The American Postal Workers Union Local 44 of Central Iowa has endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders for president, the campaign announced today.

“Senator Bernie Sanders stands for the working class people of this country,” said DMI APWU Local 44 President Mike Bates. “He will fight for postal banking that would bring in revenue to the Postal Service and stop the legalized loan sharking of check into cash and payday loans that feed on the working poor.”

A powerful Minnesota progressive group has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the state's upcoming Democratic presidential primary.

TakeAction Minnesota announced its backing for the Vermont senator on Wednesday morning. The group said it's the first time they have endorsed a candidate for president of the United States.

"We are excited to build with a candidate who is already investing in our multiracial, working class movement to take on corporate power in our democracy and do politics better," said Elianne Farhat, the group's executive director. "Bernie's politics are rooted in human dignity and justice."

TakeAction is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group that bills its work as community organizing, coalition building, policy research and development, public education and civic engagement. It has 6,000 dues-paying members, a network of 20 institutional members that includes labor, social justice and other progressive groups, and a mailing list of some 50,000 people.

Make the Road Action, an immigrant rights group, is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president, lending the Vermont senator significant political muscle in the early caucus state of Nevada and a delegate-heavy group of northeastern states.

The 10-year-old organization, which mobilizes immigrants and minority communities for political action in Connecticut, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, has not previously endorsed candidates in presidential races. But the endorsement of Sanders, provided first to POLITICO, comes after a months-long process of evaluating Democratic campaign platforms and holding meetings with a number of candidates.

the campaign official followed up to caution supporters against accusing Sanders of sexism, saying that the line of questioning would be “really bad news for us.”

“I would be careful with the ‘sexism’ angle when it comes to the Bernie/Warren exchange individually — that’s not what this is about and I think it’ll be really bad news for us if that becomes what this is about (i.e. press asking her if she thinks Bernie is sexist),” the staffer told the group. “Is that what this is about broadly? Absolutely. But no one here is actually claiming Bernie himself is sexist (regardless of your own personal beliefs on that topic).”

Warren characterized the private December 2018 meeting in her statement as a simple exchange: “I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.” Sanders and his advisers have repeatedly said this account is false and that he only pointed out Trump would use gender against a woman candidate. “What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist, and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could,” Sanders said when the story was first reported by CNN, and before Warren confirmed it herself.

At one point in a lengthy DM to the Twitter group on Tuesday morning, the Warren staffer’s description of the controversy hewed closer to Sanders’s description than Warren’s. “Claiming you’re worried a woman can’t win/flagging that she’ll receive sexist attacks is something many, many people feel,” the campaign official wrote.

Jeff Weaver, a top adviser for Sanders' campaign, also suggested the Sanders campaign did not want to continue the fight. “We’re not going to get into this tit-for-tat," he said on CNN on Monday night.

Sanders and Warren, he said, "have great respect for one another, they’re fighting for a lot of the same goals, again, there were some wires crossed apparently about this story.”

Asked to comment on the move to de-escalate, Warren's communications director, Kristen Orthman, pointed to the candidate’s statement on Monday night calling Sanders a friend and longtime ally. “Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences on punditry,” Warren said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders won the endorsement of an influential teachers’ union in Nevada on Tuesday morning, a key sign of support in the early voting state where unions have significant political power.

“We appreciated that Senator Sanders came to us, very much reached out to us and wanted to speak to us,” said Clark County Educational Association president Vikki Courtney told BuzzFeed News on Monday night. Sanders was the clear leader in a recent straw poll of union members, she said, which was a major factor in the decision.


The union represents 19,000 teachers and other educators in Las Vegas, and is the largest teachers’ union in Nevada. The Clark County School District is the fifth largest school district in the country.

In a landslide vote — more than 75 percent of respondents — Mr. Sanders earned the backing of members of the group, which has quickly become politically influential since its founding in 2017.

Once a fledgling collection of college students, frustrated that Democrats and Republicans were not acting more quickly to curb climate change, Sunrise has grown to 318 chapters nationwide, with more than 10,000 members.

Sunrise will host an event on Jan. 12 with Mr. Sanders in Iowa City to formally announce the endorsement. “We believe a Bernie Sanders presidency would provide the best political terrain in which to engage in and ultimately win that struggle for the world we deserve,” Varshini Prakash, a founder and the executive director of the movement, said in a statement. “Senator Sanders has made it clear throughout his political career and in this campaign that he grasps the scale of the climate crisis, the urgency with which we must act to address it, and the opportunity we have in coming together to do so.”