It’s hard to overstate how important Bernie Sanders is to Joe Biden’s political campaign. As we saw back in 2016, many Sanders supports simply would not support Hillary Clinton. According to NPR, 12% of his supporters voted for Donald Trump and while there aren’t concrete numbers, it’s assumed that a lot of his voters simply sat out and didn’t vote four years ago. During his speech Monday night at the Democratic National Convention, Sanders said that simply can’t happen again.
“Let us be clear, if Donald Trump is re-elected, all the progress we have made will be in jeopardy. Defending Democracy At its most basic, this election is about preserving our democracy. During this president’s term, the unthinkable has become normal. He has tried to prevent people from voting, undermined the U.S. Postal Service, deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protesters, threatened to delay the election and suggested that he will not leave office if he loses. This is not normal, and we must never treat it like it is.”
Bloomberg News wrote about how “Sanders took on a somewhat new role in his address… that of party unifier.” Here is the Vermont Senator talking to the so-called “Bernie Bros.,” the disenfranchised, the disinterested and anyone else who was listening:
“My friends, I say to you, to everyone who supported other candidates in the primary and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. We must come together, defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next president and vice president. My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”
Sanders also delivered a line that is sure to be repeated numerous times between now and November 3rd, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs.”
The Wall Street Journal writes, “Michelle Obama provided the star power at Monday night’s opening of the Democratic Party convention, but the evening really belonged to Bernie Sanders.”
Watch Sanders’s full speech above.