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The House and Senate Hopefuls Betting on Bernie
Endorsements are typically viewed as a boon to candidates running for office: They can lend gravitas to a campaign or bolster a contender’s platform. But for many House and Senate candidates backing Bernie Sanders, endorsing the longtime senator could be more helpful to them than it is to the candidate himself.
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“I hope to be a member of a class of Sanders Democrats that gets elected in the fall,” said New Hampshire’s Shawn O’Connor, who’s running against a former congresswoman and Hillary Clinton supporter looking to reclaim her seat. And “hopefully,” he adds, “it’ll be a large class.”
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In many ways, the candidates who support Sanders sound just like the average voter at one of his giant rallies: They fundamentally believe in his message that the economy is stacked in favor of those at the top, and they sincerely think a Sanders presidency could rearrange it. Some suggest his candidacy has primed voters to hear similar policies from down-ballot candidates. O’Connor, a businessman who studied at Harvard Law School under now-Senator Elizabeth Warren, said Sanders’ candidacy has “created some space” for him to talk about Wall Street, student loans, campaign finance—the very issues that motivated O’Connor to run in the first place. While Sanders’s campaign speaks to “problems and challenges that folks were already facing”—voters didn’t need to be introduced to them, in other words—the two candidates offer similar solutions. It helps O’Connor that New Hampshirites have had “almost a year to hear Senator Sanders speak about these issues.”
Lucy Flores, a former state assemblywoman who’s running for the House in Nevada’s Fourth District, said the issues she and other progressives champion—like raising the minimum wage—routinely win at the polls in the form of ballot initiatives. But “the really wonderful thing” Sanders has done is “connect those dots,” she said. “He’s managed to connect progressive issues with candidates, and really gotten people to believe that they can make a difference by electing people who are running on these progressive agendas.”
Some candidates make Sanders an integral part of their message. Tom Fiegen, a former Iowa state senator running for U.S. Senate, made his endorsement of Sanders central to his “why I’m running” reasoning: “To restore and protect working Iowans from billionaire special interests, overturn Citizens United and stand with Bernie Sanders, before and after the election.” O’Connor says he won’t take super PAC money, as Sanders insists publically he doesn’t. Supporters are “flocking” to his campaign “because I stood with Sen. Sanders and made that principled decision,” O’Connor told a local news station last month. And Tim Canova, who’s challenging Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Florida, notes in his campaign bio that he’s advised Sanders on economic policy.
For these down-ballot candidates, endorsing Sanders has everything to do with their core beliefs and—they say—little to do with political calculation. John Fetterman, the mayor of tiny Braddock, Pennsylvania, is running for Senate against two so-called establishment candidates—a former congressman and former chief of staff to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf. In a recent interview, he said Sanders’ message of economic inequality and a rigged economy is something “I’ve … dedicated myself to professionally for the last 20 years.” (If Fetterman’s name sounds familiar, that may be because you’ve seen his unconventional approach to governing highlighted on The Colbert Report, in The New York Times Magazine, and in The Atlantic—not to mention a Levi’s ad.) Explaining his support for Sanders, Fetterman describes how he prizes innovative ideas—an unintentional nod to his own public persona—and Sanders is someone who’s “leading, and not evolving.” Like circa-2008 Barack Obama (whom Fetterman endorsed) Sanders represents the future of the Democratic party, he said.
Candidates’ reasoning can also have an emotional bent. Bao Nguyen, the young mayor of Garden Grove, California, who’s running in California’s 46th District, was born in a refugee camp after his parents fled Vietnam. In Sanders, he sees someone who’s exposing government corruption in America similar to the kind his parents escaped. “I want to honor their sacrifices by fighting to make sure that as Americans we have a government that serves the interest of the people,” said Nguyen, one of two progressives in the district’s Democratic primary. “And the person leading that fight right now is Senator Bernie Sanders.”
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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-endorsements-house-senate/471660/
12 replies
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Thanks for the heads-up, Uncle Joe! Good Democrats believe in equal Justice for ALL, not just the rich.
