Bernie Sanders wins Indiana and the rest of the states
Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment, but the voters in Indiana had a different idea. The campaign wasn’t over for them. It isn’t over for the voters in West Virginia. It isn’t over for Democrats in Oregon, New Jersey and Kentucky. It isn’t over for voters in California and all the other states with contests still to come.
I understand we have an uphill climb to victory, but we have been fighting uphill from the first day of this campaign. I am in this campaign until the last vote is cast, and that’s why I have to ask:
We have received over 50,000 contributions in the last 12 hours.
Latest update on Clinton campaign funds
For months, you’ve heard the Clinton campaign endlessly repeat in interviews and on social media that they have raised millions and millions of dollars for state parties through something called the “Hillary Victory Fund.” They’ve even used it as an attack line to insinuate Bernie wasn’t willing to help down-ballot Democrats.
Well, yesterday morning, thanks to a Politico investigation, we found out that less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by the Victory Fund has stayed in state party coffers. And indeed, the majority of the money spent by the Victory Fund has gone to benefit Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign against us. The piece said some state party fundraisers believe they are basically acting as “money laundering conduits.”
There’s more, but first let me get to the part where you can take action. In recent weeks, the Clinton campaign has expressed a lot of interest in what is important to Bernie’s supporters. Here’s your chance to send a message about our distaste for big-money in politics:
Here’s how the scheme works for the Clinton campaign:
Rich people like Alice Walton of Walmart who have already contributed the maximum amount allowable to the Clinton campaign can contribute an additional $350,000-plus to the Victory Fund.
The first $33,400 of her contribution is supposed to go the DNC, and the rest divided up between participating state parties. But that’s not what’s been happening. The Victory Fund has mostly been doing one of two things with Ms. Walton’s money:
1. Taking that money and spending it on advertisements and small-dollar fundraising solicitations. Then they take all the small-dollar contributions and data reaped from Alice Walton’s contribution and transfer it directly to the Clinton campaign. This tactic is basically a way for them to benefit from a contribution much larger than the legal limit from Alice Walton.
2. They take Alice Walton’s money and transfer it to state parties, who then immediately transfer it to the DNC. Often times they do it without the state party even knowing because the Clinton campaign controls many of the bank accounts involved. So at the end of the day, most of the state parties have received exactly $0 from their Victory Fund arrangement.
So, now that we know the Clinton campaign is taking advantage of state parties to skirt fundraising limits on her presidential campaign, it’s time for her to do the right thing and let the state parties keep their fair share of the cash:
It’s unfortunate that Hillary Clinton has benefited from tens of millions of dollars in cash transfers and advertising to campaign against us in the primary. But it’s not too late for her campaign to do the right thing by the state parties we’re going to need to win elections up and down the ticket this November.
I’m sure if you sign our petition, that is something they will notice.
In solidarity,
Jeff Weaver
Campaign Manager
Bernie 2016
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are for our future and the next generation to be able to afford college, retirement, housing, healthcare and more.
After Bernie Sanders‘ defeat in New York last week, his chances of winning the Democratic nomination are dwindling. Yet, even if he loses this campaign, a poll published Monday suggests that Sanders might have already won a contest that will prove crucially important in America’s political future.
The poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 finds that Sanders is by far the most popular presidential candidate among the youngest voters. This group’s attitudes on a range of issues have become more liberal in the past year.
The data, collected by researchers at Harvard University, suggest that not only has Sanders’ campaign made for an unexpectedly competitive Democratic primary, he has also changed the way millennials think about politics, said polling director John Della Volpe.
“He’s not moving a party to the left. He’s moving a generation to the left,” Della Volpe said of the senator from Vermont. “Whether or not he’s winning or losing, it’s really that he’s impacting the way in which a generation – the largest generation in the history of America – thinks about politics.”
In one of Harvard’s polls of young people in 2014, the number who agreed that “basic health insurance is a right for all people” was 42 percent. That figure increased to 45 percent last year and to 48 percent in Monday’s poll.
The share who agreed that “basic necessities, such as food and shelter, are a right that government should provide to those unable to afford them” increased from 43 percent last year to 47 percent now. The share who agreed that “The government should spend more to reduce poverty” increased from 40 percent to 45 percent.
It’s rare, Della Volpe said, for young people’s attitudes to change much from year to year in Harvard’s polling, and even more remarkable for so many of these measures to shift in the same direction at the same time.
Millenials love Bernie Sanders
For the first time in the past five years of Harvard’s polls, significantly more young people called themselves Democrats than said they were independent. Forty percent were Democrats, 22 percent were Republicans and 36 percent were independent.
On the trail, Sanders has railed against what he called “casino capitalism,” calling himself a “democratic socialist.” A narrow majority of respondents in Harvard’s poll said they did not support capitalism. While just 1 in 3 said they supported socialism, the figures are still an indicator of millennials’ frustration with the U.S. economic system, Della Volpe said.
He called it “a lack of trust that young Americans have,” a distrust that extends to “the very premise of how our country’s organized.”
The millennial generation has no universally accepted definition, but one point of departure is the Census Bureau’s projection that by 2020, 36 percent of eligible voters will be adults born after 1980.
Young people don’t vote as much as older people, to be sure. Just 41 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 24 turned out in the last presidential election in 2012, compared with 72 percent of those older than 65. Yet as these millennial voters grow older, pollsters expect that they will begin voting more frequently, and their opinions will carry increasing weight in elections.
Della Volpe cautions that it’s impossible to predict how millennials’ views will shift in the future, but people change parties only rarely after about age 30, researchers have found. If that pattern holds for the millennial generation, then Democrats could be indebted for decades to a politician who has rejected a formal association with the Democratic Party for his entire career until now.
In Harvard’s poll, Sanders was the clear favorite of young people. Fifty-four percent said they had a favorable view of him, and 31 percent said they had an unfavorable view.
With respect to Hillary Clinton, 53 percent had an unfavorable view, and 37 percent said their views of the former secretary of state were favorable. Her gender does not seem to be helping her among young people: even self-identified millennial feminist women in the Harvard poll say that Sanders would do the most to improve women’s lives in the United States, Della Volpe pointed out.
pdate on Clin
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