Meet the Rust-Belt Populist Who Wants to Be Pennsylvania’s Next Senator
John Fetterman, mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, wants to fight for “legacy communities” and the soul of the Democratic Party.

Fetterman, who is white, has led the charge to revitalize the mostly black Braddock, which was abandoned by industry in the 1970s. Nearly 40 percent of its households now fall below the poverty line. Except for its racial demographics, Braddock is typical of the struggling Rust Belt towns that may prove pivotal in this election. Some of Donald Trump’s biggest rallies have been staged in these “legacy communities,” drawing supporters still reeling from the Recession. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, is hoping to rally the working class against the corporate interests that have deserted it. Like Sanders, Fetterman is in a battle for both the Democratic nomination and the soul of the party. Can he win over his state’s infamously conservative, mostly white center, by wooing the rural working-class voters that have fled the Democratic Party in droves? In These Times talked with Fetterman about Bernie, Braddock and 2016.

Flint resident Danielle Green was an undecided Democrat until a private meeting with an attentive U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders won her vote, she said.

“The compassion they showed for the situation,” Green said of what persuaded her during the Feb. 15 meeting with Sanders and his wife at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. “He didn’t make any promises, which I can respect.

“But he did say he would come to Flint, which he did. So Sen. Sanders has my vote. He’s my guy.”

Sanders held a Flint rally last week, 10 days after his meeting with Green. At the rally, he reiterated his demand for Gov. Rick Snyder to resign over the city’s lead-contaminated water crisis.

The call was echoed by a handful of local politicians, activists and community members endorsing the democratic socialist from Vermont Monday at New Bedford Baptist Church in Detroit.

“Gov. Snyder ignored our voices by not allowing us the opportunity to remove the emergency manager,” Green said, demanding Snyder’s “immediate” resignation.

“Clean water is not an option. It’s a necessary element to every human being. To take away water is to take away life.”

The Detroit endorsements, mostly from African-American activists and Detroit leaders, came two days after Hillary Clinton on Saturday enjoyed a lopsided primary victory in South Carolina, fueled by an overwhelming advantage among black voters, a key Democratic constituency.

“He has the right policies for our city and our nation,” former Wayne County Commissioner Bernard Parker said of Sanders. “He has shown great judgment calling for Snyder’s resignation, and he did it early.

“We are here today to say the people of Michigan will no longer stand by idle while Snyder forces poison down our children’s throats. We need a new approach to government that only Sen. Sanders can provide.”

Former State Rep. Betty Cook Scott of Detroit also linked Flint’s water crisis to her endorsement.

First Super Tuesday results:
Sanders 21 – Clinton 6

Americans in New Zealand might be the first one to change the game for the US primary elections, something that could turning point in the democratic race.

The result are astounding with Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton by 3 to 1.

New Zealand was the first of 39 countries where Democrats Abroad. Other will host in-person voting between March 1-8; voting sites will be open in 22 countries on Super Tuesday alone, and in 104 cities throughout the week.

Kat Allikian, Chair of Democrats Abroad New Zealand, said,

“TONIGHT’S OPPORTUNITY FOR U.S. DEMOCRATS LIVING IN NEW ZEALAND TO CAST THE FIRST VOTES ON SUPER TUESDAY WAS A GREAT SUCCESS. OUR TURNOUT WAS SMALL, BUT LIKE OUR FELLOW AMERICANS IN DIXVILLE NOTCH, NEW HAMPSHIRE, WE’VE MADE OUR VOICES HEARD ABOUT THE ISSUES THAT MATTER TO US.”

Voting took place at the Public Bar and Eatery in Wellington at midnight local time, with the announcement made at 12:30 AM Wellington time.

Bernie Sanders, having just finished two rallies in Texas with crowds larger than Hillary Clinton could ever dream of -- a 10,000-person rally in Austin and an 8,000-person one in Dallas -- called Clinton to concede the South Carolina primary and got on a plane bound for Minnesota, a state whose Super Tuesday vote the media hasn't bothered to poll, but which Bernie Sanders is likely to win. If he listened to any of the coverage of his dramatic defeat in the Palmetto State while en-route to Rochester, he probably wondered at its accuracy and cogency. Here's five reasons he'd be right:

1. In South Carolina, Sanders won many of the groups that will matter in the general election, making it puzzling that the media would declare Saturday's primary results solid proof of Clinton's viability in November.

2. Among voters who decided who they wanted to support over the last four weeks, Sanders significantly outperformed his statewide totals, losing that demographic by less than half what he lost South Carolina by.

3. CNN consistently misstated the composition of the Super Tuesday electorate in a way that dramatically misled viewers about Clinton's prospects.

4. John King's "Magic Wall" has dazed him into -- frankly -- incoherence.

5. Almost no one has voted yet. No, really -- almost no one has voted.

Specifically, Sanders won independents in South Carolina by 7 points, voters under 30 by 8 points, first-time primary voters by 26 points, white men by 12 points, and -- while losing the total vote by a staggering 47.5% -- managed to lose on the question of honesty and trustworthiness by only 2%.

Massachusetts and other states involved in Super Tuesday have a critical vote ahead, one that pits the party establishment against a candidate driven by dissatisfaction with the current Washington power structure.

No, we’re not talking about Donald Trump and his Republican opponents. Today’s topic is the choice many Democratic voters are grappling with between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Although the two candidates share a broad philosophy and agree on many issues, each offers a distinctly different vision for the party and the nation.

In our view, Sanders’ vision holds the greatest promise — one that is both radical and realistic.

He has an enthusiastic field campaign and growing support from black activists and politicians. Will it be enough?

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Yet two days ahead of the primary, election analyst Nate Silver gives Sanders a less than 1 percent chance of winning South Carolina. Brett Bursey, director of the South Carolina Progressive Network, sizes up the prospects only a bit more optimistically: “If there were six months until the primary, I think Bernie could win.”

It’s important to remember, however, that winning or losing a specific state isn’t as important as the slow accumulation of delegates—and because of that, margins matter.

In Silver’s projections, if Clinton won South Carolina by 11 points, she would be on a path to a tie. To achieve that, Sanders would need to beat the mid-February polling projections of 24 points by another 13 points.

“We are closing the gap,” says South Carolina state representative Terry Alexander, a Clinton supporter in 2008, now a leading black supporter of Sanders. “We’re making a difference. It’s his message and how he gives people hope. Clinton is old style, change bit by bit.”

Sanders’ campaign has 10 offices in South Carolina with 240 staff, 80 percent of them African-American, compared to two offices with 14 full-time staff for Clinton, backed up by nine small get-out-the-vote offices.

Beyond recruiting volunteers from within South Carolina, Sanders is counting on some key backers from across the country—such as Martese Chism, a nurse for more than 23 years at the John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, Illinois, and a member of National Nurses United, the first major national union to endorse Sanders.

While Sanders was speaking, Chism was riding through South Carolina in National Nurses United's red #BernieBus, drumming up support for him.

Chism is also the great-granddaughter of a grassroots civil rights leader, Birdia Keglar. In 1966, Keglar was returning home from Jackson, Miss., with four other civil rights supporters after testifying before Robert F. Kennedy about voting rights violations. White racists forced them off the road and beat and tortured them, severely injuring two of the three men and killing the two women in the car—including Keglar, who was decapitated.

With such a powerful personal connection, Chism says she’s felt a calling to work for civil rights since she was 5 years old. That’s what brought her out to campaign for Sanders.

“I knew Bernie because he was always for the union,” she says. “He always supported our issues. But it sealed the deal when I found out that Bernie was in the civil rights movement.”

A debate within the International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422 in Charleston, a major East Coast port, is one sign that black voters are still in play. The influential, predominantly African-American local has 600 members. In October, local president Ken Riley, endorsed Clinton as the practical choice—the candidate who could win and get things done. But then Charles Brave, Jr., a rank-and-file member of Local 1422 and vice-president of the state AFL-CIO, began drumming up support for Sanders within the local. He believes that now, if members were to take a vote, a clear majority would support Sanders.