Under new pressure, Sanders released a document claiming to show how he pays for everything. It doesn’t come close.

After his train wreck 60 Minutes appearance when he couldn’t answer basic questions from Anderson Cooper about paying for some of his proposals, Sen. Bernie Sanders returned the next night while appearing on CNN and released a fact sheet claiming he can pay for all his new spending proposals. But, alas, conventional economic and budget analysis reveal that this claim is not remotely credible.

First, it is worth noting that Sanders’ spending promises total as much as $97.5 trillion over the decade. Sanders concedes that his Medicare For All plan would increase federal spending by “somewhere between $30 and $40 trillion over a 10-year period.” He has promised to spend $16.3 trillion on his climate plan. And his proposal to guarantee all Americans a full-time government job paying $15 an hour, with full benefits, is estimated to cost $30.1 trillion. The final $11.1 trillion includes $2.5 trillion on housing, $1.8 trillion to expand Social Security, $1.6 trillion on paid family leave, $1 trillion on infrastructure, $3 trillion to forgive all student loans and guarantee free public-college tuition, $800 billion on general K-12 education spending, and an additional $400 billion on higher public school teacher salaries.

Many of these spending estimates come directly from the Sanders campaign.

GEORGETOWN, South Carolina—Democrats will sometimes list all of the people and items they would vote for over President Donald Trump in a general election.

An inanimate object, an anonymous bus driver, a fictional character.

But that doesn’t mean some are necessarily happy about the possibility of having to vote for Bernie Sanders in November.

It’s a prospect that can tend to give away a person’s true feelings in grimaces and groans, a reluctant ‘I guess, if I have to’, grasping for words and giving a look like, ‘Let’s hope America doesn’t put me in that position.’ It’s a potential future that makes Debbie Meekins, a 55-year-old supporter of Joe Biden’s have to laugh just moments after enthusiastically watching the former vice president walk into a South Carolina campaign event this week.

“Not good, but I'd vote for him,” Meekins said about her feelings towards a Sanders general election campaign. “(It’s) one of those, I'd vote for Mickey Mouse over Trump.”

“Sadly, it is what it is,” she says. Sanders is as polarizing as Trump, “but in the other direction.”

Ahead of Saturday’s primary, some Democratic voters in South Carolina who are either undecided or support other candidates said they’ll side with the Vermont senator if he does indeed make it to the general election.

For them it’s more out of a necessity to oust the incumbent, in their minds, than because of a growing affection for the 78-year-old democratic socialist turned Democratic frontrunner. And many are not entirely convinced he’ll be able to oust the Republican from the White House if he gets the chance.

Voters in South Carolina, even undecided ones, have a deep affection for Biden. And they take their memories of Biden’s past as a sign that he belongs in their future.

The comfort runs both ways. For at least a little while, Biden can enjoy not feeling like he has to explain to voters the reason he may fail or why he has yet to succeed, a stream of consciousness blip Biden couldn’t shake in between a rout in the Iowa caucuses and his freefall in the New Hampshire primary.

Life’s only gotten better for Biden’s campaign since he left New Hampshire early. A second place Nevada finish reminded the faithful not to admit defeat just yet. South Carolina’s focused on spoiling the presidential contender with affection that was sorely lacking from the masses in the other early voting states this cycle.

Biden seems like he's coming into his stride again, said former Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH). Biden had been avoiding getting into the fray as much, she said, but that's now changed.

"It's the Joe Biden that I have known for like 15 years," she said. "And I'm delighted to see it."

Former Vice President Joe Biden appears to have regained momentum in Virginia ahead of Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary election, while Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and billionaire Mike Bloomberg have both lost support, a poll released Friday shows.

In the survey by Christopher Newport University's Wason Center for Public Policy, 22 percent of likely Democratic voters said they preferred Biden.

Sanders, I, who has been leading in national polls after successes in Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa, was second among Virginia voters, with 17 percent.

Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who has saturated Virginia with campaign ads, trailed behind in third place, with 13 percent.

All the other Democratic candidates polled in the single digits

It is is the most politically provocative part of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign pitch: that his progressive movement will bring millions of nonvoters into the November election, driving record turnout especially among disaffected working-class Americans and young people.

And yet despite a virtual tie in Iowa, a narrow victory in New Hampshire and a big triumph in Nevada, the first three nominating contests reveal a fundamental challenge for Sanders’ political revolution: He may be winning, but not because of his long-standing pledge to expand the Democratic base.

The results so far show that Sanders has prevailed by broadening his appeal among traditional Democratic voters, not by fundamentally transforming the electorate.
In Iowa, for instance, turnout for the caucuses was lower than expected, up 3% compared with 2016, and the increase was concentrated in more well-educated areas where Sanders struggled, according to a New York Times analysis; in the Iowa precincts where Sanders won, turnout increased by only 1 percentage point.
There was no sign of a Sanders voter surge in New Hampshire either, nor Saturday in Nevada, where the nearly final results indicated that turnout would finish above 2016 but well short of 2008 levels, despite a decade of population growth and a new early voting option that attracted some 75,000 voters. The low numbers are all the more striking given the huge turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, which was the highest in a century.

“I grant that the turnouts aren’t at the level that we would hope,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California, one of the campaign’s national co-chairs, said before the Nevada caucuses.

On Wednesday morning, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted a not-so-subtle reminder to Nevada union members that his “Medicare for All Who Want It” plan protects “union members’ freedom to choose the coverage that’s best for them.”

After Argüello-Kline’s [President of Culinary Union] public statement, though, the flood gates opened. Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and former Vice President Joe Biden all tweeted their support for the Culinary Workers Union’s members. (Buttigieg joined them on Thursday morning with a Twitter message of support in Spanish and English.)

Biden went first, tweeting that he stands “with the working men and women of [the Culinary Union] because supporting labor means supporting our unions.”

But the remarks from Warren, who has at once cast herself as a unity candidate and begun to more explicitly contrast herself with Sanders, were notable.

“No one should attack [the Culinary Union] and its members for fighting hard for themselves and their families,” she tweeted. “Like them, I want to see every American get high-quality and affordable health care — and I’m committed to working with them to achieve that goal.”

Warren’s statement reflects the degree to which she has distanced herself from the Sanders plan since signing onto his legislation in 2017 and stating at the first Democratic presidential debate in June that she was “with Bernie” on Medicare for All.