Bernie Sanders Is the Most Progressive Politician in the 2020 Race. Why Aren't More People Talking

About Him?




Bernie Sanders Is the Most Progressive Politician in the 2020 Race. Why Aren’t More People Talking About Him?
EMMA SPECTER

November 8, 2019 3:45 PM

Bernie Sanders announced his immigration platform on Thursday, becoming the first and only 2020 Democratic candidate to call for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. (There’s probably little need to remind you where President Trump stands on the issue.)

In a plan that the Intercept called “arguably the most ambitious of any Democratic presidential candidate’s [sic] so far, Sanders pledged to support the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which would “provide domestic workers with at least a $15 minimum wage, strong protections for collective bargaining, workers’ rights, workplace safety, and fair scheduling,” regardless of immigration status, and reinstating the DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, program.

The comparison between Sanders’s plan and the other Democratic front-runners’ is striking. Sanders’s plan goes measurably further than, for example, Elizabeth Warren’s—in July, she pledged to “remake CBP and ICE in a way that reflects our values”—and from a progressive standpoint, he’s miles ahead of Joe Biden, who served as vice president under an administration with a higher deportation rate than any other in U.S. history.

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It’s doubtful that there’s some sort of media conspiracy going on to misrepresent Sanders’s standing in the 2020 race, but the numbers speak for themselves; for example, between October 28 and November 8, the New York Times appeared to have published more than four times as many articles about Warren than it did about Sanders, despite the fact that Sanders is consistently polling just a few percentage points behind Warren (in fact, a Reuters poll this week found Sanders ahead of Warren by 4%, crediting the rise in support for Sanders to a post-debate spike). Sanders’s top aide Jeff Weaver criticized the “undiscriminating coverage of polls that fit existing narratives” from CNN, MSNBC, and major newspapers in August.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that much of Bernie’s base is younger and more diverse than the myth the “Bernie bro” implies; as usual, there seems to be a disinclination to amplify the voices of young people, women, and people of color, particularly when they’re telling a story that deviates from expectations.

https://www.vogue.com/article/bernie-sanders-progressive-presidential-candidate-2020-blackout/amp?__twitter_impression=true