On top of that, most journalists who echo the Sanders enthusiasm narrative spend a lot of time on social media, and if you do that, then it’s safe to say that it looks like Sanders is inspiring a lot of enthusiasm. There is an explosion of memes and chatter about the “revolution” and sharing every single story they can find that says something positive about Sanders’s chances.

But if you dig in, it also becomes quickly clear that much of the online enthusiasm isn’t really pro-Sanders so much as it’s anti-Clinton. There are thousands, probably millions of social media messages which are more about using Sanders as a cover to harass women and their allies than as legitimate advocacy for the candidate. Remove the mansplaining, harassment, and gotcha trolling, and the amount of Sanders traffic isn’t quite so awe-inspiring in volume.

The online boors aren’t the majority of Sanders supporters, to be clear. On the contrary, this poll and others show that the majority of Sanders supporters are pretty chilled out. But this small percentage of angry men (and a few women) are really loud online and their anti-Clinton vitriol contributes to the false notion that Sanders has the wind at his back.

Clinton isn’t a meh candidate, in other words. She inspires passion, both in her haters and in her supporters.

If you give it a moment’s thought, that Clinton would be such an inspiring figure to her supporters makes perfect sense. She has spent two and a half decades in the spotlight, enduring huge amounts of sexism as every single man in the country who feels threatened by smart women or powerful women projects all his anxieties on her with the passion of a thousand burning suns. But she hasn’t stopped striving. She eats haters for breakfast and keeps smiling, all while more haters are telling her she doesn’t smile enough.

For supporters, especially female supporters, who are sick to the teeth of all this sexist nonsense and sometimes wonder how they are going to keep on fighting another day, Clinton’s resilience is the stuff of legends.

METCALFE: Again, negative conversations about our candidates do nothing to further Sanders’s cause.

YOUNGER: I’m not sure how negative it is to question your voting discretion in spite of overwhelming support. If critiquing Hillary or your apprehension to accurately vote for those you represent is negative, then I’m not sure you’re the one I’d like representing me.

Metcalfe then asked Younger where he lived, and after he responded, he asked her frankly why she’s casting her superdelegate vote for Hillary Clinton despite a vast majority of her state caucusing for Sanders.

METCALFE: Because I believe Hillary Clinton would be a better president. End of conversation.

YOUNGER: And that’s why people get angry. Bernie supporters can be quite vapid. But voting in opposition to what we voted for is only supporting the idea that Hillary and her supporting super delegates are in the pockets of others.

Bernie won in Alaska. End of story. Your personal preferences for president are represented in your vote as a citizen. Not as a representative of your state.

At this point in the conversation, Metcalfe’s tone turned noticeably sour. She patronized Younger, reminding him of her experience as a Democratic Party officer for decades, and essentially told him his opinion on how she should cast her superdelegate vote was invalid, since he was just a voter.

METCALFE: I’m in the pocket of no one. I have no financial connections to Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat. I am a retired union representative. I put in my time in the trenches for 40 years, and I really object to someone like you who has probably done nothing except caucus telling me what to do. I am voting for the best interests of my country. And that would be Hillary Clinton.

With as much time as respected MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has spent cheering on the various aspects of the Bernie Sanders campaign over the past few months, it’s caused many within her audience to question if she’s lost her focus, and some have told us they’ve tuned her out entirely. But that may be about to become a moot point, because Maddow now appears to be losing patience for Sanders as he shifts his tone from idealistic to nihilistic and absurd. In fact Rachel took the Sanders campaign to task for its (false) claim this week that it wasn’t even trying to win in certain states.

The claim, which came from Bernie Sanders senior strategist Tad Devine, was that Sanders has won states in which he invested time and resources, and has lost eight key states because he wasn’t bothering to compete there to begin with. It’s not clear why such a claim was supposed to help the Sanders campaign or make him look good, but as it turns out, the claim is factually and numerically false. Rachel Maddow took particular objection to the claim and tore it apart on-air last night.

Maddow walked through the numbers demonstrating that the Bernie Sanders campaign invested more time and resources than Hillary Clinton in states like Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Virginia – yet Clinton won all of those states in whopping blowouts. That left Maddow to conclude that the Sanders campaign will have to “walk back” Devine’s comments for being false. She also suggested that if Sanders continues with his new strategy of trying to pressure superdelegates to hand him the nomination even though he’s far behind in regular delegates, even his own supporters may not follow him down that path.

Generally speaking, Rachel Maddow sounded borderline fed up with the direction the Bernie Sanders campaign has begun taking of late. Considering that she has been one of his biggest on-air allies in all of cable news , this can’t be a positive development for him. Her full nine minute MSNBC segment is available online, but the above referenced commentary begins at about the six minute mark.

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Tim Canova's Facebook has 31,000 likes. His opponent Debbie Wasserman Schultz has 240,000+. Can we give him a Bernie Boost?
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Here's a spreadsheet of 300 superdelegates who have pledged to vote for Hillary despite the wishes of their constituents. Contact them to let them know you want representation! We must be represented! docs.google.com
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The actor-director and his partner Susan Sarandon campaigned for the former North Carolina senator one day before New Hampshire voters go to the polls in a crucial vote that could shape the rest of the primary contests.

He also met regularly with the Young Peoples Socialist League in the student center, where students talked about nuclear disarmament, former Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, the lessons of the Russian revolution, and how to implement socialism, though his vision did not match up with the already faltering Soviet experiment. He talks today about expanding government programs like social security and Medicare, and tuition-free college. “Should the government be running the restaurant across the street?” says Sanders today. “Obviously not!”

