Last Tuesday, after staggeringly losing to everyone’s favorite orange-colored, billionaire racist, Florida Senator Marco Rubio ended his bid for president.
As the reality of Donald Trump potentially becoming the GOP nominee for president, or even worse, becoming president sets in, both the Republican and Democratic parties are trying to rally together to find the candidate that they believe could defeat him.
Republicans have seemingly chosen Texas Senator Ted Cruz.
But who’s the Democrats’ choice?
It’s a fact that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has a lead over Senator Bernie Sanders in delegate counts. Clinton currently has 1,163 delegates and 467 superdelegates compared to Sanders’ 844 delegates and 26 superdelegates.
With these numbers in mind, there are many Democrats, including President Barack Obama, according to a March 17 New York Times article, who believe it’s time to stop messing around and rally behind Clinton.
Sanders isn’t giving up that easily.
Following a string of primary losses to Clinton, Sanders and his campaign staff remain positive.
“We are feeling very good,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager, told reporters last Wednesday. “We are going to carry this campaign on to success in the summer and then ultimately in the fall.”
Sanders has an overwhelming amount of millennial supporters, according to a January poll from Rock the Vote which says that Sanders leads Clinton in that demographic 46 percent to 35 percent. Getting millennials to the polls, however, is a whole different story. If they can’t show up in mass amounts during the primaries, Sanders’s campaign could be over.
But I don’t think Sanders should give up. At least not yet.
The South, which is where Clinton is highly favored, has voted. The following primaries will be taking place in states that are demographically friendlier for Sanders.
What he, his staff and his supporters need to do is generate more enthusiasm to go out and vote, especially at such a dire time in his campaign.
This is many of his young supporters’ first time voting in a presidential election, and motivating them to go and use their rights as Americans could help.
If he doesn’t get high numbers of young people to show up at the polls, this could all be over, but the primaries aren’t over yet. In fact, they’ve only just begun.
There are still 28 states left. That’s more than half of the country, and people want him to just “give up, already?”
Don’t let the superdelegates scare you, either. They change sides according to who does best. In fact, Clinton had 154 superdelegates to now-President Obama’s 50 before New Hampshire voted in Janurary of 2008.
Even if Sanders does lose his bid for candidacy, he’s already begun to leave a lasting mark on the new generation of Democrats and American politics.
Bringing Democratic Socialism to the forefronts of the presidential race, raising 98 percent of his campaign money through small individual donations and being consistent across the board, Sanders isn’t going anywhere, even after the nominee is picked, and neither should you.
