Presidents and Populism: Bernie Sanders
In the 2016 election, there was a strong move among both parties to park their vote behind a candidate who did not represent the establishment. Both sides had a sense that Washington was broken, as congressional approval ratings sunk to new lows. It soon became apparent, early on in the primaries, which candidate the Republican rank and file would park their votes with. The Democratic Party also had its non-establishment candidate, but he faced something that Donald Trump did not have to confront in his battle for the GOP nomination: the super-delegate. But despite this formidable challenge, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders fought a valiant battle to become his party's David against the Goliath backed by the party establishment.
Born on September 8, 1941, the Brooklyn born and raised Sanders graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 and spent his youth as active in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After settling in Vermont in 1968, Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party campaigns for governor and U.S. senator in the early to mid-1970s. As an independent, he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont's largest city, in 1981, by a margin of ten votes. He went on win reelection as mayor three more times and in 1990, he was elected to represent Vermont's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991 and served as a congressman for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006. In 2012, he was re-elected with 71% of the vote.
Sanders rose to national prominence as a result of his 2010 filibuster against the Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2010, which extended the Bush tax cuts. He established himself as a leading progressive voice on issues such as campaign finance reform, corporate welfare, global warming, income inequality, LGBT rights, parental leave, and universal healthcare. He was also a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy and was an early opponent of the Iraq War, the First Gulf War, and U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua. He also became a strong advocate for civil liberties and civil rights, strongly criticizing racial discrimination in the criminal justice system and speaking out against mass surveillance policies such as the Patriot Act and the NSA surveillance programs.
Sanders began his 2016 presidential campaign with an informal announcement on April 30, 2015. The following month, on May 26th, he made a formal announcement in Burlington that he planned to seek the Democratic nomination for President. Though he had previously run as an independent, he routinely caucused with the Democratic Party. He decided that running as a Democrat made it easier to participate in debates and get on state ballots.
Sanders's chief competitor for the nomination was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had the support of the party establishment. But despite being considered a long shot to win the nomination, Sanders drew large crowds to his speaking events, providing a populist message that unashamedly embraced socialist and social democratic policies. He attracted considerable support among Americans under 40. He performed strongly with white voters, but consistently trailed Clinton by 30 or more percentage points among black voters, while the two closely competed for the support of Hispanic voters.
On of the key messages of Sanders campaign was the problem of income and wealth inequality. He told his audience that the American middle class was shrinking because of political policies that favored the wealthy. He also called for campaign finance reform. Unlike most other major presidential candidates, Sanders refused the support of super PACs. Instead he chose to receive most of his funding from direct individual campaign donations. His message appealed to small dollar donors. On September 30, 2015, The New York Times reported that Sanders had raised $26 million over the preceding three months, close behind Hillary Clinton's $28 million. His campaign had received one million individual donations, becoming the first candidate in the race to accomplish this. He raised more money than Clinton in February 2016, getting $43.5 million to her $30 million. During March, Sanders raised $44 million from a donor base roughly twice as large as Clinton's.
But unlike Donald Trump, Sanders had to contend with the problem of the superdelegate. This is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention who is seated automatically, not elected by voters in a primary or caucus. Superdelegates include distinguished party leaders and elected officials, including all Democratic members of the House and Senate and sitting Democratic governors. Democratic superdelegates are free to support any candidate for the presidential nomination and most of the Democratic Party Superdelegates supported Hillary Clinton. On Face the Nation, Sanders was asked whether the Democratic system was "rigged". He replied, "I wouldn't use the word 'rigged', but what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York State, where three million people who are Democrats or Republicans could not participate, where you have a situation where over 400 superdelegates came on board Clinton's campaign before anybody else was in the race, eight months before the first vote was cast." Even in states in which he had won landslide victories, he still lacked the support of many superdelegates.
Sanders continued to draw large crowds, with many events filled to capacity and some with additional supporters outside who could not fit in the venue. Sanders spoke to a crowd of 15,000 in Seattle's Safeco Field in late March 2016 and by June, crowds at Sanders events became much larger than those of any other presidential candidate. On July 1, a crowd of at least 10,000 came to see Sanders in Madison, Wisconsin, nearly twice the size of the biggest crowd of his main primary challenger, Hillary Clinton.
Sanders narrowly lost the 2016 Iowa Democratic caucuses by 0.25% of the vote. He won the New Hampshire Democratic primary on February 9, 2016 by 22.4% of the vote (60.4% to Hillary Clinton's 38.0%), and in his home state of Vermont, Sanders received 86.1% of the vote, denying Clinton any delegates. He also won strong victories in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. On March 8, Sanders pulled off an upset in the Michigan Democratic primary, where polls had favored Clinton by significant margins. Of the 78% of pledged delegates allocated in primaries and caucuses by May 10, 2016, Clinton had won 54% to Sanders' 46%. But of the 715 superdelegates, Clinton had received endorsements from a lopsided 505 (71%) to Sanders' 41 (6%).