Standing up to bullies will be – or is – an intangible yet concrete strategy of the Clinton campaign. That includes you and me. We have to stay fresh. We have to exude enthusiasm for our candidate. We cannot be diminished or demolished by the bullies.

How to do it? I’ve started by recognizing “bullying” as a tactic of the opposition. I understand why it is done. And I am protecting myself. That’s the best I can do at the moment. We each need this consciousness. As far as mechanisms, I think it’s important that we band together. We can become tribes that congregate, refresh, vent and lend support through the DM option on Twitter. We can call out for help when the gang-bangers attack, and know that our friends will be there. If there’s one trait I’ve noticed thus far, it’s that the bullies gang up on a single individual. We have to deploy the same tactic in a defensive posture. Sounds like war, yes. It is. However, I know we’ll get through it. My visual reminder, at the end of an evening or during an assault, comes from Hillary. I’ll sign off with this empowering reminder.

However, this was just the first round of problems for the campaign committee. When Bernie 2016 filed its report for the month of January, still more donations were flagged.

On 25 February, the FEC sent an RFAI covering January 2016. Once again, impermissible donations from people with addresses outside the U.S. were found. Again, the Treasurer for Sanders’ campaign fund-raiser was reminded of federal laws:

Schedule A-P (see attached) discloses a contribution(s) from an individual(s) who has a mailing address outside of the United States of America. Please be advised that 52 U.S.C. § 30121(a) (formerly 2 U.S.C. § 441e(a)) and 11 CFR § 110.20 prohibit foreign nationals from making contributions in connection with any election for political office or in connection with any primary election, convention, or caucus held to select candidates for any political office.



The FEC ordered Jackson to comply with these laws by 31 March:

If you have received a contribution from a foreign national, you must refund the impermissible contribution to the donor in accordance with 11CFR § 103.3(b). Please inform the Commission of your corrective action immediately in writing and provide a photocopy of your check for the refund. (25 February 2016 RFAI)

On 25 March, Bernie 2016 filed an amended report to the FEC, showing refunds to individuals totaling $684,455.53. The amended report covers several months in 2015. It’s not clear whether the refunds were for excessive contributions or prohibited donations by Foreign Nationals or something else.

Bernie 2016 has yet to report its campaign finance disclosure for February.

First off, like the majority of journalists covering the election, you grossly exaggerate the support that Bernie Sanders has among millennials. Millennials are not a monolith; we exist across racial, religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. To say that Bernie Sanders is "winning under-30 voters by consistently absurd margins" is a gross miscategorization of what the vote totals have said thus far. The truth is that Sanders is doing well with White millennials while he is still struggling to make inroads with people of color. According to South Carolina exit polls, Clinton won 46% of the under-30 vote but 86% of the African-American vote. In Texas, she won 40% of the under-30 vote but 73% of the non-White vote. In Florida, she won 35% of the under-30 vote but 74% of the non-White vote. I know that you tried to defend Sanders' lack of non-White support by saying he is "making gains" but when you cite the fact that he only lost the non-White vote of Michigan by 30 points what you're essentially saying is that this is a large segment of the population that Sanders is struggling to connect and, as you fail to realize, is a segment that includes large numbers of millennials within their ranks.

Numbers aside, the next part of your article focused on several critiques of Hillary Clinton you feel millennials are justified in having. Let's look at some of these, particularly your critique of Hillary Clinton's Iraq vote. You may be shocked to learn that this vote was not "one of the easiest calls ever" as you implied but was rather a difficult and drawn out decision that every single member of Congress mulled in both an extensive and exhaustive manner. In fact, had you done a little independent research, you would have been able to read the transcript of Hillary Clinton's speech on the Senate floor in October of 2002 where she calls her vote "probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make." It was not a slam dunk vote as you implied but rather a complicated one with far-reaching implications. In fact, several progressive icons voted in favor of the bill including then senators Joe Biden, Diane Feinstein, Chris Dodd, and John Kerry. If it was such an easy call, why did so many progressives drop the ball, so to speak?

To answer this, you imply that these Democratic senators didn't want to appear to be anti-war. However, you have also stated that you don't personally buy Hillary Clinton's justification for her vote. What is it about her justification that you find so "ridiculous"? Hillary has called her vote a mistake yet she has also offered insight into why she voted the way she did. At the time, Clinton believed that a yes vote would be a strong piece of leverage that would ensure that the negotiation of weapons inspections between the United Nations and Saddam Hussein would be completed before the United States took further action. In that same speech Clinton said that her vote was not "for any new doctrine of preemption or for unilateralism or for the arrogance of American power or purpose." Clinton, along with 76 other senators trusted George W. Bush to do the right thing and stay true to his word. Unfortunately he did not and the result was America's worst foreign policy decision since Vietnam. This was not about Democrats "supporting a wrong war" as you implied but instead was about a president accepting the trust placed in him by Congress and then abusing that trust to promote his own personal disastrous agenda.

In addition, you also seem critical of Hillary Clinton's role as First Lady by implying that she was responsible for her husband's policies. Last time I checked Matt, a First Lady is supposed to be an advocate for the administration unless you personally believe every First Lady should take on the role of Claire Underwood in House of Cards and use the position to promote her own personal political agenda. However, since you seem to believe that a First Lady is a major policy player let's take a look at your criticism of her in that role, focusing on the 1994 Crime Bill. Like most Hillary critics, you took aim at her out-of-context quote taken on young African-American men who became known as "super-predators" at the time. If you had done even a tiny bit of research, you would have realized that not only did Clinton use this term a single time but she used it to specifically describe gang members and not all African-American males. The fact that you took this smear as being factual shows that you, like many others in the media, were duped into believing something that simply was not true.