Cycling, brunch, the beach – Bernie Sanders had quite the ‘Sunday Fun-day’ this weekend, or at least observed others out and about as he criss-crossed Los Angeles shaking hands and greeting people.
Two days before the California primary, the Vermont senator ventured into restaurants in West Hollywood, interrupted a fundraiser on the Santa Monica pier, and listened to mariachi music in Lynwood. At every corner, as has been the case for months, excited fans swarmed the progressive superstar, jockeying for a photo.
The "Sanders Stroll" has become a bit of legend this campaign cycle. The senator often walks down streets in cities he visits, especially days before voting.
"He likes doing it," Sanders’ communications director Michael Briggs told ABC News, acknowledging the outings were often spur of the moment and improvised, but adding that Sanders wants to "meet people." Briggs said the senator looked at a map and decided where he wanted to venture Sunday.
In West Hollywood, Sanders and his entourage stormed into a restaurant called Hamburger Mary’s, a disco joint of sorts that does a “drag brunch” on Sundays. Standing underneath flashing, colorful party lights, the senator took a microphone and told the patrons he needed them to get out and vote.
One woman exclaimed, "Welcome to West Hollywood," as she stuck her hand out to meet Sanders at a spot across the street. There, at Beach Nation, brunch-goers dined at tables in the sand.
Reporters, staff, and secret service, then traveled with the senator to the Santa Monica pier. Sanders spent over an hour weaving through carnival games and beneath rollercoasters greeting more people. Along the way, a man in the crowd suggested Sanders stop by a fundraising cycling session on the pier. Before long, the senator was onstage at the event. Athletes peeled off their stationary bikes to form a last minute audience for him.
With two days to go before Hillary Clinton likely secures the 2,383 delegates she needs to win the Democratic presidential nomination, voters in Puerto Rico handed Clinton a victory on Sunday. When the race was called by the major networks, Clinton was winning 64 percent of the vote to Sanders' 34 percent, and a likely majority of the territory's 60 pledged delegates.
On Tuesday, Democratic voters will go to the polls in six states, including delegate-rich California and New Jersey. Barring overwhelming victories for Sanders, the contests will ensure that Clinton wins both a majority of pledged delegates and a majority of overall delegates, assuming her support does not erode significantly among party-insider superdelegates.
But even if its vote won't change the outcome of the race, Puerto Rico was in the relatively rare position of playing more than a bit role in this year's election because of its colossal debt crisis. Candidates from both parties weighed in on whether the US government should allow the island to restructure debts under US bankruptcy laws. Puerto Rico's government, which owes more than $72 billion, has already defaulted three times on various debt payments.
Clinton and Sanders have different opinions on legislation that would help Puerto Rico restructure its debt but would also create a financial review board with oversight of the island's finances, harking back to the island's colonial roots. Clinton said she had "serious concerns" about the review board but urged swift passage. Sanders, on the other hand, said the bill would prioritize creditors over Puerto Rico's residents and encouraged other Democrats not to support it.
Bernie Sanders concluded a hurried day of campaigning Sunday by delivering a defiant rebuttal to the growing calls from some Democrats for him to drop out of the presidential race.
Rousing more than 4,000 supporters as the sun set over his rally near Qualcomm Stadium, Sanders signaled that he plans to fight on to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and is far from ready to cede the nomination to his rival, Hillary Clinton, who picked up more delegates in contests over weekend as she inched closer to clinching.
The sprawling and rebellious scene in Southern California captured the spirit of the Sanders campaign ahead of the primaries that will take place Tuesday here and in five other states. Instead of beginning to accept Clinton’s likely ascent, the Vermont senator and the people behind him are responding with simmering indignation about the forces they believe are aligned against him.
The sea of blue “Bernie” T-shirts roared as Sanders’s unfurled a rapid-fire riff on his perceived foes in the political realm and beyond: “corporate” news organizations, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, the “oligarchy” of billionaires.
“Any objective analyst of the current campaign understands that the energy and the grass-roots activism of this campaign is with us,” Sanders bellowed, putting an emphasis on that last word. “Not Hillary Clinton.”
My view is we have got to take on Wall Street, not take their money,” Sanders said as the crowd erupted, immediately following boos at the mention of her name.
Sanders’s volleys kept coming over the course of his 50-minute speech. He hit Clinton hard for not moving quickly in the past to support a $15 federal minimum wage. He dismissed her position on fracking and said that entire energy process must be banned in the United States.
Sanders also has a number of advantages. All along, he has done much better in open primaries, where independents as well as registered Democrats can vote. In California, independents, who are officially referred to as “non-partisans,” are eligible to vote as long as they registered by May 23rd. A second factor in Sanders’s favor is that, in recent months, the state has seen a surge in voter registrations, particularly among young voters, who skew heavily toward him. According to figures from the office of California’s Secretary of State, between mid-March and mid-May the number of registered Democrats rose by more than two hundred and twenty thousand, or about three per cent.
