Sanders says Harris fell short with working class. He has a plan to fix that.
The independent senator from Vermont is deploying his expansive political network to fill a void he says Democrats have created. Not all in the party are happy.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) speaks to a crowd in Folsom, California, on April 15. (Paul Kuroda/For the Washington Post)
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is deploying his expansive political network to elevate left-leaning candidates and ideas in the midterm elections, accusing Democrats including Kamala Harris of falling short with working-class voters and raising fresh tensions in a party divided over how to rebuild.
In an interview with The Washington Post during his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour this spring, Sanders called Harris, the 2024 presidential nominee, a friend, but added that the campaign she ran “went around the country with Liz Cheney, had billionaires talking for her, basically did not talk to the needs of the working class of this country.”
Now, the independent senator from Vermont — who caucuses with Democrats and twice sought the party’s nomination for president — is stepping up his efforts to influence the party as it heads toward next year’s midterms and right some of what he thinks went wrong in 2024.
One of the top goals he has identified is recruiting “working-class” candidates who refuse to take money from billionaire donors and lobbyists and who he argues have constrained the Democratic agenda. About 7,000 people responded to a recruiting call that his political organization promoted, and about half want to run as independents, according to Sanders and his aides.
His political organization is also aiming to hire staff in more than three-dozen districts across 18 states to fight President Donald Trump’s agenda and train supporters to pressure vulnerable Republicans to oppose cuts to the social safety net. And Sanders himself has so far endorsed Democratic candidates in four open races, with more likely to come.
“Do Democrats do enough? No,” Sanders said in an interview this month. “The difference that I have with the Democratic leadership is not in the need to vigorously oppose Trump. It’s to bring forth an agenda that resonates with working-class families. And I think there are a number of Trump people who will support that agenda.”
Sanders has long clashed with establishment and centrist Democrats, and his latest efforts have been met with skepticism from some who see his efforts as potentially counterproductive for a party trying to revive its image after a devastating 2024 election that put Republicans in control of Congress and the White House.
Some are worried that he will stoke intraparty fights or elevate polarizing candidates in battleground races where Democrats will need to marshal resources for the general election. Others are uneasy with his backing of independents or see his firebrand liberal platform and use of terms such as “oligarchy” to describe Trump and his allies as off-putting.
“If the Democrats have a shot at winning the House and the Senate, they need to be firing on all cylinders and not just steering to the hard left or the hard right. The point of politics is winning in order to govern, not passing ideological purity tests,” said Steve Israel, a former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman.
The disagreements reflect a party still struggling to find a path forward more than six months after the November elections. Democrats have no clear standard-bearer and are presenting competing ideas to fix the party’s deep unpopularity. Protests against Trump’s agenda have been large and spirited, giving Democrats an opening for a rebound. But the challenges ahead are broad and deep.
Sanders, 83, has said he is highly unlikely to run for the White House again. But he has embarked on something of a legacy-shaping project that he hopes will help reverse those trends. After huge crowds showed up at his recent rallies with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who is seen by many as a potential successor in his movement, he was emboldened to step up his involvement in the midterms.
Democrats lost in 2024, Sanders argues, because they were perceived as defenders of the status quo who embraced incrementalism, rather than a party with a compelling agenda to address income and wealth inequality and the daily economic struggles many working-class families are facing.
Last month, on the 10th anniversary of his first presidential run, Sanders joined a Zoom call with several thousand attendees from his “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies who had responded to the recruiting effort that his political organization, Friends of Bernie Sanders, had made. He outlined how his organization and its partners would help train and support them.
“All that we ask from you is that you have courage to stand up with a battered working class in this country. Have the courage to take on the wealthy and the powerful,” Sanders told the group.
Many Democrats acknowledge the party’s struggles last year to win over voters without a college degree, including some voters of color. Some have suggested focusing now primarily on arguing that Trump’s agenda hurts working-class voters, rather than embracing ideas popular on the left such as Medicare-for-all.
Some Democrats have also voiced concerns that Sanders could end up boosting untested contenders who could be general election liabilities, pointing to previous losses by some far-left nominees. Others warned that independents could pull votes away from Democrats and suggested the party focus on uniting.
“We have to keep our eye on who really is the enemy,” former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison said. “We don’t need a lot of big Democratic primaries. What we need are a lot of people running against Republican incumbents.”
The Vermont senator says that he has been thinking carefully about who he endorses and that the goal of regaining Democratic control of the House is at the top of his mind. He has backed four candidates in open races so far: Adelita Grijalva in Arizona’s 7th District, state Sen. Robert Peters in Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District, fifth-generation logger Troy Jackson for governor of Maine and Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, for U.S. Senate in Michigan, a contested primary.
In recent Zoom calls with his supporters, organizers and candidate recruits, Sanders described an ambitious three-phase project that extends beyond the midterms: defeating Trump’s tax and immigration bill by targeting the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress with calls, protests and events about the effects of the GOP’s proposed spending cuts; helping win back Democratic control of the House in 2026; and curbing the influence of wealthy donors in politics.
If reliant only on small-dollar donors, the Vermont senator said he believes elected Democrats will pursue goals he champions such as universal health care, raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, addressing child care costs and reducing the cost of higher education.
Sanders told his supporters on the recent Zoom calls that the Democratic Party is a “top-down” effort that has not organized voters in a granular way, particularly in red states such as Idaho, South Dakota, North Dakota and Texas.
“There are a number of states around the country where it almost virtually does not exist,” he said in the interview this month.
The Democratic Party’s new chairman, Ken Martin, has increased the amount of money that the DNC gives to parties in the 50 states for organizing, hiring and research. The largest increase went to red states, and the overall investment by the DNC in state parties now amounts to more than $1 million a month. Martin said in a statement that the party has to “start with focusing on a working-class agenda that unites families across race, age, background, and class.”
It is not yet clear which offices Sanders’s recruits will run for, how many will ultimately do so, or how many he will endorse. Friends of Bernie Sanders has paired them up with three veteran groups that work with new candidates: Run for Something, Contest Every Race and the National Democratic Training Committee, people involved in the conversations said. Teachers were the most common profession among the recruits and many were veterans, according to Sanders aides. And Friends of Bernie is flush with cash for Sanders’s new organizing project, having raised more than $11.5 million in the first quarter of this year with more than $19 million in cash on hand.
Many of the potential candidates, Sanders political adviser Faiz Shakir said, are not interested in being associated with the Democratic brand. “These are people who know why they are running,” he said. “It’s a vision of taking on the elite, taking on the powerful, taking on the establishment to make working-class lives better. That is what motivates them.”
Source
