And so it begins: Hillary Clinton vaguely entreats voters to cast aside color-coded maps and “get on the American team” as her allies make “a furious round of calls to top Bush family donors to try to convince them that she represents their values better than Donald Trump.” Meanwhile, Trump publicly scarfs down a taco bowl and exclaims that he “loves Hispanics,” insulting Mexican food with the same vigor he has insulted Mexican people. This election is going to be horrible.

November will pit the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in recent history against the second most unpopular one. Eight years after Democrats embraced “hope” and “change,” the presumptive nominees can offer a restless electorate little more than dread. This campaign, of course, will be waged on fear. Trump will tell voters to be afraid of Muslims and Mexicans. Clinton will remind voters that the president has access to the nuclear launch codes, and that Donald Trump is, in fact, terrifying. An experienced hawk versus an unstable isolationist.

Trump’s clownish demagoguery is dangerous. But it also plays to Clinton’s strength by moving the debate away from the neoliberal economic record that harmed her during the primary. She can both embrace multiculturalism while aligning herself with Wall Street and the national security state. Clinton will likely peel off a good chunk of the conservative foreign policy establishment and in March, she raised a majority of Wall Street donations.

For the second Tuesday in a row, Bernie Sanders has won a Democratic primary in a state that Hillary Clinton won in the party’s 2008 nomination race. Last week he took Indiana from Clinton. This week he has taken West Virginia.

The Sanders win in West Virginia was a big one. The senator secured 51 percent of the vote to 36 percent for the former secretary of state. He carried every county in the state—taking several with over 60 percent of the vote.

Sanders has now won 20 Democratic contests and 1,430 delegates.

The senator is still trailing Clinton, who has prevailed in 26 contests and secured more than 1,716 delegates. Even as she was losing West Virginia, Clinton picked up 11 pledged delegates. And with unelected superdelegates counted in, Clinton is over the 2,200 mark in a race where 2,384 delegate votes are needed to win the nomination.

Yet, with another primary state counted in his column, Sanders continues to upend the argument that Democratic race is done. He is still in the running. He will continue to compete for states and delegates—having declared in Oregon on Tuesday night that “we will keep fighting for every last vote.” He will continue to look for opportunities to shape the Democratic message for a fall race against the most divisive Republican nominee in modern political history.

Frustrated by what they describe as a "rigged" electoral system in the face of Bernie Sanders' overwhelming majority win, Democrats in Maine on Saturday voted to adopt a rule change that will essentially eliminate the power of superdelegates to pick a candidate of their choosing.

Though Sanders won 64 percent of the Maine vote, he has only received one of the state's five superdelegates. Three have endorsed Hillary Clinton, who only secured 35 percent of the popular vote, while one remains undeclared.

The amendment to the state convention includes language that strongly encourages superdelegates to vote in proportion to caucus results, which reports say could prompt a "fight" on the Democratic convention floor in July.

As of 2020, however, the legislation "has teeth," AP reports, as the party chair will then be required to "account for superdelegates' preferences to ensure the overall delegate makeup matches the outcome of the caucus or primary."

"We have a system of government where you have one person, one vote, by and large," state Rep. Diane Russell, who introduced the measure, told the Bangor Daily News ahead of the vote. "The primary system is not when that happens. And I think that we need to start moving toward a system that’s more fair, that’s more democratic and more reflective of the popular vote."

Coming off a big win in Indiana and with the Democratic Party holding four more primaries this month, May could end up showing a resilient Bernie Sanders campaign despite the concerted effort of the mainstream press to count him out.

With upcoming contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, and the territory of Guam, Politico reports Friday that Sanders could be poised for another upcoming "win streak" against rival Hillary Clinton:

Sanders points to his record of winning 18 states and the narrow margin separating him and Clinton in national polls as cause for remaining in the race.

He contends that he’s the strongest Democratic candidate against presumptive GOP front-runner Donald Trump, and holds out hope that more super delegates in the states where he won will ultimately line up in his camp. Wins in West Virginia and Oregon, following his victory last week in Indiana, would bolster his argument...

With the West Virginia primary next Tuesday, Sanders has been campaigning heavily in the state where he has put his main focus on lifting up workers and the scourge of poverty that impacts large portions of the state and remains a too-often ignored epidemic nationwide.

