Bernie Sanders dives into a key House battleground Trump carried in 2024 with a new endorsement
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Thursday announced his endorsement of Democrat Rebecca Cooke for Congress in Wisconsin's 3rd District — making a foray into one of a handful of districts that could decide the next House majority, which President Donald Trump carried by 7 points less than a year ago.
'Rebecca is a working class fighter who developed her populist roots in rural Western Wisconsin. A daughter of farmers, a waitress and a small business owner — she's lived through failed policies from Washington elites and is ready to deliver tangible outcomes that working people will actually feel,' Sanders said in a statement shared first with NBC News.
Sanders' endorsement brings renewed national attention to a race that Cooke lost by less than 3 percentage points last year as GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden earned a second term. And it also highlights a notable cross-section of support for Cooke — who has also been endorsed by the Blue Dog Democrats' PAC, a longtime supporter of party moderates — as Democrats in Washington and around the country review the party's policy platforms, personalities and coalitions after they suffered defeat to Trump in the 2024 election.
Cooke said in an interview that Sanders' endorsement meant a lot to her because 'Bernie really is no bulls---.'
'He's been able to pass legislation in the fray of Washington while remaining really true to his core values that center around the working class, and his voice has never really wavered,' she said.
Cooke said she voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and has valued his authenticity ever since.
'Why wouldn't I seek support from someone like that in an era, kind of, where nothing feels authentic, when Bernie really is?' she added.
Last year, Cooke campaigned on a message focused largely on the economy and ran ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in her district. She also ran with the support of the New Democrat Coalition and Blue Dog Democrats, two groups of moderate congressional Democrats who tout their support for bipartisanship and working across the aisle. The Blue Dog PAC endorsed her again this month.
Sanders followers and some Blue Dog types have clashed over the years over policy and the direction of the Democratic Party. Cooke acknowledged that 'it could seem surprising, you know, to welcome an endorsement like that from Senator Sanders.'
'But I really think that it's important that we let go of purity tests in politics and that we stay disciplined on creating election wins,' she said, adding that in her campaign she hopes to shed the labels of 'moderate' or 'progressive' and gain support from a broad base of voters.
'I am a Blue Dog and a new Dem, but I'm also very progressive where it counts,' Cooke said. 'I don't like the labels and the boxes that kind of have been created, because immediately, you know, you're written off and 'othered' in your party because you're this or because you're that. And really, I'm just — I'm running because I'm for western Wisconsin, period.'
The national stakes
Democrats need a net gain of at least three districts to retake a majority in the House in 2026. And Wisconsin's 3rd District is expected to be highly competitive again in 2026. It's one of just nine Republican-held House seats rated as toss-ups by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.
As Cooke welcomes Sanders' support in a district Trump has carried three times, after Barack Obama and other Democratic presidential nominees carried it in previous elections, the Democratic Party is grappling with how to move forward from the 2024 election.
Some Democrats — like Sens. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts — have said Democrats alienated some voters in recent years by insisting that candidates agree with certain socially progressive norms and use 'woke' language that not all voters understand.
'We have to, you know, quit demonizing people along the political spectrum. Otherwise we're, we're never going to get there. We're never going to achieve the things that we want to get done," Cooke said.
Sanders, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, kicked off a nationwide 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour this year, rallying with voters across the country and urging Democrats to fight Trump and his allies and to listen to voters' concerns about the economy.
Sanders made several stops in Wisconsin, including in Eau Claire County, which is in the 3rd District.
Sanders' endorsement statement praised Cooke as a potential "partner in Congress" who shares his goal of "building opportunities for the working class."
"She will be an ally to me in the House as she works to enforce antitrust laws against corporate monopolies that have bankrupted family farms like hers, raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage and expand Medicare to cover vision, dental and hearing," Sanders said in the statement.
