Sanders Supporters Seek Ways to Keep ‘Bernie’ Movement Alive [View all]

[BootinUp]

Election presents choice they had hoped to avoid: Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump



By Peter Nicholas
June 19, 2016 5:30 a.m. ET
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CHICAGO—With visions of what-might-have-been, the liberal activists behind Bernie Sanders’s campaign commiserated over his loss to Hillary Clinton and plotted ways to keep the “Bernie” movement alive now that the candidate is exiting the presidential stage.

At a weekend-long conference, they were thinking through their role in a general election that presents a choice they had hoped to avoid: Mrs. Clinton or presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

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Mr. Sanders wasn’t at the conference dubbed “The People’s Summit.” But the Vermont senator was everywhere all the same. Millennials walked through the halls wearing Sanders T-shirts bearing sketches of his receding hairline. In panels, participants dissected the campaign’s rise and fall and talked wistfully about how close Mr. Sanders came to vanquishing Mrs. Clinton.

The conference’s lead organizer is National Nurses United, one of the Sanders campaign’s most zealous backers. The approximately 3,000 attendees included socialists, union officials, community organizers and college students. Together, they represent the wing of the Sanders coalition that is the least enthused about coalescing behind the Clinton campaign.

“It’s a terrible place we find ourselves in,” said Becky Bond, a former adviser to Mr. Sanders’s campaign, in a session titled “Understanding our Movement Moment.”

The best a Clinton presidency would produce is a nation “slightly worse than it is under Obama,” Ms. Bond said.

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Rosario Dawson, an actress who attended the conference, said in an interview she has no use for any pro-Clinton messages crossing her cellphone: “If she wants our vote, then she needs to go get it,” said Ms. Dawson, who campaigned for Mr. Sanders. “We didn’t register to vote and phone bank and canvass for her for a reason.”


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Nina Turner, a Sanders supporter and former Ohio state senator, said that even though she has been a lifelong Democrat, “a third party might not be bad for this country.”

“Let’s shake it up,” Ms. Turner said in an interview. “I want to see the Democratic Party live up to our values. And if we refuse to, then we need something to shake us up.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/sanders-supporters-seek-ways-to-keep-bernie-movement-alive-1466328604