At the Nevada Democratic State Convention in May, Sanders delegates were outraged by changes to the rules that resulted in denial of the credentials of almost 60 Sanders backers. As a result that Sanders came in second and angry Sanders backers shouted down keynote speaker Barbara Boxer, a Clinton supporter.
Sanders supporters organized various demonstrations in support of his campaign. But they also participated in large numbers in the Donald Trump Chicago rally protest. The also mounted a protest in front of CNN Headquarters in Los Angeles, demonstrating against the amount of airtime Sanders received in comparison to other candidates.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted May 15 through 19 found Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in a "dead heat" within the poll's margin of error. But the same poll found that if Sanders were the Democratic nominee, 53% of voters would support him to 39% for Trump.
On October 17, 2015, the long-running NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live highlighted Sanders in its open sketch with Seinfeld writer Larry David playing the role of Sanders. When Sanders was shown a clip of David's impression of him by George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week, Sanders responded: “I think we’ll use Larry at our next rally. He does me better than I do." The two later appeared together in a skit on the show.
After the final primary election (the District of Columbia's, on June 14), Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee, but Sanders did not immediately endorse Clinton. He said he would work with her to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump. On June 16 Sanders gave a live online speech to his supporters, saying, "The political revolution continues". A month later, on July 12, Sanders officially endorsed Clinton at a unity rally with her in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
On July 22, 2016, various emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the governing body of the Democratic Party, were leaked and published, allegedly showing bias against the Sanders campaign on the part of the Committee and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Schultz subsequently resigned as DNC chair and was replaced by Donna Brazile, who was also implicated in the leaks and apologized to Sanders and his supporters. This included Brazile providing the Clinton campaign advance notice of debate questions, but not to Sanders.
In the Democratic National Convention roll-call vote on July 26, 2016, Sanders received 1,865 votes (39% of the vote), which consisted of 1,848 pledged delegates won in primary and caucus contests (46% of the total) and 17 superdelegates (4%). After the roll call, Sanders put forward a motion to formally nominate Clinton, which passed by voice vote. Some of Sanders's supporters attempted to protest Clinton's nomination and booed when Sanders called for party unity. Sanders told the crowd, "Our job is to do two things: to defeat Donald Trump and to elect Hillary Clinton. It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency."
Sanders campaigned for Clinton in the general election, meeting some opposition from former supporters. Though not a candidate in the election, he received 111,850 write-in votes or 0.08% of the popular vote. On December 19, 2016, Sanders received three electoral votes for president from faithless electors in Hawaii, Minnesota, and Maine. Only the Hawaii elector's vote was counted; the Minnesota and Maine votes were rejected. If he had been nominated and elected, Sanders would have been the oldest president to take office at age 75. This record was later broken by Donald Trump, who was 70 when he took office in January 2017. Sanders would also have been the first Jewish president.
Born on September 8, 1941, the Brooklyn born and raised Sanders graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 and spent his youth as active in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After settling in Vermont in 1968, Sanders ran unsuccessful third-party campaigns for governor and U.S. senator in the early to mid-1970s. As an independent, he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont's largest city, in 1981, by a margin of ten votes. He went on win reelection as mayor three more times and in 1990, he was elected to represent Vermont's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991 and served as a congressman for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006. In 2012, he was re-elected with 71% of the vote.
Sanders rose to national prominence as a result of his 2010 filibuster against the Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2010, which extended the Bush tax cuts. He established himself as a leading progressive voice on issues such as campaign finance reform, corporate welfare, global warming, income inequality, LGBT rights, parental leave, and universal healthcare. He was also a prominent critic of U.S. foreign policy and was an early opponent of the Iraq War, the First Gulf War, and U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua. He also became a strong advocate for civil liberties and civil rights, strongly criticizing racial discrimination in the criminal justice system and speaking out against mass surveillance policies such as the Patriot Act and the NSA surveillance programs.
Sanders began his 2016 presidential campaign with an informal announcement on April 30, 2015. The following month, on May 26th, he made a formal announcement in Burlington that he planned to seek the Democratic nomination for President. Though he had previously run as an independent, he routinely caucused with the Democratic Party. He decided that running as a Democrat made it easier to participate in debates and get on state ballots.
Sanders's chief competitor for the nomination was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had the support of the party establishment. But despite being considered a long shot to win the nomination, Sanders drew large crowds to his speaking events, providing a populist message that unashamedly embraced socialist and social democratic policies. He attracted considerable support among Americans under 40. He performed strongly with white voters, but consistently trailed Clinton by 30 or more percentage points among black voters, while the two closely competed for the support of Hispanic voters.
On of the key messages of Sanders campaign was the problem of income and wealth inequality. He told his audience that the American middle class was shrinking because of political policies that favored the wealthy. He also called for campaign finance reform. Unlike most other major presidential candidates, Sanders refused the support of super PACs. Instead he chose to receive most of his funding from direct individual campaign donations. His message appealed to small dollar donors. On September 30, 2015, The New York Times reported that Sanders had raised $26 million over the preceding three months, close behind Hillary Clinton's $28 million. His campaign had received one million individual donations, becoming the first candidate in the race to accomplish this. He raised more money than Clinton in February 2016, getting $43.5 million to her $30 million. During March, Sanders raised $44 million from a donor base roughly twice as large as Clinton's.
