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Bernie Sanders Is Quietly Building a Digital Media Empire

For a brief moment in late October 2016, when Hillary Clinton was surfing on a six-point national lead over Donald Trump and James Comey had yet to dive-bomb the presidential race, the talk of the political class was a set of curious reports suggesting that after losing embarrassingly, Trump could soon pursue his own TV network. The chatter grew loud enough that, just two weeks before Election Day, the candidate had to start publicly fending off rumors about his aspirations of a media venture, for fear that his supporters would lose interest in him just as early voting was getting underway.

“No, I have no interest in Trump TV — I hear it all over the place, I hear it,” he announced to one Cincinnati radio host, clearly reveling in the speculation but straining to get the attention back to the election at hand. “I have a tremendous fan base, I mean, we have a tremendous base, we have the most incredible people. But I just don’t have any interest in that.”

Denials aside, it made some kind of sense. Here was a screw-the-system, longtime student and manipulator of the press who’d just upended one massive institution (a political party) turning his attention to another that he’d spent years rhetorically ripping to shreds (the mass media), just as everyone finally — after all these decades — knew, and would never forget, his name.

The calculation still works. But Donald Trump isn’t the 2016 candidate who’s got a mini-media empire with a dedicated following all figured out. It’s Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator, who’s been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a “nation of morons” since at least 1979 — and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long — has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

The situation in Gaza is a humanitarian crisis. The United States must play a more aggressive and even-handed role in ending the Gaza blockade and helping Palestinians and Israelis build a future that works for all. pic.twitter.com/rDleLkcDNc

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 21, 2018

Bernie Sanders Says ‘Trump’s Agenda Is Dead’ if Democrats Win Midterms

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, vowing to play an influential role in the 2018 midterm elections, was blunt on Friday about the stakes for the Democratic Party.

“If Democrats control either the House or the Senate, Trump’s agenda is dead,” Mr. Sanders said during a conversation with New York Times reporters and editors.

At this critical moment ahead of hundreds of House and Senate primaries, Mr. Sanders also argued that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other national party organizations are not doing enough to support liberal grass-roots candidates who are running against Mr. Trump and backing a progressive agenda.

“The establishment Democrats are still, I think, looking toward candidates who can self-fund,” said Mr. Sanders, a progressive independent who had enormous success raising about $230 million in mostly small-dollar and online donations during his 2016 presidential bid.

National Democrats “still have a tendency to believe that more conservative candidates are better positioned to win,” he added. Mr. Sanders argued that ideas like “Medicare for All” and a higher minimum wage, which he championed in 2016, are increasingly popular and helpful to Democratic candidates.

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In the New York governor’s race, in which Cynthia Nixon, the progressive activist and former “Sex and the City” star, is challenging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary, Mr. Sanders declined to make an endorsement when asked. Ms. Nixon has positioned herself as more of a populist, criticizing Mr. Cuomo for his reliance on large donors.

“Governor Cuomo has a strong record, he has done some very good things, obviously there are areas where I disagree with him,” Mr. Sanders said. “Cynthia seems to be generating a lot of grass-roots enthusiasm running on a progressive platform.”

In N.H., a burning political question: Where are all the big-deal Democratic presidential candidates?

With seven months until the 2020 presidential primary season kicks off in earnest, the top-tier Democratic potential candidates are nowhere to be found in Iowa or New Hampshire. These are the first states that vote in the process, and visiting early could help to lay the groundwork ahead of what is expected to be the largest presidential Democratic candidate field in modern history. So where are they?

Beyond a trip from Vermont US Senator Bernie Sanders to Iowa in February, the major names are ceding the early ground game to a relatively unknown group of potential candidates who have made frequent trips, hiring staff and calling activists so often their voice mails are ignored.

Not so for the bigger candidates. Massachusetts US Senator Elizabeth Warren traveled to Ohio last week, but hasn’t set foot in an early primary state since the 2016 election. Former vice president Joe Biden raised eyebrows when he visited New Hampshire more than a year ago, but he hasn’t been back.

Even Sanders, who lives in a neighboring state, hasn’t been to New Hampshire in eight months. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand just rejected an invitation to address a prominent Democratic event there. California Senator Kamala Harris and former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe have been careful to avoid states that would cause presidential buzz, aides say.

At which point in the article I’m still thinking… ok, so the candidates dont want to overshadow the chances of a Democratic house/senate and make the 2018 elections all about presidential politic divisions. Thats some unity I’m ok with. But apparently I’m too reasonable. It’s just that many of these people don’t know why they are running. If you ask the ‘expert’..:

Robby Mook, who served as Hillary Clinton’s national campaign manager in 2016, said the decision this year is more complex than it has been in years.

“As they weigh invitations to visit, they are forced to ask themselves the questions about why they should run and what they want to say,” Mook said. “I think the honest reason why many of them aren’t visiting yet is that they haven’t figured those questions out yet.”

