Bernie Sanders announced he is running for president on Vermont Public Radio Tuesday morning.

It will be Sanders’ second consecutive bid for the Democratic nomination after losing to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Sanders enters the 2020 race as one of the frontrunners — a remarkable turn for the democratic socialist who, three years ago, was viewed as a protest candidate from the political fringe.

Today, Sanders is one of the most popular politicians among Democratic voters and his policy agenda — a suite of progressive proposals to expand health care, broaden the social safety net and make higher education free — has been embraced by many of the Democratic party’s leading figures. </s> (AP) – Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says he’s running for president in 2020.

The 77-year-old self-described democratic socialist challenged Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary in 2016 and told Vermont Public Radio on Tuesday that he planned to again seek the nomination.

Sanders has reshaped Democratic politics and earned a loyal following with his passionate defense of liberal proposals including free college tuition and single-payer health care. But he will face off against several other Democratic candidates who also want to appeal to the party’s base.

Still, Sanders’ name recognition, fundraising prowess and passion for liberal policies makes him a top-tier 2020 presidential contender. </s> Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announces bid for Democratic nomination for president in 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announces bid for Democratic nomination for president in 2020. </s> Multiple news outlets are reporting that 77-year-old Senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders will announce his candidacy for the 2020 Presidential election.

The self-described socialist ran a competitive Democratic primary race against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

He later threw his support behind Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.

Recent polls have shown that Sanders is one of the most popular politicians in the country, especially amongst African-American and Latino voters.

Sources also told say that Sanders’ will begin a search for an exploratory committee.

Click here to learn more. </s> Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced on Tuesday that he will be entering the 2020 race to run for president on the Democratic ticket in 2020.

“We began the political revolution in the 2016 campaign, and now it’s time to move that revolution forward,” Sanders told Vermont Public Radio in an interview airing Tuesday morning.

“I think the current occupant of the White House is an embarrassment to our country,” he continued. “I think he is a pathological liar … I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”

Sanders revealed in November 2018 he will “probably” launch a bid for the presidency if another candidate does not emerge who is more likely to beat President Donald Trump in 2020.

“If there’s somebody else who appears who can, for whatever reason, do a better job than me, I’ll work my ass off to elect him or her,” Sanders said at the time. “If it turns out that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, then I will probably run.”

The progressive senator unsuccessfully ran a 2016 presidential campaign as a Democrat. Although his run was initially considered a long-shot bid, Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses. He also won more than 45 percent of pledged delegates, compared to challenger Hillary Clinton’s 54 percent.

“I wanted to let the people of the state of Vermont know about this first,” Sanders told VPR’s Bob Kinzel Tuesday. “And what I promise to do is, as I go around the country, is to take the values that all of us in Vermont are proud of — a belief in justice, in community, in grassroots politics, in town meetings — that’s what I’m going to carry all over this country.”

Sanders and his advisers gathered for a weekend in Vermont in December to discuss his prospective run and started laying the foundation in preparation for an even more expansive campaign than he had during his first presidential run.

“This time, he starts off as a front-runner, or one of the front-runners,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s 2016 campaign manager, said during the retreat. “It’ll be a much bigger campaign if he runs again, in terms of the size of the operation.” </s> According to two sources close to Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator is allegedly set to announce that he will be launching his 2020 bid for the presidency.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is reportedly gearing up to announce his next presidential run for 2020, according to two sources close to Sanders who apparently have personal knowledge of his intention to run for the White House again.

Sanders, who has called himself a “democratic socialist,” and who has the blessings of many, has apparently been debating whether he should run for president again for quite some time now, but one source has now said that he has finally made up his mind after keeping a close watch on polls which indicate that he is still wildly popular as a potential presidential candidate, and that he is one of the most popular candidates in the Democratic primary field, as Huffington News through Yahoo has reported.

When considering whether he should run for president again in 2020, Bernie Sanders was also apparently delighted to find that he has an overwhelming amount of support from both the Latino and African-American community, which was allegedly lower back in 2016.

The unnamed source who has claimed that Bernie Sanders will be running for president again in 2020 also stated that with polls showing that the senator may just be the most popular politician in all of America, the time is certainly right to announce his nomination with so much support.

Another source has suggested that the first thing Bernie Sanders will be doing after he announces his run for president is to create an exploratory committee. However, it should be noted that Sanders has not personally responded to this idea or commented on it as of yet.

However, a staffer who previously worked for Sanders has said that Bernie has been working on preparing for his presidential run for a while and that many things are already in place, with the Vermont senator allegedly hiring people to work on his campaign already.

Despite the fact that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton during the last election, many people have cried foul over how he was treated, with politicians who agree with his Medicare for All plans like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also backed him, now in office.