But unlike Donald Trump, Sanders had to contend with the problem of the superdelegate. This is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention who is seated automatically, not elected by voters in a primary or caucus. Superdelegates include distinguished party leaders and elected officials, including all Democratic members of the House and Senate and sitting Democratic governors. Democratic superdelegates are free to support any candidate for the presidential nomination and most of the Democratic Party Superdelegates supported Hillary Clinton. On Face the Nation, Sanders was asked whether the Democratic system was "rigged". He replied, "I wouldn't use the word 'rigged', but what is really dumb is that you have closed primaries, like in New York State, where three million people who are Democrats or Republicans could not participate, where you have a situation where over 400 superdelegates came on board Clinton's campaign before anybody else was in the race, eight months before the first vote was cast." Even in states in which he had won landslide victories, he still lacked the support of many superdelegates.
Sanders continued to draw large crowds, with many events filled to capacity and some with additional supporters outside who could not fit in the venue. Sanders spoke to a crowd of 15,000 in Seattle's Safeco Field in late March 2016 and by June, crowds at Sanders events became much larger than those of any other presidential candidate. On July 1, a crowd of at least 10,000 came to see Sanders in Madison, Wisconsin, nearly twice the size of the biggest crowd of his main primary challenger, Hillary Clinton.
Sanders narrowly lost the 2016 Iowa Democratic caucuses by 0.25% of the vote. He won the New Hampshire Democratic primary on February 9, 2016 by 22.4% of the vote (60.4% to Hillary Clinton's 38.0%), and in his home state of Vermont, Sanders received 86.1% of the vote, denying Clinton any delegates. He also won strong victories in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. On March 8, Sanders pulled off an upset in the Michigan Democratic primary, where polls had favored Clinton by significant margins. Of the 78% of pledged delegates allocated in primaries and caucuses by May 10, 2016, Clinton had won 54% to Sanders' 46%. But of the 715 superdelegates, Clinton had received endorsements from a lopsided 505 (71%) to Sanders' 41 (6%).
At the Nevada Democratic State Convention in May, Sanders delegates were outraged by changes to the rules that resulted in denial of the credentials of almost 60 Sanders backers. As a result that Sanders came in second and angry Sanders backers shouted down keynote speaker Barbara Boxer, a Clinton supporter.
Sanders supporters organized various demonstrations in support of his campaign. But they also participated in large numbers in the Donald Trump Chicago rally protest. The also mounted a protest in front of CNN Headquarters in Los Angeles, demonstrating against the amount of airtime Sanders received in comparison to other candidates.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted May 15 through 19 found Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in a "dead heat" within the poll's margin of error. But the same poll found that if Sanders were the Democratic nominee, 53% of voters would support him to 39% for Trump.
On October 17, 2015, the long-running NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live highlighted Sanders in its open sketch with Seinfeld writer Larry David playing the role of Sanders. When Sanders was shown a clip of David's impression of him by George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week, Sanders responded: “I think we’ll use Larry at our next rally. He does me better than I do." The two later appeared together in a skit on the show.
After the final primary election (the District of Columbia's, on June 14), Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee, but Sanders did not immediately endorse Clinton. He said he would work with her to defeat the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump. On June 16 Sanders gave a live online speech to his supporters, saying, "The political revolution continues". A month later, on July 12, Sanders officially endorsed Clinton at a unity rally with her in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
On July 22, 2016, various emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the governing body of the Democratic Party, were leaked and published, allegedly showing bias against the Sanders campaign on the part of the Committee and its chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Schultz subsequently resigned as DNC chair and was replaced by Donna Brazile, who was also implicated in the leaks and apologized to Sanders and his supporters. This included Brazile providing the Clinton campaign advance notice of debate questions, but not to Sanders.
In the Democratic National Convention roll-call vote on July 26, 2016, Sanders received 1,865 votes (39% of the vote), which consisted of 1,848 pledged delegates won in primary and caucus contests (46% of the total) and 17 superdelegates (4%). After the roll call, Sanders put forward a motion to formally nominate Clinton, which passed by voice vote. Some of Sanders's supporters attempted to protest Clinton's nomination and booed when Sanders called for party unity. Sanders told the crowd, "Our job is to do two things: to defeat Donald Trump and to elect Hillary Clinton. It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency."
Sanders campaigned for Clinton in the general election, meeting some opposition from former supporters. Though not a candidate in the election, he received 111,850 write-in votes or 0.08% of the popular vote. On December 19, 2016, Sanders received three electoral votes for president from faithless electors in Hawaii, Minnesota, and Maine. Only the Hawaii elector's vote was counted; the Minnesota and Maine votes were rejected. If he had been nominated and elected, Sanders would have been the oldest president to take office at age 75. This record was later broken by Donald Trump, who was 70 when he took office in January 2017. Sanders would also have been the first Jewish president.