Kori Feener
Bernie Sanders speaking at James Madison Park.
It was overcast. It was cold. A biting wind was coming off of Lake Mendota. Still, around 2,500 people showed up at James Madison Park on April 12 to, as presidential candidate Bernie Sanders put it, “complete the political revolution and transform this country.”
“All of you will recall that here in Wisconsin, wherever we went around the country, the ideas we brought forth four years ago were considered by the political establishment, by the media establishment, as ideas that were radical, that were extreme — ideas that nobody in America supported,” said Sanders at his campaign rally in Madison. “Well, I think it’s fair to say that things have changed over the last four years.”
But one thing hasn’t changed: Bernie.
At the rally Friday evening, Sanders called health care a human right and pledged to expand the federal Medicare program to cover everyone. He wants to make all public universities tuition-free and to help graduates shackled with student debt. He vowed to spend a trillion dollars on roads, bridges and other public infrastructure and to get the energy sector off fossil fuels to combat climate change.
And Sanders returned, again and again throughout his speech, to his signature promise to “end the corrupt political system that allows the rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else.”
Sound familiar? Sanders made identical campaign promises on July 1, 2015, when he spoke to 10,000 supporters at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Madison. “We believe that the time has come when people in Wisconsin, Vermont and all over the country, create a political movement which says to the billionaire class you can’t have it all,” Sanders told the massive crowd.
At the time, it was the largest political rally of any candidate running in the 2016 presidential race. Sanders would go on to win the Wisconsin Democratic primary in April 2016 by 136,000 votes over eventual nominee Hillary Clinton, winning 71 out of the state’s 72 counties. Seven months later, Donald Trump would narrowly win the state with 47 percent of the vote.
“Together we are going to make sure that does not happen again. We are going to win here in Wisconsin,” Sanders said Friday. “We are going to win in Indiana. We are going to win in Ohio. We are going to win in Michigan. We are going to win in Pennsylvania. And together we are going to win this election.”
The independent U.S. senator from Vermont repeated his 2015 promise to make it easier for workers to join a union, and to push to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. It’s currently $7.25 an hour, the same as it was four years ago.
“Four years ago, we talked about criminal justice reforms. We talked about ending the war on drugs and legalizing marijuana and we were told those [ideas] were too radical,” said Sanders. “Here is another idea that four years again seemed so, so radical: How could you possibly run for president of the United States without having a super PAC and begging billionaires for campaign contributions?”
Kori Feener
Cheering crowd at the Bernie Sanders rally in Madison.
Sanders says his agenda will help Democrats avoid the electoral shellacking they suffered in 2016. Clinton may have won the popular vote by almost 2.9 million nationwide, but she lost every state in the Midwest, except for Illinois and Minnesota, ensuring the electoral college would deliver a win for Trump.
Debbie from Monroe, who declined to give her last name, was at the rally Friday evening. She didn’t vote for Sanders in the 2016 primary and hasn’t picked a candidate to back in the 2020 race.
“I wanted to hear what [Sanders] had to say,” said Debbie. “Maybe I should have voted for him in 2016. I voted for Hillary Clinton.”
Andrew Glickman from Madison felt the Bern in 2016 and remains a fan.
“Even though Bernie couldn’t clinch [the nomination in 2016] I just thought he was the most progressive voice at the time,” said Glickman. “I think he’s going to clinch the nomination this time.”
But as even Sanders points out, he may not be the standout progressive — or “radical” — among the packed field of Democrats running for president in 2020. Seventeen Dems are currently vying for the presidential nomination.
“[Our] ideas were not radical ideas, they were common sense ideas that the American people supported. Today — four years later — those ideas are supported by Democratic candidates from school board to president of the United States,” said Sanders. “In other words, we made real progress in transforming the political debate in America.”
But did Sanders’ revolution in 2016 shift the political tides to a degree that makes his 2020 campaign less viable? We won’t know for another year, when Wisconsin voters head to the polls to select a Democratic nominee. Sanders did acknowledge that he needs to improve on his 2016 showing, and expand his base beyond young people and the working class.
“The principles of our government will be based on the time-honored American belief in justice. Economic justice. Social justice. Racial justice, and environmental justice,” said Sanders, eliciting perhaps the biggest reaction from the crowd all evening. “Donald Trump wants to divide our country up based on the color of skin, based on our gender, based on where we were born, based on our sexual orientation. What we are going to do — and what the American people want — is exactly the opposite. We are going to bring our people together.”
Kori Feener contributed reporting for this article.
