaign would keep on staff more than 300 workers focused on the remaining contests.
Blake Valdez, decked out in “Feel the Bern” blue, bounded off the Purdue Co-Rec gym floor, bouncing off friends and totally jacked up by being that close to Bernie Sanders on Wednesday afternoon.
“Huge fan, biggest fan. I woke this morning feeling like Jewish Santa Claus was coming to Purdue — my campus,” Valdez, a Purdue senior, said after the Vermont senator’s 66-minute speech on the West Lafayette campus. “No way did he disappoint. The window is closing, I know, “I think God can do great miracles. I believe in Bernie.”
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“First of all, this is Indiana, and this is our primary,” said Gina Billadeau, a West Lafayette resident. “I’m going to make my statement with my vote, and it’s not going to Hillary. We make a statement if Bernie wins or even does well here. Like Bernie said up there today, this is more than about getting Bernie Sanders to the White House. This is about a revolution — even if that revolution is making it to us like it is right now.”
“I think (the Indiana primary) did come a little too late to do a lot of good for Bernie,” Buikema said. “It does look like a dire situation. … But I’m here to support what Bernie Sanders is all about, maybe more than to support Bernie Sanders himself.”
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Charles Calvin, a delivery man from Lafayette, said he wasn’t giving up on what he called an “unselfish vote for the man we’re coming to see.” He said Sanders’ promises of college tuition probably wouldn’t help him. Same with health care. (“I’m a pretty healthy guy,” he said.)
“I mean, when I buy a pair of shoes, I’ll admit that I’m a bit selfish and I want them to look good on me,” Calvin said. “When I vote, I think about my country, and I want it to look good on all of us.”
But if Sanders isn’t around this fall, what’s the backup plan?
“Hold up,” Calvin said. “If you’re down in the fourth quarter, do you just give up? No, you go out and play. I believe in sports Hail Marys, why not political Hail Marys?”
The Democratic candidate seems to believe that his best shot at a political revolution now rests with fighting to transform the party, and politics-as-usual, rather than winning the White House. As the campaign shifts into this new stage of the race, it may increasingly need to fight a two-front battle, with Sanders doing everything he can to maintain grassroots enthusiasm while working to effectively make the case for change to party elites.
A behind-the-scenes push to shape party politics appears to already be underway. The New York Times recently reported that “aides to Mr. Sanders have been pressing party officials for a significant role in drafting the platform for the Democratic convention.” But how much would it matter if Sanders is indeed able to shape the platform? It would be far less powerful than winning the White House, but that doesn’t mean it would be inconsequential. The convention could provide a high-visibility opportunity for Sanders to preach his message of political revolution. If he can influence the Democratic platform, that would provide tangible evidence of his success. A party platform that spells out many of Sanders’s political priorities could become a tool for activists to hold the party accountable and pressure Democrats to move in a more progressive direction.
The long-term success of the Sanders campaign hinges on the extent to which its message turns into conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party. A strong showing by Sanders at the Democratic convention and an impact on the party platform could further that goal. “I think Sanders is right that partys evolve in their thinking on issues and to the extent that particular priorities become institutionalized within the party that does have implications for the way that future candidates are going to act,” said John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, in an interview. “The important thing is whether the priorities of the Sanders’s campaign and his supporters become fixtures of the party’s agenda.”
Still, whatever happens at the convention will only amount to one part of the equation. Whether the campaign’s articulated ambitions ultimately turn into law will also depend on the extent to which Sanders’s grassroots army, made up of supporters, allied networks and candidates who attempt to emulate his success, continue to mobilize to carry out his work. If Sanders wants to keep fighting for a more progressive party, he will need to keep his supporters engaged. What they say and do in the coming months will set the tone for what happens this summer as well.
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Whatever happens, it is increasingly clear that Team Sanders is thinking about how to lay the groundwork for a different kind of victory. The victory likely will not be one that lands their candidate in the White House, but it may be one that will influence the trajectory of liberal politics for years to come.
While even Bernie Sanders is starting to admit that his chance of winning the Democratic nomination is exceedingly slim, some of his former staff and volunteers have formed a political action committee dedicated to giving the senator “the ability to make real change from the White House.”
Brand New Congress, which was launched Monday, is looking ahead to the 2018 midterm elections to “replace Congress all at once” with lawmakers who agree with the Vermont independent’s policy positions. The PAC won’t be able to fully accomplish that goal in 2018, however, since just 468 of the 535 lawmakers in the House and Senate will be up for re-election.
A timeline on the PAC’s website says that it plans to form local search committees to recruit organizers and candidates who are new to politics. (Sanders, for his part, has served in Congress for 26 years.) The PAC says it will codify various progressive policies in a platform that its slate of candidates must support.
Zack Exley, one of the PAC’s founding organizers and a senior Sanders adviser until a few weeks ago, said Brand New Congress can accomplish its goals because Sanders has shown that grassroots candidates who weren’t taken seriously in the past can recruit thousands of volunteers and raise tens of millions of dollars online. The senator has out-raised Clinton in each of the last three months, and has now matched her total fundraising haul, helping him stay in the race much longer than anyone anticipated before the primaries.
“We learned … that the grassroots are better qualified to run electoral campaigns than Democratic party operatives,” Exley told The Huffington Post in an email. “They just need to be given the tools, the data, the offices and the structure to succeed.”
“We want a supermajority in Congress that is fighting for jobs, criminal justice reform and the environment,” Exley said. “Most Americans actually want that, and I think we get it by running Dems in blue areas, Republicans in deep red areas, and by running independents wherever we didn’t defeat incumbents.”
In August 1963, 21-year-old college student Bernie Sanders was arrested during a school segregation protest in Chicago. Sanders joined hundreds of demonstrators, most black parents and students, in protesting the installation of mobile classrooms to relieve overcrowding at black schools without transporting black students to white schools with open seats. Protestors barricaded the proposed construction site, and some physically blocked construction trucks and police cars. A new Sanders campaign advertisement features recently discovered video footage and a photograph of his arrest at this protest over five decades ago. “When I saw Bernie Sanders getting arrested for protesting segregation it was powerful,” actor and activist Danny Glover says in the ad. “The presidential candidate that has put himself on the line to be on the right side of history. I think Bernie is one of us. I think Bernie is with us.”
Sanders’s civil-rights record has been a subject of debate during this year's presidential campaign, and this school segregation protest is the most visible evidence of his activism. More important than strengthening Sanders’s credentials among black voters, his 1963 arrest is a window into the civil rights movement in the North and highlights a little-known turning point in the history of civil rights and education equality. The fights over segregation in Chicago are not as well known as the battles in Little Rock or Selma, but in the mid-1960s Chicago became the most important test case for implementing civil-rights legislation that prohibited school segregation.
The protest in which Sanders participated was part of a decade of civil-rights activism designed to force Chicago to address school segregation in the city. The demonstrations escalated in 1963 and included a massive “Freedom Day” school boycott organized by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a civil-rights coalition including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, black and white parents, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the organization with which Sanders was affiliated. Over 220,000 students (47 percent of total enrollment) stayed away from public schools on October 22, 1963, with many attending Freedom Schools at churches and community centers.
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It is great that Democratic voters are debating the civil-rights records of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and that more people now recognize that civil-rights activists were organized, creative, and persistent in the North as well as the South. More importantly, the history of civil rights and school segregation in Chicago, of which Sanders’s 1963 arrest is a part, makes it clear how far America must still travel to achieve equality.