Despite basically being let down by every news media source, Bernie supporters have had a good week and a HUGE weekend.
The good stuff started this past Wednesday (the 23rd), when Bernie did an interview on the online news outlet The Young Turks (TYT), who have been a consistent online progressive voice for years now. They live-streamed the interview and later published it; the video currently has about 800K views. It was a great interview because Bernie was able to talk about his policy positions the whole time, instead of sensationalist crap like “how much do you like Castro” or other diversions used by CNN & Fox News/MSNBC.
Immediately after the online interview, a TYT viewer started an online petition to demand the Democratic National Committee (DNC) allow an official Dem debate on TYT. The petition is doing extremely well. It’s been less than a week and will probably cross 150K signatures by tomorrow. A debate on TYT would be epic, allowing a SINGLE debate of this political season to be conducted on an outlet that is FREE from influence by corporate interests/advertisers. The sheer engagement from millennials alone should be enough for the DNC, who wants to reach young voters, to jump all over this. Not surprising, but the response so far has been silence.
Now, getting to the voting weekend, where we had primaries in Alaska, Washington, and Hawaii. I already suspected that these would have diminished attention in mainstream media, because these are places where progressive people are active and will most likely heavily support Sanders. What boggles my mind, however, is that even TYT was not live with coverage for the whole weekend!
No democratic caucus coverage today TYT? What’s up with that?! We’re working on a sweep! Not even on ur facebook! #TYTLive #TYTNetwork
— melsimo (@mels_simo) March 27, 2016
I really hope they are going to explain why they didn’t do primary coverage over such an important weekend (some of us are hoping they were prepping for a debate), but oh well.
Bernie did great in the 3 elections. He got about 70% (or more) of the vote in all 3 places.
You’ll notice that all of WA’s delegates isn’t figure out yet. This is because its going to take time for the state party to release all of the margins by district. Estimates right now are that Bernie will get about 60 from WA.
Most progressives would have told you before this weekend that we are still in this thing. We would also have said that we needed BIG wins this weekend. We got them. It’s the choice of news media whether they appeal to the positive feels of the Bernie folks, or try to re-affirm the opponent’s advantage. It remained important to the major news organizations to keep people from getting too excited. The Wall Street Journal decided on this headline:
Despite all the shenanigans, it’s a solid weekend for the revolution. In my volunteering, I came across a teenager via text messaging that told me “Hey Alex, I’m not 18 so I can’t go vote but I did convince my dad to register!”
Can you imagine that? Very young people, interested enough in the democratic process that they are convincing their parents to do the right thing. Humanity is getting smarter and smarter; I hope we get smart enough to defeat climate change before it takes us out!
So yes, you are getting quite the love fest right now from someone who isn’t big on love fests. But how can I resist, when this week also brought us this incredible Bernie event where even NATURE was feeling the Bern:
The natural candidate.
-g