He has already thrown his support behind several other candidates in the 2026 midterm elections. They include Maine's former stateSenate president Troy Jackson, who is running for governor; Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed; and Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney, who is challenging Rep. Shri Thanedar in the Democratic primary in a Detroit-area district.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
How does an Obama speechwriter befriend a Joe Rogan fan? Via surfing
What do men want? Democrats need to know after their election drubbing by Donald Trump and the 'manosphere' last year. They have responded by commissioning 'Speaking with American Men', a strategic plan that will study 'the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality' in online spaces. News of the two-year $20m project reinforced critics' view that Democrats have become the party of an aloof, college-educated liberal elite whose pursuit of working class men resembles a Victorian explorer wielding a butterfly net. Which makes the publication of David Litt's book, It's Only Drowning, a timely contribution to Democrats' ongoing post-mortem. Litt is a former senior speechwriter for Barack Obama dubbed 'the comic muse for the president' for his work on White House Correspondents' Association dinner monologues. The 38-year-old has written speeches and jokes for athletes, chief executives and philanthropists and was head writer and producer in the Washington office of the comedy studio Funny or Die. It's Only Drowning, his third book, centres on an improbable friendship that develops between Litt, a Yale-educated liberal with a fear of sharks, and his brother-in-law Matt Kappler, a tattooed truck driver who listens to podcaster Joe Rogan and never registered to vote. Their chasmic differences in background, education, ideology and lifestyle initially seem unbridgeable but, when Litt asks Kappler to help him learn how to surf, the shared experience provides neutral ground for connection. 'What started as a surfing book became a story about basically a will-they won't-they?, except it's whether an Obama speechwriter and a Joe Rogan superfan can become friends,' Litt says in an interview at the Guardian's office in Washington. 'Like a lot of Democrats, my natural inclination is to be a little annoying and condescending. I certainly wasn't doing that when I was the one who desperately needed to learn from him.' Litt, who divides his time between Washington and Asbury Park, New Jersey, describes himself as a high-functioning, high-anxiety person who experienced situational depression during the coronavirus pandemic. He had a feeling of overwhelming dread, difficulty getting out of bed and found himself endlessly doomscrolling. His wife Jacqui's brother, by contrast, seemed to be thriving. Kappler is a guitar player, a motorcycle enthusiast and a daredevil surfer. Litt reflects: 'I had always thought of him as a crazy person, and I still do, but he was able to deal with the ups and downs of life in a world that's on fire in a way that I began to envy. 'He did well during the pandemic and he seemed resilient in a way that, to be totally honest, I didn't. I definitely was not about to get tattoos or try to drive a truck because I would bump into things, but I could see myself trying to surf and that's what happened.' It would not be easy. At the age of 35, it required developing new muscles and confronting intense fear and humiliation. Still, Litt moved to the Jersey Shore and enlisted Kappler to help with surfing lessons. After months of struggle, he set the ambitious goal of riding a big wave in Hawaii. Surfing became a metaphor for confronting fear, both physical and existential, and an antidote to Litt's habitual overthinking. He says: 'Weirdly, the feeling I get, that sense of dread when a wave is about to crash down right on top of me, is actually somewhat analogous to the feeling I get when reading the news these days. It's that sense of looming disaster and there's nothing you can do about it.' And most importantly, Litt came to consider Kappler a friend. 'One of the only things more difficult than learning to surf is making a new friend in your 30s, so I feel like I might be even more proud that I was able to accomplish that than riding an overhead wave on the North Shore.' As he tells this story, Litt reflects on America's deep political and cultural divisions and how they were exacerbated by the pandemic. Differences in taste and lifestyle become 'identifiers' declaring political allegiance. Litt admits that, had Kappler been a friend rather than family, he would probably have cut off contact after learning that Kappler refused the Covid shot. 'He played electric guitar in a ska band that is a big deal on the Shore; I played ultimate frisbee. He was into death metal and I was into Stephen Sondheim. So we never had anything in common. In the run up to the pandemic all of these differences weren't always political but then somehow they started to feel like they were telling us what team we were on. It felt like we'd been drafted into opposite sides of the culture war.' Litt does not pretend that there was a Hollywood ending in which he and Kappler found common ground and changed each other's minds. But he does argue in favour of shared activities that allow for connection and understanding between individuals with differing views. 'What we found was this neutral ground. Surfing is a space that is not politically coded and you can talk about something that isn't one of the gazillion fault lines in our society right now. It's hard to find those spaces but, for the exact same reason, it's worth trying. 