With polls suggesting that Bernie Sanders is one of the top candidates for president in the United States, many Americans will now be watching and waiting to see if Sanders will be announcing his 2020 presidential run. </s> After months of deliberation, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Tuesday that he is running for president again in 2020. It will be Sanders’ second consecutive bid for the Democratic nomination after losing to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Sanders made the announcement in an interview with Vermont Public Radio Tuesday morning.

In the phone interview, Sanders said he “wanted to let the state of Vermont know about this first.”

When asked why he’s running, Sanders took direct aim at President Trump. “I think the current occupant of the White House is an embarrassment to our country,” Sanders said.

“I think he is a pathological liar. I also think he is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe — somebody who is gaining cheap political points by trying to pick on minorities, often undocumented immigrants.”

In an official campaign announce video Sanders posted to YouTube at about 7 a.m. Tuesday, the senator invited supporters to join and “unprecedented grassroots campaign of one million active volunteers in every state in our country.”

“Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history,” Sanders said in the campaign video. “Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”

Sanders continued, “Our campaign is about taking on the powerful special interests that dominate our economic and political life. I’m talking about Wall Street, the health insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, and the large multinational corporations that exert such an enormous influence over our lives.”

Buckling down on the social justice angle, Sanders continued by saying, “Our campaign is about redoubling our efforts to end racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and all forms of discrimination.”

Sanders also speaks on gun control and foreign policy, among other important campaign issues in the nearly 11-minute video.

The Vermont senator was also on CBS This Morning announcing his second presidential bid Tuesday.

Sanders enters the 2020 race as one of the frontrunners — a remarkable turn for the democratic socialist who, three years ago, was viewed as a protest candidate from the political fringe. Today, Sanders is one of the most popular politicians among Democratic voters and his policy agenda — a suite of progressive proposals to expand health care, broaden the social safety net and make higher education free — has been embraced by many of the Democratic party’s leading figures.

“I can tell you very happily, and I think any objective observer would confirm what I’m saying, is that in the last year and half or so, the Democratic party has moved in a far more progressive direction than they were before I ran for president,” he said in an interview with CNN last year. But in the run-up to his announcement, Sanders and top aides insisted the decision would ultimately turn on a much simpler question: whether he was the best candidate to defeat President Donald Trump next year.

Sanders begins his campaign this time around with a higher profile and better organized base of support, but rather than having a single establishment favorite to fight, perhaps a dozen other candidates with wide and often overlapping appeal are already pursing the nomination. That includes as many as a half-dozen credible progressive hopefuls who, though not social democrats in the Sanders mold, share many of his policy priorities and political style. The primary field will also be more racially diverse and, on average, younger. Less than two months into the year, five of his Senate colleagues are either running or exploring campaigns, including four of the six women in the race.

And though he has joined the race now earlier than he did at this point in 2015, Sanders’ entry comes in the wake of about a dozen others, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another progressive populist, who announced the formation of an exploratory committee on New Year’s Eve and formally declared her candidacy 10 days ago. She quickly scooped up Sanders’ 2016 Iowa caucus director and has already traveled to six key states and Puerto Rico.

Sanders has spent much of the past few years spreading his message and developing relationships with like-minded officials and activists during exhaustive travels around the country — with a particular eye on states won by Trump in 2016 — and via his unrivaled digital operation. His core of supporters, though their vote share will likely diminish in a crowded field, could be stubborn enough to carry him to victories in some of the key early voting states. His media footprint and ability to raise big numbers of small-dollar donations should allow him to compete in California, which moved up its primary for 2020, creating an expensive new challenge for candidates who have largely forsworn corporate PAC donations and super PAC support.

“He never stopped,” Our Revolution president Nina Turner, a trusted adviser, said in January. “He stays on the mission. People sometimes try to knock him off the path but he’s right there, and he never wavers in that. And that’s a hard thing to do, to be the one who’s pushing the vision even when it’s not popular. It’s easy to come on board when things are popular.”

But Sanders’ increased influence has also invited stricter scrutiny from the political opponents, including a vocal faction inside the Democratic party who blame him for dampening support for Clinton ahead of her loss to Trump, the press and even some of his most dedicated advocates.

In January, he was forced to publicly confront allegations of sexual harassment by staffers on his 2016 campaign. Sanders apologized but, during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, said he was unaware of the misconduct at the time because he “was little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case.” The explanation fell flat and, days later another report emerged accusing an operative on the campaign of forcibly kissing a younger female staffer. When Sanders met with a group of men and women who wrote a letter to his office detailing their experiences in 2016, he was, according one former staffer in attendance, “conciliatory” and opened his remarks with what she described as an “honest apology.”

