Bernie Sanders is partnering with the group Run for Something to help support a new generation of progressive candidates interested in seeking public office.
Questions about the future of Sanders’ leftwing movement have followed his cross-country Fighting Oligarchy tour, where at each stop the Vermont senator encourages supporters to get involved and run for office. The initiative builds on those calls, Politico first reported, by teaming up with organizations that recruit and train candidates running for office, with an emphasis on young people.
“I am writing to ask you to run for office. Yes, you,” Sanders wrote last month in an email to supporters, which included a link to a form that promised to connect interested parties with an organization that would provide information and training on running for office. “We need to elect progressives at every level in this country who are prepared to side with the working class in America and fight for an economy and government that works for all of us, not just the few.”
More than 5,000 people have already expressed interested through Sanders’ operation and have been connected to one of the partner organizations, including Run for Something, the group said.
“Young people aren’t waiting for the change we need – they’re stepping up to be that change,” Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, said in a statement announcing the partnership. “Our future depends on building a new generation of leaders, and with this partnership, we can reach even more young people ready to serve their communities and fight for change.”
Run for Something, founded in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first election victory, helps recruit and support young progressive candidates interested in running for down-ballot races. The group said it has had more than 45,000 candidates sign up since election day – more than it had in its entire first three years.
Sanders, an independent who twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, has rankled some in the party for suggesting some left-leaning candidates would fare better if they ran as an independent. The Democratic party’s brand is deeply tarnished in Republican-led corners of the country, and its overall approval rating has fallen to record lows since Kamala Harris lost the presidency to Trump.
Post-election, many centrist Democrats blamed the progressive wing, led by Sanders and House members such as representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Maxwell Frost of Florida, for pulling the party too far left over the past decade. But Sanders argues the opposite, that his populist economic agenda, pieces of which Trump also supports, is crucial to winning back working-class voters.
With the Democratic base desperate for leaders willing to take on Trump, the senator, joined along the way by Ocasio-Cortez and Frost, as well as representatives Ro Khanna of California and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, has drawn the biggest crowds of his life during his tour. Though the 83-year-old has not formally ruled out a third bid for the White House, his tour and the new effort to recruit candidates is seen as an attempt to guide the movement he has built over decades toward a post-Sanders future.