'I heard from a lot of people in the run-up to this book coming out who said, 'I have a friend or family member where politics is tearing us apart. We can't talk about anything in the news and how do I convince them?' What I would say now is talk about something else. Don't talk about what's in the news. 'Start by looking for that neutral ground and forgetting about this idea of common ground, because the reason it feels like we have no common ground is that we don't. We just disagree on a lot of important things as a society.' Litt knows that, had Kappler been registered to vote, he would certainly not have done so for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Back in 2016, Kappler said he would have backed either Trump or Bernie Sanders because they were the most entertaining. Litt says: 'Truly the biggest divide between us politically is that I think about politics a lot and that's part of how I define myself. Matt watches the news, he cares about what's going on in the world, but that's not his identity. He's not a political person. 'One of the problems that Democrats have right now is we're very much the party of news junkies and most Americans are not news junkies.' Celebrity politics and cultural influence have moved towards Republicans and the likes of Rogan and Elon Musk, who appeal to anti-establishment sentiment and claim to prioritise common sense over political parties. A new generation of rightwing podcasters and influencers started out as entertainers and latched on to issues later. 'Democrats are still lagging.' Litt says. 'The new media voices that are developing, many of them are great, but they tend to be political first and entertainment second, or politics as entertainment, and so they don't appeal as much to people who don't find politics entertaining and those are the voters we're going to need in '28.' Democrats also have a well documented class problem. It has come to be seen by many as the party of Hollywood celebrities and college-educated elites, with a whiff of contempt for blue collar workers in the heartland, summed up by Hillary Clinton's dismissal of half of Trump supporters as a 'basket of deplorables.' The party's perceived shift toward identity politics and social justice issues alienated some working class voters who once formed its base. Ahead of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer declared: 'For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.' It turned out to be bad maths. Last November Republicans swept the White House and both chambers of Congress. Trump won 56% of voters without a college degree, compared with 42% who favoured Harris, a shift from 2020 when Trump and Joe Biden were roughly even. Litt points out the homogeneity of Democratic circles and the lack of organic relationships with working-class people, particularly those without college degrees. This disconnect hinders their ability to understand their issues or effectively communicate. Recalling his time volunteering for Harris's ill-starred election campaign, he says: 'I would sometimes be on conference calls and people would talk about a policy or message and say, 'Do we think this is going to work? Do we think this is going to be effective?' I would basically say, well, let me go surfing and find out. 'Nobody else said, 'Oh, let me go talk to my working class friend,' because Democrats often do not have working friends who don't have college degrees. The people who are in office, and the people who work for those who are in office, almost all are college educated and almost all their friends are college educated. 'You have Democrats sit in rooms where literally everyone has a college degree, and they say, how come people without college degrees don't feel like we're thinking about them or that we're welcoming to them? Well, look around the room.' Litt acknowledges that he is writing about a friendship with one other white man, the smallest possible sample size, making it hard to draw sociological conclusions about working class people of colour. But he also notes that Republicans have sought to 'repolarise' the country on educational and culture war lines while making race less important in determining how people vote. Polls show that Trump did make big inroads with Latino men and, to a lesser extent, with African American men. Litt says: 'I don't know that race stopped mattering but I do think there was a Democratic view that race mattered so much more than anything else, especially for people who are not white. 'What we saw is very clearly no, that's not true and was maybe not the most empirically based attitude to have. The base of the Democratic party is still Black women but I do think there was some some of that racial depolarisation.' Democrats do have a strong policy agenda for blue collar workers but have failed to communicate it, Litt argues. His friendship with Kappler will not explain everything. But he offers it as a start for a party that somehow allowed Trump – a millionaire businessman who cuts taxes for the rich – to steal its clothes. 'If you had asked me three years ago, do you have a lot to learn from your brother-in-law, I would have said not really, and one of the things I had to learn was that's a deeply obnoxious attitude. I'm still a professional Democrat – I can still be plenty annoying – but I think I am less self-righteous than I used to be. And it turns out life is more fun and you're more persuasive that way. So why not?'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Recent US political violence aided by DIY murder tradecraft available on internet
A rash of recent assassinations have brought on congressional scrutiny and concern among law enforcement agencies who are wary of an age of political polarization turning deadly. But experts say the violence is as much a byproduct of the times as it is the easy accessibility to DIY murder tradecraft, evident in some high-profile slayings of late. So while the willingness to commit these acts has certainly increased, the tradecraft to pull them off has never been more obtainable. 'Political polarization, combined with the idea that one's opponents are irredeemably evil and that there are no other legal avenues to create change, can lead to violence,' said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a terrorism analyst who closely tracks extremists across the political spectrum. 'There are several guides online for assassination, guerrilla warfare or similar violent acts, as well as counter-surveillance manuals shared by individuals in communication apps such as Telegram and online libraries.' The proliferation of those kinds of resources have spilled into the mainstream and have given the average person the knowhow to access the types of instructions on popular apps that were once only available on dark web archives. Whether it's downloading blueprints for and creating a 3D-printed gun, professionally tracking down targets, cooking up a bomb recipe or looking up ways to evade law enforcement once an act has been committed, a number of public attacks show so-called 'lone wolves' using internet resources to plot their crimes. For example, police say Vance Boelter, 57, charged with killing Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband at their home in Minnesota earlier this month, used a number of data brokering websites to amass not only a hitlist of 'mostly or all Democrats' but their home addresses, too. Court documents say Boelter was caught with 'lists of internet-based people search engines including Truepeoplesearch, Spokeo, Pipl, Peoplefinders, Beenverified, Whitepages, Truthfinder, Intelius, Ownerly, USsearch and Peoplelooker' which can 'aggregate data from various online and offline sources to provide the querying user details about the searched-for person, such as home addresses, phone numbers and information about family members'. Extremists on the far right have also used similar resources to create kill lists of their enemies, and Fisher-Birch said some have become more 'adept at doxing in recent years'. He noted that terrorist groups have gone about producing easily digestible manuals in pdf form then spreading them on Telegram, while other instructional materials are 'commercially available books written by former members of militaries or intelligence services' they suggest reading. Available online materials can also extend to sourcing weaponry. Fisher-Birch continued: 'According to police, Luigi Mangione used a partially 3D-printed pistol to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.' Mangione, who has amassed a cult-like following among anti-corporatists after the Manhattan assassination of Thompson in December, also allegedly managed to evade a manhunt for days with a stunning amount of counter-surveillance tradecraft – something other known attackers have achieved. Still, to this day, the masked and hooded suspect seen planting pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC offices in Washington DC the night before the 6 January 2021 insurrection on Capitol Hill has yet to be caught. In the past, multiple law enforcement sources remarked how the surveillance footage shows the would-be bomber wearing the same prescribed disguise and gloves featured in terrorism manuals circulated on the far right. Incidents like that suggest the ecosystem of DIY manualling has partly been seeded by extremist organizations on social media, which have then spread elsewhere. As early as 2018, the internationally designated neo-Nazi terrorist group the Base posted military tradecraft gleaned from US Marine Corps manuals and other sources instructing how to make a covert exit if you're pursued by authorities. Other jihadists groups, such as the Islamic State, have uploaded similar literature on encrypted forums they use to communicate with recruits. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion 'More generally, violent extremists groups put considerable time and effort into inciting followers to plot attacks and building robust online communities for information sharing and advice,' said Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism and a research fellow at the Soufan Center. '[IS] and al-Qaida produce and disseminate manuals and videos teaching followers to construct explosive devices, detonators, suppressors and more.' Coinciding with this surge in political violence is the growing willingness of nation-states to increase covert assassination operations on foreign soil, taking advantage of the moment. Iranian agents sponsored the attempted assassination of a dissident in New York by tapping criminal networks to carry it out, while Indian diplomats tried to disguise the murder of a Sikh activist in Canada as a gangland killing. Of course, political assassinations and their attempts, without the clear aid of online tools, have also come to pass: a man stalked an event at a Jewish museum in DC to gun down Israeli diplomats in May, while then presidential candidate Donald Trump faced an attempted assassination last summer in the lead-up to the November vote – both attackers using over-the-counter firearms and limited tradecraft. One thing does seem clear: authorities appear unable or unsure on how to counter the rising threat of lethal political violence. The FBI declined to comment on the broad string of recent political assassinations and how the agency plans to handle them in the future. 'We have nothing to add to previous statements about the events you mention,' said a spokesperson in an email. After Boelter was caught, a federal agent in Minnesota called his alleged murders 'an appalling act of political violence that has no place in our country'.
