Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign to be the next president of the United States on Wednesday, clearing the path for former Vice President Joe Biden to take on President Trump in November.
Sanders, whose campaign built upon its momentum from 2016, was at one point the front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nominee. His self-described democratic-socialist policies—a hard line on Medicare for all and free college education—proved a hard sell beyond his core believers, but his idealism, passion for the working class, and curmudgeonly demeanor never faltered, especially in the meme-o-sphere, where his rhetoric became an anthem for a wing of the Democratic Party fed up with the status quo.
After lackluster showings in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, the Sanders campaign began to lose steam as party leaders rallied around Biden.
And then coronavirus happened.
Suddenly, the presidential race was drowned out by headlines about the rising death toll or Trump’s outlandish daily press conferences, and primary elections were either pushed back to later in the spring or became dangerous shit shows, like the one in Wisconsin last night. Sanders was far enough behind in delegates that catching Biden would require something of a miracle; the pandemic made it all but an impossibility.
At 78 years old, this is probably the independent Vermont senator’s last run for the White House. But his influence will long outlast him. In state after state—both in 2020 and in his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016—he was by far the choice of Millennial and Gen Z voters, inspiring a new generation of progressive leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and pulling the party to the left on health care, tax, and education policy.
The question now is whether he can move those young voters into Joe Biden’s somewhat-less-inspiring camp by November, and what steps Biden will make to entice them.
So we’ll say goodbye to Bernie. But his legacy lives on.
Contact Raleigh news editor Leigh Tauss at [email protected].
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He is only suspending his campaign.
He stated he’s still trying to get delegates in each state to gain leverage for needed changes in the DNC platform. Changes like Single Payer/Medicare for All – because we can all see how dumb it is to tie health care to employment.
We need a higher minimum wage, and looking at a Universal Basic Income. We need greater wage & hour, as well as workplace safety and health laws.
And above all, Biden needs to be able to articulate reason why people should vote for him and every other Democrat on the ballot other than they are only slightly less worse than Trump and the Republicans. Because 8 years of Obama-Biden did not leave me better off than I was before their 8 years in office. #StatusQuoJoe just won’t cut it.