Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) conceded defeat Saturday in the Nevada caucus, a contest where his campaign showed promise as it shrunk Clinton’s double-digit lead. Ultimately, however, the Sanders campaign fell short of the win.
Sanders said in a statement that he conceded the loss to Clinton over the phone Saturday, but that he plans to continue to fight.
“I am also proud of the fact that we have brought many working people and young people into the political process and believe that we have the wind at our back as we head toward Super Tuesday. I want to thank the people of Nevada for their support that they have given us and the boost that their support will give us as we go forward,” Sanders said in a released statement.
In a separate fundraising email to supporters, Sanders pleaded for them to keep his campaign afloat.
“There are 26 primaries and caucuses in the next month, and three straight positive results for our campaign are sure to prompt an over-the-top response from the millionaires and billionaires who are funding our opponent and her many super PACs,” the letter said.
Read the full statement below:
“I just spoke the Secretary Clinton and congratulated her on her victory here in Nevada. I am very proud of the campaign we ran. Five weeks ago we were 25 points behind and we ended up in a very close election. And we probably will leave Nevada with a solid share of the delegates.
“I am also proud of the fact that we have brought many working people and young people into the political process and believe that we have the wind at our back as we head toward Super Tuesday. I want to thank the people of Nevada for their support that they have given us and the boost that their support will give us as we go forward,” Sanders said in a released statement.
Class act. I support Clinton — and I admire Sanders.
We are in the over 65, longtime Democrats demographic that is calculated as automatic for Hillary. My immediate circle of ten contemporaries is overwhelmingly (8 to 2) for Bernie Sanders. We have all committed to vote for whomever the Democratic Party nominee is. The eight believe Bernie’s aspirations are our aspirations, and that they must be pressed to avoid backsliding into the business as usual mindset of temporizing corporate interests at the expense of the public interest, the intent of triangulation. None of us will cave in reflexively. We recognize that when the sun sets, you go with the best you can get, though you may need to bite your tongue to do it.
I was over at Raw Story tut-tutting and finger-wagging at some of his more over-enthusiastic supporters over the level of over-the-top venom and general cray-cray they’ve worked themselves up into over Hillary, and came away instead with a real sense of how much of that passion is fueled by sheer despair among the Millennials.
They really do feel, with good reason, like they are just well and truly permanently fucked by this this economy beyond any hope of advancement. And they’re not wrong. The reality is that they are just holding the other end of the shit stick from me and people my age. People in their fifties who get fired for making too much money and being too expensive to insure and having crazy, unrealistic expectations about retirement plans and shit like that, and they get hired to to my old job at a fraction of the cost without the benefits. And still our Galtian Overlords in the .1% look on in barely concealed rage that any of us are still are allowed to have anything, that pesky pan-handlers and homeless people clutter up their nice streets and demand “free stuff” like schools and roads and cops who don’t act like Peacekeepers from the Hunger Games.
Yeah, the appeal of anything that smacks of revolution to a person in their twenties, unafflicted by the general deadening of passion and hormones we call wisdom, is pretty easy to understand.
But the thing is, a major part of the reason they’re fucked (and me too) is because so many of them, and so many of their predecessors in Gens X and Y, were besotted with the insane fucking notion that their votes must be “earned” and that not voting is a viable means of expressing dissatisfaction.
In my generation, we faced Vietnam after college. In my father’s, there was the Great Depression and then the horror of WW II. So, I’ve pretty much had it with the bellyaching about all the problems the millennials face. Spoiled.
The thing about Millennials (I have two) and what separates them fro my 60’s boomer generation, is they do want to buy into the ‘system’; have good jobs, family, a home and all the related feel-good stuff of adulthood. They appear far more mature and less suspicious than many boomers who were resistant to buying into the rigidity and conformity of the '50’s and '60’s.
But opportunity does not come knocking for them. There’s no longer a clear path to the feel-good stuff they want to experience. And they see what’s going on and as a result have learned to live with less. It amazes me just how fucking adult they can be about their situations. There’s nothing more dangerous to the economy than a young consumer who has learned to live with less.
So I think they will vote in the general election but if it’s either HRC or Sanders in the WH and little gets done the first two years, in that no real effort is made to ‘fix’ those issues they campaigned on related to Millennials (1.3 trillion student debt), 2018 will be deja vous all over again.