NBC News
3 hours ago
- NBC News
What the explosive growth of 'blowout counties' means for U.S. politics
Look at a few national election results and it's easy to think of the United States as a 50/50 nation overall, split down the middle between Republican red and Democratic blue. But that's not the reality in vast and growing swaths of the country, where political competitiveness at the local level is being replaced by landslide loyalty to a single party. Across the country, 20-point margins in counties Republicans were winning at the turn of the century have turned into 50-point margins or more in recent years. Meanwhile, the number of counties that flipped from one party to the other in each presidential election has shrunk. Data compiled by the NBC News Political Unit has shown the demographic trends that have organized our current political coalitions. But the geographical trends also help show how much of the reorganization has clustered along community lines over the last quarter-century. If some people talk like they've never had political conversations with people who disagree with them, it could be because that's more possible than ever before in today's politically clustered United States. Looking at blowout county wins George W. Bush's Electoral College win in 2000 was famously razor-thin. But his average win across the country's 3,100-plus counties was about 17 points. Democrats' advantage in population-dense urban cores bolsters their popular vote count election after election. But Republicans' advantage in rural counties has been a core part of the Republican playbook, with small-county wins with margins of 50 points or more adding up, bit by bit, to a substantial coalition. These were the counties where each candidate had 50-plus-point-margin wins in the 2000 election: Bush captured major wins across the Plains states and up through the Mountain West, while Al Gore racked up margins of 50-plus points in the densely populated New York City boroughs, Philadelphia, Baltimore and some scattered rural areas with large Black populations. But more than two decades later, President Donald Trump has dramatically expanded the number of blowout win counties. Trump has grown Republican political advantages east of the older GOP bulwarks and has captured Appalachia, which was once a reliably Democratic region, continuing to drive up margins in rural America. The average size of a Trump blowout county was about 10,000 voters last year. On the flip side, Democrats have grown their advantages in population-dense cities and suburbs, with the San Francisco Bay Area; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle emerging on this map as heavily Democratic areas. The average size of a blowout county for Kamala Harris was 210,000 voters. Some of the most important political coalitions for Democrats emerge on this map, especially in comparison with 2000. The 2024 map shows the birth of Democratic vote powerhouses in majority-Black DeKalb and Clayton counties in Georgia and in Wisconsin's Dane County, home of Madison and the University of Wisconsin, with its heavily white and college degree-holding population. Both coalitions are essential to Democratic wins in those states in recent elections. Overall, there are four times as many blowout counties today than there were at the turn of the century. Counties flipped One consequence of the sharp rise in blowout counties: a precipitous decline in swing counties. Back in the 2004 election, 227 counties flipped from one party to the other compared with the 2000 election. But last fall, only 89 changed their party preferences from the 2020 election. The total number of flipped counties has dropped over the century. The biggest spikes occurred in the 2008 first-term election of Barack Obama and the 2016 first-term election of Trump — moments when the party coalitions changed dramatically. Trump's 89-county flip in this last election was actually an increase over the 80 counties that flipped in Joe Biden's victory in 2020. The last election was also statistically notable for another reason: Harris became the first candidate this century who didn't flip a single county compared with the previous election.
