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Bernie Sanders to Speak in Goldsboro, NC Church This Week

GOLDSBORO, N.C. (WTVD) — Sen. Bernie Sanders will speak on poverty with Rev. William Barber at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro this week.

RELATED: Bernie Sanders wins Nevada caucuses, takes national Democratic lead

Sanders visited Durham and Charlotte last week at events that drew over 5,200 people.

RELATED: Bernie Sanders touts guaranteed health care during Durham campaign ahead of March primary vote

In December, candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg visited Greenleaf Christian Church to talk poverty, jobs and voter suppression.

RELATED: Pete Buttigieg discusses poverty with Rev. Barber at Goldsboro church

Sanders will head to Goldsboro Wednesday, Feb. 26 for a discussion at 7 p.m.

Next, Sanders will travel to Winston-Salem for a rally Thur.

Sanders eviscerates the conventional wisdom about why he can’t win

But the Sanders victory still exploded a lot of myths. He was said to have a ceiling of 30% or so. Remarkably, against a much larger field of candidates Sanders is poised to come close to the same level of support as he did in 2016 in a one-on-one race against Hillary Clinton, to whom he lost 47%-53%. (He was at 46% with a quarter of precincts reporting as of this writing.) He was said to be unable to attract anyone outside his core base. But he held his own with moderate voters (22%) and won across every issue area except voters who cared most about foreign policy, who went with Biden.

All of this makes the results of the Nevada caucuses, which in the past have not been treated with the same importance as the contests in the three other early states — Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — matter more this year. They have helped settle lingering questions about Sanders’ appeal.

More important, Nevada exposed his four main rivals as weak, divided, and grasping at increasingly tenuous arguments about how they can still win.

Warren came in a distant fourth place but still argued that since the Vegas debate on Wednesday, when she reversed a year-long plan not to pillory her opponents, “our support has been growing everywhere.” Except Nevada, apparently. In fact, voters who decided in the days following the debate were roughly divided between supporting Sanders (24%), Pete Buttigieg (21%), Warren (21%), and Biden (19%).

Bernie Sanders’ Nevada win is a breakout moment. The others are toast

Nevada is the breakthrough moment for Bernie, after squeaking out a win in New Hampshire, and squeaking out something like a tie in whatever happened in Iowa.

You can easily dismiss Nevada’s bizarre connection to reality in the tourist version of Las Vegas. You can happily downplay the small number of caucus voters, or the weirdness of the caucus process itself.

But Nevada shares some similarities with two key neighboring states: California and Arizona. Unlike the early voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, California’s Democrats are not obsessed with politics.

They are what the consultants call low-information voters: they have day jobs, like the union workers in Las Vegas. But those union voters defied their bosses, at least among the Culinary Union, and voted heavily for Sanders at the caucus sites in the big hotel-casinos.

So Sanders’ poll lead in California – somewhere between 8 and 18 points in recent polls – looks big enough to give him a delegate advantage that nobody will overturn after early March. In Texas, the other big Super Tuesday state, Biden was leading as recently as a month ago, but recent polls suggest a narrow Sanders lead. Texas is unlikely to help the rest of the pack catch up to Bernie.

This leads us to the first and last argument that Sanders faces, which is the single most important factor for Democratic voters in every poll in this cycle: who is best placed to beat Donald Trump?

The remainder of this primary contest will revolve around a never-ending, unresolvable discussion about Bernie’s prospects against Trumpian and Russian disinformation, targeted most obviously at the massive government spending he proposes.

Yet the polls for all the Democratic candidates show a marginal difference between them in the notional head-to-head contests against Donald Trump. For now, a Biden or Bloomberg is a slightly better bet than a Sanders. But Sanders still beats Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and even Ohio.

If Trump keeps hold of one of the swing states he surprisingly took in 2016, like Wisconsin, then Democrats will need to take back another state to have a couple of paths to victory in November. That’s where Arizona comes in: a state Trump won by 3.5 points last time around.

Arizona and Nevada have similar percentages of Latino population: around 30% in both states. Among the Nevada caucus goers, Sanders swept Latino Democrats, taking 54% of their support – a full 40 points ahead of Joe Biden, according to CNN’s entrance poll.

Those voters cannot be dismissed lightly. They are a good reason why Arizona is now a finely balanced state where Sanders holds a nominal one-point lead over Trump, and Biden was tied with Trump in the most recent head-to-head.

The non-Bernie candidates have almost run out of runway. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to them.

MSNBC in ‘Full-Blown Freakout’ Mode as Bernie Sanders Cements Status as Democratic Frontrunner

As it became clear Saturday evening that Sen. Bernie Sanders would run away with the Nevada caucus and secure his position as the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary, MSNBC anchors and contributors lashed out at the senator and his supporters in bizarre and sometimes hysterical fashion, descending into what one observer could only describe as a “full-blown freakout.”

Earlier in the Democratic primary process, the Comcast-owned network was notorious for ignoring the senator from Vermont, and covering him negatively when it covered him at all.

