How Sander Is Building a ‘Big Tent’ To Win Nomination

FEATURING ROSA CLEMENTE – Culinary workers in Nevada defied their union leadership’s criticism of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan to back him in large numbers in the primary caucuses on Saturday. Sanders’s win was greater than the cumulative votes won by his next three challengers: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren. Buttigieg has warned against Sanders saying he would alienate Democrats and Americans in general, while calling on others to withdraw from the race in order to consolidate the centrist vote. Meanwhile media pundits like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews reacted hysterically to Sanders’ momentum, likening it to the Nazi invasion of France.

But what the numbers from Nevada show is that Latinos, African Americans, and working people across different races coalesced around Sanders’s vision for a different kind of Presidency. As the elite fear mongering about Sanders being as divisive as Trump builds up, the reality is that Sanders appears to be winning over a far more diverse electorate than the experts thought him capable of.

Rosa Clemente is a community organizer, 2008 Green Party Vice Presidential candidate, and currently a doctoral candidate in the W.E.B. DuBois Department of AfroAmerican Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a news correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali.