Senator Bernie Sanders took a look back in order to encourage voters to look for the future during the second night of the Democratic National Convention ( DNC) in Chicago.
Sanders took the attendees to “three-and-a-half years ago” when the country was “amid the worst public health crisis in 100 years and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.”
“That was the reality the Biden-Harris administration faced as they entered the Oval Office,” Sanders said. “A nation suffering, a nation frightened a people looking to their government for support.”
Sanders said the government responded and assisted Americans, now he and others should continue to “lay the groundwork” for Vice President Kamala Harris to become president, he said Tuesday night. Harris is expected to formally accept the Democratic nomination in a concluding speech on Thursday night.
“When the political will is there, government can effectively deliver for the people of our country,” Sanders said. “Now, we need to summon that will again because too many of our fellow Americans are struggling every day to just get by.”
Sanders told Newsweek last week that he would advise Harris and Walz to ignore many strategists’ advice to moderate their policy views.
“We’re going to win this struggle because this is precisely what the American people want from the government,” Sanders said Tuesday. “This is not a radical agenda, but let me tell you what a radical agenda is. That is Trump’s Project 2025.”
The progressive independent senator from Vermont, who caucuses with Democrats and twice sought the party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, believes the data is on his side for the Democratic ticket to follow through with their “common sense” proposals.
“I hesitate to even call them progressive,” Sanders told Newsweek.
Sanders spoke at the DNC on Tuesday night about the working class, raising the minimum wage “to a living wage, health care and cutting childhood poverty.
“Thank you, President Biden. Thank you, Vice President Harris. Thank you, Democratic Congress,” Sanders said. “We need an economy that works for all of us, not just the billionaire class.”
Sanders said at the “top of the to-do list” is the need to get “big money out of our political process.”
He previously told Newsweek that while Republicans have centered themselves in recent years as the party of the working class, this is more about Democrats’ failings than real GOP policy solutions.
“Many working-class people feel that the Democratic Party has kind of abandoned them,” he said, explaining his hope that Harris will lead the party to reprioritize working-class voters.
Representatives of six unions and labor groups spoke during night one of the DNC.
“Every step of the way, Kamala Harris has been there for us,” said Kenneth Cooper, the international president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “She has come through for all of us and it is our turn to come through for her.”
Sanders, though, thinks Harris can win by a “decent margin,” he told Newsweek, saying, “We’re working as hard as we can.”
“On November 5, let us elect Kamala Harris as our president and let us go forward as the nation that we know we can become,” Sanders said.
Follow Newsweek‘s live DNC updates here.