But Saturday marked a clear escalation in hostility from MSNBC’s on-air personalities as Sanders’ diverse coalition of supporters propelled him to a landslide victory in Nevada, the third consecutive state in which the senator has won the popular vote.

Nicole Wallace, former communications director for the George W. Bush White House, described Sanders’ multi-racial, multi-generational coalition as a “squeaky, angry minority” and accused the senator of deploying “dark arts” as she introduced Democratic political consultant James Carville, who proceeded to declare Sanders’ win in Nevada a victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At one point in his appearance, Carville waved at the camera and said, “Hi, Vlad,” suggesting Putin was likely watching MSNBC’s coverage of the caucus results.

Wallace later lamented that she has “no idea what voters think about anything anymore” after her colleague, Steve Kornacki, explained that Sanders performed well in precincts with a large number of Culinary Union workers, despite the union leadership’s antagonism toward the senator.

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“For those of you unfortunate enough to have turned on MSNBC,” wrote Hill TV’s Krystal Ball, “you have witnessed a full-blown freakout. Nazi comparisons, commentators near tears, and even a stunning admission that maybe they don’t understand the country anymore.”

MSNBC’s network-wide meltdown was so apparent that commentators on rival networks took notice—and talked about it on live television.

“There’s another station, another channel,” said CNN contributor Van Jones, “where people are freaking out, melting down, all across the country, at least all over the airwaves.”

“He’s not wrong,” Jones said of Sanders. “The establishment is upset.”

The #NeverTrumpers are upset that both Trump and Bernie are going to compete over working class votes, rather than MSNBC green room votes.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) February 23, 2020

Bernie Sanders’ plans may be expensive but inaction would cost much more

Putting aside the accuracy of these cost estimates, they omit the other side of the equation: what, by comparison, is the cost of doing nothing?

A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. California is already burning, the midwest and south are flooding, New England is eroding, Florida is sinking. If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.

Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere. The nation already pays more for healthcare per person and has worse health outcomes than any other advanced country. A new study in the Lancet estimates that Medicare for All would save $450bn and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.

Investing in universal childcare, public higher education and woefully outdated and dilapidated infrastructure will be expensive too, but the cost of not making these investments would be astronomical. American productivity is already suffering and millions of families can’t afford decent childcare, college or housing – whose soaring costs are closely related to inadequate transportation and water systems.

Focusing only on the costs of doing something about these problems without mentioning the costs of doing nothing is misleading, but this asymmetry is widespread. Journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy continue to rip into Sanders and the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren (whose policies are almost as ambitious) for the costs of their proposals but never ask self-styled moderates like Buttigieg how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or too little.

A related criticism of Sanders and Warren is that they haven’t come up with ways to pay for their proposals. Sanders “only explained $25tn worth of revenue, which means the hole in there is bigger than the size of the entire economy of the United States”, charged Buttigieg.

Sanders’ and Warren’s wealth taxes would go a long way toward paying for their plans.

But even if it paid a small fraction of the costs of their proposals, so what? As long as every additional dollar of spending reduces by more than a dollar the future costs of climate change, inadequate healthcare and insufficient public investment, it makes sense to spend more.

Republican administrations have doled out gigantic tax cuts to big corporations and the wealthy without announcing specific cuts in public spending or other tax increases because – despite decades of evidence to the contrary – they claim the cuts will generate economic growth that will more than make up for any lost revenue.

Yet when Warren and Sanders propose ambitious plans for reducing empirically verifiable costs of large and growing public problems, they are skewered by fellow Democrats and the press for not having ways to pay for them.

A third line of criticism is that Sanders’ and Warren’s proposals are just too big: they’re risky, they may fail or have unintended consequences, they’ll be difficult to implement.

This argument might be convincing if the problems Sanders and Warren address were growing slowly. But if anything, they’re speeding up. Experts on the environment, health, education and infrastructure are nearly unanimous: these problems are worsening exponentially.

Climate change is upon us; the environment is altering far more quickly than scientists feared even a few years ago. The cost of health insurance is soaring, as are the costs of preventive care. So too with childcare, college and a crumbling infrastructure. And let’s not forget widening inequality, as most families continue to face stagnant wages while wealth and power accumulate at the top.

@amjoyshow @MSNBC please include @TiffanyDCross regularly! Her contributions have depth and truth. She speaks about a growing electorate that is becoming the majority. It’s refreshing and needed!

— Sara Nelson (@FlyingWithSara) February 23, 2020

Video of Bernie’s rally last night from NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/elections/100000006993046/bernie-sanders-2020-nevada-caucus.html

#Pennsylvania Democratic Primary Polling:

Sanders: 25%
Biden: 20%
Bloomberg: 19%
Buttigieg: 12%
Warren: 9%
Klobuchar: 5%

YouGov / February 20, 2020 / n=537 / Online#Democrats #USA

— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) February 23, 2020

I made this for CNN, hope they'll use it 😂 pic.twitter.com/zgZ2l7sVZT

— Karl Marx Jr. 🍞🌹 (@KarlMarxJunior) February 23, 2020