In Los Angeles County alone, almost two hundred thousand voters have registered since the start of the year, and more than sixty per cent of them were under the age of twenty. One independent expert, Paul Mitchell, of Political Data Inc., calculated that, since 2012, as many as two million new voters have joined the electoral register statewide, many of them under the age of thirty.
These figures augur well for Sanders, as does some of the recent polling data. The Field Poll showed him running ahead of Clinton in the northern half of the state, including the Bay Area. Clinton was doing best in Los Angeles County and the Central Valley, both of which have large minority populations. However, the poll also showed that, among Latino voters, Clinton was leading Sanders by just four points, forty-six per cent to forty-two. As was the case in many other states, there appears to be a large gender gap in California. Among men, Sanders was leading in the Field Poll by eleven points; among women, Clinton was ahead by nine.
The most recent poll from the Los Angeles Times, which was also published on Thursday, showed the contest virtually tied among registered voters, but among “likely voters” Clinton retained a ten-point lead. These figures raised the question of who is genuinely likely to turn out. Many of Clinton’s supporters are older people and loyal Democrats, who tend to vote pretty reliably. Sanders is counting on young people, independents, and other groups that have a lower propensity to actually appear at the polling stations. Getting enough of these voters to show up on Tuesday will be a big task. How big? “This may be the biggest voter mobilization challenge California has seen in many, many years,” Dan Schnur, the director of the Los Angeles Times poll and the head of U.S.C.’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, said.
Mr. Sanders’s chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination have been fading since Hillary Clinton’s big win in April in New York. With her victory on Sunday in Puerto Rico, she stands only 28 delegates short of securing the nomination, and she is almost certain to clinch it on Tuesday when New Jersey, California and four other states hold primaries. But one would not know that from the enthusiastic throngs of supporters who still flock to hear him call for a transformation of America’s economy and for a political revolution.
Some are there in solidarity with his message, and others because they believe Mr. Sanders when he says, against the odds, that he can still snag the nomination at the party’s convention in July.
And then there are many who, regardless of their outlook on the race, are streaming in for what they believe may be their last glimpse of a political phenomenon.
Hafeez Alam, 26, a mechanical engineer from Irvine, said that his mother regretted not seeing Barack Obama in person in 2008, and that he was not going to have similar regrets.
“It’s kind of like you listen to your favorite band on YouTube and you watch their concerts and DVDs, but when you go to a live event, it’s a totally different experience,” Mr. Alam said last month at the Irvine rally.
Diana Modica let her children, Charlie Baldwin, 15, and Harriet Baldwin, 14, skip school to attend the Palo Alto rally last week. She said she was holding out hope that Mr. Sanders would win but also wanted to give her children a lesson in political participation. “The last time I saw a presidential candidate was Jesse Jackson in ’84 at Stanford, so you don’t get a lot of chances,” she said.
Asked why she went to see Mr. Sanders last month in her hometown, National City, Calif., Angelica Arroyo said it was like watching a “superstar.”
“I just feel like this is, like, for a bucket list,” said Ms. Arroyo, 21.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign issued the following statement Sunday on long lines at polling places in Puerto Rico’s Democratic Party presidential primary election:
“Some Puerto Rico Democratic officials are claiming that the Sanders campaign requested fewer polling places in today’s primary contest. That’s completely false. The opposite is true. In emails with the party, Sanders’ staff asked the party to maintain the 1,500 plus presidential primary locations promised by the Puerto Rico Democratic party in testimony before the DNC in April, when the party was asking to have its caucus changed to a primary. They cannot blame their shoddy running of the primary on our campaign. This is just one example of irregularities going on in Puerto Rico voting today. We are the campaign that has been fighting to increase voter participation.”
In the Sanders stump speech, and in his interactions with voters, there are clues to how he broke through with non-white votes. Immigration is now an issue of morality and workers' dignity; gone are the days when, in sync with some labor leaders, he said that only people like David and Charles Koch wanted "open borders." At a Thursday rally in Modesto, Sanders promised to legalize workers by executive order if Congress did not pass "comprehensive" reform.
"Today, there are 11 undocumented people in this country, and when you are a worker, and when you are undocumented, you get cheated and you get exploited every single day," he said. "What your employer can do to you if you are an undocumented worker is a disgrace."
One day earlier, at a forum for Asian American and Pacific Islander voters in Palo Alto, Sanders traded the microphone with activists who raised specific concerns about racism and job security. As he has long done at forums like this, Sanders pivoted with every answer to talk about the larger systemic problems with the country.
But that changed when one voter brought up immigration. She asked Sanders about the "two million plus" people deported under the Obama Administration, and about deportations to come. He started his answer with a story about his parents, immigrants from Poland. Then he described his visit to Friendship Park, along the U.S.-Mexican border, one of the events meant to penetrate Spanish-speaking media.
"Anyone been there?" he asked. "It's a beautiful park, right on the ocean. At that park, there is a fence - a very heavily screened fence - and as I understand it, on weekends, for a few hours, people from both sides of the border can get through the border and talk to each other."