At a meeting held at food bank in McDowell County, West Virginia on Thursday, Sanders told those gathered that it is a national shame that in the "wealthiest country in the history of the world" more than 47 million Americans live in poverty. In his opening remarks at what was billed as a community roundtable event, Sanders described his understanding of the problem:

http://commondreams.org/news/2016/05/06/may-looking-bright-sanders-political-revolution-marches

Coming off a big win in Indiana and with the Democratic Party holding four more primaries this month, May could end up showing a resilient Bernie Sanders campaign despite the concerted effort of the mainstream press to count him out.

With upcoming contests in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, and the territory of Guam, Politico reports Friday that Sanders could be poised for another upcoming "win streak" against rival Hillary Clinton:

Sanders points to his record of winning 18 states and the narrow margin separating him and Clinton in national polls as cause for remaining in the race.

He contends that he’s the strongest Democratic candidate against presumptive GOP front-runner Donald Trump, and holds out hope that more super delegates in the states where he won will ultimately line up in his camp. Wins in West Virginia and Oregon, following his victory last week in Indiana, would bolster his argument...

With the West Virginia primary next Tuesday, Sanders has been campaigning heavily in the state where he has put his main focus on lifting up workers and the scourge of poverty that impacts large portions of the state and remains a too-often ignored epidemic nationwide.

At a meeting held at food bank in McDowell County, West Virginia on Thursday, Sanders told those gathered that it is a national shame that in the "wealthiest country in the history of the world" more than 47 million Americans live in poverty. In his opening remarks at what was billed as a community roundtable event, Sanders described his understanding of the problem:

http://commondreams.org/news/2016/05/06/may-looking-bright-sanders-political-revolution-marches

WITH THE WEST VIRGINIA primary five days away, Bernie Sanders traveled Thursday to the state’s impoverished McDowell County, which has the lowest male life expectancy in the country. During a campaign speech there, he cited the disparity in life expectancy between McDowell and Fairfax, Virginia, a prosperous suburb of Washington, D.C.:

The average life expectancy for men in this county is just 64 years. But if you take a six-hour drive from here you will arrive in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the wealthiest counties in America with a median income of more than $107,000 – over five time the median income in McDowell. In that county a man can expect to live until the age of 82 – 18 years longer than men in McDowell County. The average life expectancy for a woman in Fairfax County is 85, compared to just 73 for women in McDowell. That is unacceptable and that has got to change.

What Sanders didn’t explain is why that a drive would take you from one of the poorest locales in America to one of the richest.

McDowell County has long been one of the epicenters of America’s failure to end intergenerational poverty. John Kennedy campaigned there in the ’60s, citing the region’s poverty as an affront in the face of the country’s wealth. Its coal-dependent economy remained stagnant and between 1980 and 1990 it had a net population loss of 42 percent. The decline of American steel and coal has left the county with few economic engines; the New York Times reported in 2014 that almost 47 percent of the income in the county was generated by federal safety net programs like Social Security and food stamps.

Fairfax, Virginia, too, is reliant on federal aid to generate income — but a far more lucrative kind. Last year, the Northern Virginia Regional Commission conducted a comprehensive study to examine the impact of federal contracting — both defense-related and non-defense related — on the economy of the region.

The study found that from 2010 to 2014, the U.S. government spent an average of $59 billion a year on federal procurement in Virginia. Roughly $1 out of every $8.50 the federal government spent on procurement was spent in Virginia.

Northern Virginia, where Fairfax is located, received 75 percent of those total procurement funds. The authors noted that if northern Virginia was its own state, it would rank “second in the nation” in terms of federal procurement subsidies it received in the past five years, behind only California.

And within northern Virginia, Fairfax County ranks first. The authors noted that it “accounts for a staggering $131 billion of the $295 billion awarded in Virginia from 2010 through 2014. This amount, 45 percent of the statewide total, is a sum greater than that received by all but four states during the last half decade: Virginia, California, Texas and Maryland. On average, Fairfax County’s allotment comes an annual infusion of more than 26.2 billion, or $23,730 annually per county resident.”

In the 2010 Census, the median household — not individual — income of McDowell County was only $22,154.

That’s the closer that Bernie Sanders missed telling his audience. They are poor and Fairfax is rich because the government made it so.