OPINION:
Hillary Clinton has a problem — the progressives don’t really like her, and rival Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders is refusing to bow out of the race quietly.
Mrs. Clinton is trying her best to reach across the aisle and prove her progressive credentials — they just come across hollow.
On Monday, Mrs. Clinton invited Sen. Elizabeth Warren to campaign with her in Ohio – a pivotal swing state. The Massachusetts senator — who unlike Mrs. Clinton is extremely popular with the liberal base of the party — played attack dog on Mr. Trump and tried to unite progressives to Mrs. Clinton’s cause.
But, they remain skeptical — and there’s reason they should be.
First, Mr. Sanders has yet to concede the presidential race, let alone offer an endorsement for Mrs. Clinton. For about a year now, he’s been arguing that Mrs. Clinton is beholden to Wall Street interests and corporate donors, and that she’s not a true progressive-warrior given her late endorsement of the $15 minimum-wage law and refusal to support free public higher-education and a single-payer health care system.
Since Mrs. Clinton clinched the number of delegates she needed to win the nomination, Mr. Sanders’ embrace of her has only been lukewarm, and his backers seem deeply ambivalent. A Bloomberg Politics national poll taken this month found barely half of those who favored Mr. Sanders — 55 percent — plan to vote for Mrs. Clinton. Instead, 22 percent say they’ll vote for Mr. Trump, while 18 percent favor Libertarian Gary Johnson.
Secondly, Mr. Sanders doesn’t seem happy with his — and his progressive allies’ — progress in altering the Democratic Party’s platform, which will be unveiled at their convention next month. In a statement, Mr. Sanders’ criticized a committee drafting the platform for not including language that denounced the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade deal he’s long opposed. Mrs. Clinton flip-flopped on the issue, and now says she doesn’t support it.
“What we are doing is trying to say to the Clinton camp: ’Stand up, be bolder than you have been, and then many of those voters may in fact come on board,’ ” Mr. Sanders said Sunday on CNN. “Those people voted for me, I believe, because they said it is time to have a president who has the guts to stand up to big-money interests.”
Mr. Sanders relied on small-dollar online donations to fund his campaign, whereas Mrs. Clinton’s five largest donors, according to Opensecrets.org, are private equity and hedge fund owners — essentially, Wall Street.
What Mr. Sanders has — that Mrs. Clinton’s team desperately wants and needs — is his email list of supporters. She needs to target these individuals with her talking points to sway them to the polls come November to vote Democratic. Right now, she doesn’t really know who they are.
Many of Mr. Sanders’ supporters doesn’t want him to give up the list to either Mrs. Clinton or the Democratic National Committee, according to a report from McClatchy News.
Dominique Scott, a 21-year-old University of Mississippi student who attended the People’s Summit this month, said Mr. Sanders shouldn’t hand over his list because “there are reasons why people didn’t support Clinton in the first place,” McClatchy reported.
“She has her own donors,” Ms. Scott told McClatchy. “She has plenty of money.”
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