On Tuesday, a bit after 5 p.m., Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders voted against the Republican budget. Shortly thereafter, he sat for an interview with MSNBCs Hardballhis second interview on the channel in 24 hours. At 6:40 p.m., the independent who is running in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary bounded up the stairs of an anonymous suburban office park into an IBEW meeting hall, to report that his bid was succeeding more than he'd ever hoped it could.
"In the first five days, about 200,000 people have signed up to work on the campaign," said Sanders, as around 200 people from Maryland and Washington applauded. "How's that? Two hundred thousand! We're gonna be have to working overtime to figure out how we use those people."
The town hall meeting had been billed as a discussion on "How the Republican Budget will hurt working Americans," and Sanders's Senate staff drove him to and from the union hall. He was, after all, the ranking member on the Budget Committee. Most of the senator's 40-minute speech did focus on the budget, as a jumping-off point for everything his campaign would be abouta discussion that took place as Hillary Clinton, the other declared candidate for the nomination, was holding a tightly controlled event on immigration three time zones away.
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Sanders led a round of applause, and lit into the Republican-passed budget. This is the story of tens of millions of Americans who are totally dependent on Medicaid, Sanders said. Those cuts will throw some 11 million Americans off of health insurance. On top of that, they ended the Affordable Care Act, which would throw 16 million Americans off of health insurance. I may not be a math expert, but 11 million plus 16 million is 27 million people without insurance if their vision, their idea, goes into law."
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When the conversation turned to 2016, Sanders insisted that he was only discussing the race because he was asked. "We won't have a super-PAC," he said, beaming about the 50,000-plus donors who'd given an average of $43 to him. Matter-of-factly, he agreed to every progressive position that the audience asked about. Prison reform? For it. Paper ballots? "In Canada, they do their votes with a paper ballot," he said, approvingly. Immigration? "People in this country want a path toward citizenship and I want to establish that path."
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