Bernie Sanders Explains How He Decides To Endorse Candidates: “We Can’t Do Everything”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is asked about his decision-making process for deciding whether to endorse or not endorse a candidate in an interview with Sam Seder.
SAM SEDER, ‘THE MAJORITY REPORT’ HOST: Where do you, how do you calculate, you know, where are you going to place endorsements and where not? I mean, we just had Francesca Hong lose by a hair in Wisconsin and, you know, impossible to know, you know, exactly whether an endorsement from you or AOC would make a difference. But how do you, like, you know, and I keep using the example of that game Risk, which I played as a kid where, you know, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t move to Kamchatka until you have enough on your tusk or something like, how do you calibrate that? SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): That’s a good question. And, you know, something that we in our political movement think about a whole lot. I think for a start, we don’t want to overextend ourselves and promise more than we can provide. So we take, and second of all, I am a United States Senator. Am I familiar with the agricultural problems facing farmers in Wisconsin? I am not. Do I know something about what’s going on nationally? I do. So for a start, most of our focus, with a few exceptions, has been on U.S. Senate races, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, maybe elsewhere, and congressional races, a lot of congressional races. Also, we have supported dozens and dozens of what we call down-ballot candidates, people running literally for school boards, city council, mayor, state legislature. Why are we doing that? And that is to create, in a sense, a farm team. These are the young people who 10, 20 years from now will be national leaders. We want to help them get elected, get the experience that they need. And then furthermore, when we look at a campaign, for example, you’ve got wonderful victories that took place in mayor’s races in Seattle, Washington, D.C. We were not involved in those races. So we can’t do everything. But what we do, we want to do well and give the kind of support to those candidates that they may need. That’s kind of the explanation.