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Sanders sees these gains as evidence that early losses with nonwhite voters were tricks of the front-loaded Southern campaign schedule. In California, he proved that nonwhite voters could be won over if they simply learned who he was. In a telephone interview Thursday, he said his message is now resonating more with minority voters not because he's doing much differently but because of a greater familiarity with him.
Senator Bernie Sanders defiantly vowed again on Sunday to take his campaign to the Democratic National Convention this summer, even as Hillary Clinton edged closer to clinching the party’s presidential nomination and the final primary contests drew near.
Two days before Tuesday’s primaries in California and five other states, Mr. Sanders repeated his pledge not to concede even if Mrs. Clinton acquires enough delegates to reach 2,383, the threshold for securing the nomination.
A win in California is critical to Mr. Sanders’s plan to stay in the race through the convention and would give him a significant lift.
But with her victory in the Puerto Rico primary on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton is only 28 delegates short of the threshold and will most likely declare victory on Tuesday.
Mr. Sanders, however, insists that the convention will be contested because he is still lobbying superdelegates — party officials and state leaders who cast their final votes at the convention — to withdraw support from Mrs. Clinton and back him instead. He plans to make the case that he is a stronger candidate against Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee. A number of polls, he said, show he can beat Mr. Trump by larger margins than Mrs. Clinton can.
When Mr. Sanders, who greeted fans in West Hollywood, was asked by reporters if he remained committed to pushing for a contested convention, he said he “absolutely” was.
Bernie Sanders unleashed a sharp attack on Hillary Clinton over foreign policy on Sunday, casting her as too eager to use U.S. military force and saying her family charity's acceptance of foreign countries' contributions could be a conflict of interest.
The Vermont senator told CNN's Jake Tapper the former secretary of state is too quick to "rush in" and remove dictators and he criticized Clinton's approaches to Iraq, Libya and Syria.
"I worry about that, yeah, I do. I think her support for the war in Iraq was not just an aberration," Sanders said of Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq War, in the interview that aired on "State of the Union."
"I think that her willingness to kind of push President (Barack) Obama to overthrow (Libyan leader Moammar) Gaddafi and lead to the kind of instability that we're seeing now in Libya -- not inconsistent with her other views on Syria, where she wants a no-fly zone, which I think can suck us into never-ending conflict in that area," he said.
Speaking about Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi, Sanders said: "These are terrible, brutal dictators. But our job is to think what happens the day after these people are removed -- the kind of instability that occurs." Sanders was also sharply critical of the Clinton Foundation -- the Clinton family's charitable organization -- for accepting millions of dollars in donations from countries like Saudi Arabia during her tenure as America's top diplomat.
"Do I have any problems when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collect many millions of dollars from foreign governments which are dictatorships?" Sanders said. "You don't have a lot of civil liberties or democratic rights in Saudi Arabia. You don't have a lot of respect there for opposition points of view, for gay rights, for women's rights."
"Yes," he said. "Do I have a problem with that? Yeah, I do."
As the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House moves from ludicrous to terrifying, it’s time to reconsider the electability question. Despite polls suggesting that Hillary Clinton is more likely to lose the general election than Bernie Sanders, her supporters routinely argue that Sanders’ program is too radically utopian to have a chance. Often a note of condescension is injected: Young people support Sanders because they want free stuff. Once his proposals are seriously considered, it’s argued, any adult will reject them out of hand.
Although countless analyses have been devoted to the demographics each candidate needs to win, one demographic has not been part of the national conversation. Sanders won the first global Democratic Party primary by a landslide — 69% of the vote — that the media hardly noted and never analyzed. Democrats Abroad, the overseas arm of the Democratic Party, organized the election, which took place in March, to represent citizens who live outside the U.S., a group the Democratic National Committee considers the 51st state.
Expatriate Democrats could choose to send primary election absentee ballots back to their home states, or they could participate in the global primary, which will send 21 delegates to the party convention in July. Ballots could be cast by fax, email or snail mail in the global primary, or at one of 104 polling places that were organized in cities from Lima to London. (Since I was traveling at the time, I faxed my ballot, but my daughter sent me a festive photo showing her feeling the Bern in Berlin.)
Of the 8 million Americans who live abroad, 34,700 participated in the global Democratic primary. Although the sampling is not huge, it’s considerably larger than that used for polls that play crucial roles in the electoral process. While we are wondering what drives young Latinas or older white men to support this or that candidate, we ought to consider why 69% of Democratic voters who live in 40 countries preferred Bernie Sanders.
The answer is quite simple: The Sanders proposals that may strike Americans who have never lived in other countries as impractical and outlandish are simply common sense elsewhere — especially in Canada and Western Europe, where the majority of Democrats Abroad voters live. Universal healthcare? The U.S. is the only developed country that lacks it. Family leave? While it is nice that San Francisco just mandated six weeks of paid leave for new parents, Germany mandates 14 months — 16 if both parents share the time spent at home. Free college tuition? Britain recently tripled its college tuition fees, though it’s still the case that a year at Oxford will cost you a fraction of a year at a middling American college. In the rest of Europe, free tuition, and interest-free loans for living expenses, are the rule.