Bernie is stumping in the South and winning over some black voters

Sen. Bernie Sanders entered Duke University Chapel on Thursday night to hundreds of people singing “This Little Light of Mine.” Sitting down with NAACP national board member the Rev. William Barber II, Sanders’s conversation brought up a familiar theme of his 2016 campaign: the “moral economy.”

“There is no excuse for 40 million Americans living in poverty,” Sanders thundered on Thursday night. “The way we bring about change is having the courage to talk about a reality that you may not see on a TV and you surely will not hear discussed in the United State Congress.”

It was a different feel to many of his 2016 campaign rallies, even though the Vermont senator’s core message has not changed. Instead of speaking to a crowd of mostly white and mostly secular settings, Sanders not only shared his message with a predominantly black audience, he sang along in a nod to the long history of the black church and politics.

One of the biggest problems Sanders had in 2016 during his insurgent presidential campaign was in Southern states, where the African-American vote is crucial to securing the Democratic nomination. Now, as the senator from Vermont seriously mulls a presidential run in 2020, he’s not going to make the same mistake again.

Joe Manchin’s Primary Opponent Taps Into Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Momentum

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), one of the least popular members of the U.S. Senate, faces a progressive challenge in a state won in a landslide by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.

A Morning Consult poll released this month indicates Manchin’s job approval dropped from 60 percent to 43 percent between the fourth quarter of 2017 and the first quarter of 2018.

Manchin’s precipitous drop in job approval has made the former West Virginia governor the fifth least popular senator, according to the poll. The poll results follow Senate race ratings released this month by the Cook Political Report, which dubbed Manchin’s seat as a competitive “toss-up” that could fall to either party in November’s midterm election.

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Manchin’s opponent in the state’s upcoming Democratic primary, Paula Jean Swearengin of Mullens, West Virginia, is following Sanders’ leftward trend, including refusing corporate PAC contributions. She hopes to continue the work Sanders started when he drew working class support with a populist platform, as Swearengin has trumpeted progressive priorities like tuition-free prekindergarten and college, a minimum wage increase, and Medicare for all. Manchin is not among the 16 Democratic senators who have co-sponsored Sanders’ Medicare-for-all bill.

Meanwhile, 55 percent of voters who backed Sanders in the 2016 West Virginia primary identified health care as their most important issue. Two-thirds of Sanders voters in West Virginia said the next president should be more liberal, according to CNN exit polling.

“This used to be a Democratic state,” Swearengin said in an interview with Rewire.News. “Democrats are tired of not having a Democratic candidate. When you have Democrats that act like Republicans, they’re not Democrats anymore.”

Bernie Sanders criticizes Democrats, they flip out (again): Has politics become team sports?

Bernie Sanders provoked the ire of Democratic partisans once again earlier this month when he criticized their party during an economic justice forum in Jackson, Mississippi, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

“The business model, if you like, of the Democratic Party for the last 15 years or so has been a failure,” declared the Vermont senator. “Now, what happened — people sometimes don’t see that because of the charismatic individual named Barack Obama who won the presidency in 2008 and 2012. He was obviously an extraordinary candidate, brilliant man. But behind that reality, over the last 10 years Democrats have lost about 1,000 seats in state legislatures all across this country.”

Though nothing Sanders said about the Democratic Party was factually incorrect, or even remotely controversial, partisans on social media couldn’t hold back their fury, reacting as if Sanders had just questioned the validity of Obama’s birth certificate (rather than praising him as “extraordinary” and “brilliant”). That Sanders’ remarks attracted such vitriol is disheartening but hardly surprising. It tells us more about hardened attitudes within the Democratic Party than it does about him.

Indeed, the knee-jerk outrage that Democratic loyalists seem to display every time that Sanders says something slightly critical about the party or its leaders demonstrates how tribalism has infected our political discourse, and how party loyalty has come to take precedence over political values for many Democrats. This is primarily why Sanders enrages them so much: Because he is not, in their eyes, one of them, and has been unwilling to give up his political independence. He is an outsider, and therefore has no right to criticize their party. It is not so much the message but the messenger that infuriates them. It’s also true, however, that the idea Sanders represents — namely, that principles should come before party, and that politics should not be treated like a team sport — is anathema to these committed partisans.

Was honored to just speak at a rally for @AbdulElSayed!!

We believe in you Abdul! Michigan!! Make this man your next Governor! pic.twitter.com/hWFduvaxTC

— Shaun King (@shaunking) April 22, 2018

Governor Snyder’s deal with Enbridge leaves the future of the Great Lakes in the hands of a corporation that has a history of hiding problems from the public. We can’t trust Enbridge. That’s why we must immediately #ShutDownLine5 pic.twitter.com/1lhmMKxdAj

— Ab-ghoul El-Scary 🎃 👻 (@AbdulElSayed) April 22, 2018