Both Sanders critics and allies will keep a close eye on the makeup of his early hires, most notably his choice of a campaign manager to replace Jeff Weaver, who ran the show in 2016 and will remain on as a senior adviser. An aide told CNN in January that the process was already underway. There is also the question of whether influential progressives like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who volunteered on Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and traveled with him during the midterms to campaign for progressive hopefuls, will offer their public support. California Rep. Barbara Lee, one of the most respected progressive lawmakers in the country, endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris last week.

From the backbench to the front lines

Sanders’ increased visibility has yielded substantial gains for the Democratic party’s left flank and — through an unlikely alliance with a Republican — helped deliver a historic rebuke to the Trump administration’s policy in the Middle East. Along with GOP Sen. Mike Lee and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, Sanders last year won bipartisan backing for a War Powers resolution calling for an end to military support for the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen. His pressure campaigns on major corporations like Amazon also helped secure a $15 minimum wage for workers there and a pledge from the company to back legislation raising it nationwide.

“He has reached out more to work with colleagues in the last few years to show that effectiveness and that’s his biggest plus point on a substance level,” said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who led the successful push for a matching resolution this year in the House.

The policy principles behind a second Sanders campaign are expected to be largely the same as in 2015 and 2016. Still, he has over the past few weeks begun to roll out or re-up proposals to combat economic inequality and fortify programs like Social Security. He is also planning to reintroduce his Medicare for all legislation in tandem with Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who has taken over developing and shepherding the accompanying House bill.

Over two weeks in January and February, Sanders unveiled plans to buy more than 50 years of padding for Social Security by raising payroll taxes on income above $250,000 and hike the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans — suggesting a top rate of 77% on billionaire heirs.

“Our bill does what the American people want,” Sanders said in a statement ahead of the rollout, “by substantially increasing the estate tax on the wealthiest families in this country and dramatically reducing wealth inequality. From a moral, economic, and political perspective our nation will not thrive when so few have so much and so many have so little.” </s> WASHINGTON DC — After months of deliberation, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Tuesday that he is running for president again in 2020. It will be Sanders’ second consecutive bid for the Democratic nomination after losing to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“What I promise to do is, as I go around the country, is to take the values that all of us in Vermont are proud of — our belief in justice, in community, in grassroots politics and town meetings — that’s what I’m going to carry all over this country,” Sanders said in his announcement on Vermont Public Radio Tuesday morning.

Sanders enters the 2020 race as one of the frontrunners — a remarkable turn for the democratic socialist who, three years ago, was viewed as a protest candidate from the political fringe. Today, Sanders is one of the most popular politicians among Democratic voters and his policy agenda — a suite of progressive proposals to expand health care, broaden the social safety net and make higher education free — has been embraced by many of the Democratic party’s leading figures.

“I can tell you very happily, and I think any objective observer would confirm what I’m saying, is that in the last year and half or so, the Democratic party has moved in a far more progressive direction than they were before I ran for president,” he said in an interview with CNN last year. But in the run-up to his announcement, Sanders and top aides insisted the decision would ultimately turn on a much simpler question: whether he was the best candidate to defeat President Donald Trump next year.

Sanders begins his campaign this time around with a higher profile and better organized base of support, but rather than having a single establishment favorite to fight, perhaps a dozen other candidates with wide and often overlapping appeal are already pursing the nomination. That includes as many as a half-dozen credible progressive hopefuls who, though not social democrats in the Sanders mold, share many of his policy priorities and political style. The primary field will also be more racially diverse and, on average, younger. Less than two months into the year, five of his Senate colleagues are either running or exploring campaigns, including four of the six women in the race.

And though he has joined the race now earlier than he did at this point in 2015, Sanders’ entry comes in the wake of about a dozen others, like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another progressive populist, who announced the formation of an exploratory committee on New Year’s Eve and formally declared her candidacy 10 days ago. She quickly scooped up Sanders’ 2016 Iowa caucus director and has already traveled to six key states and Puerto Rico.

Sanders has spent much of the past few years spreading his message and developing relationships with like-minded officials and activists during exhaustive travels around the country — with a particular eye on states won by Trump in 2016 — and via his unrivaled digital operation. His core of supporters, though their vote share will likely diminish in a crowded field, could be stubborn enough to carry him to victories in some of the key early voting states. His media footprint and ability to raise big numbers of small-dollar donations should allow him to compete in California, which moved up its primary for 2020, creating an expensive new challenge for candidates who have largely forsworn corporate PAC donations and super PAC support.

“He never stopped,” Our Revolution president Nina Turner, a trusted adviser, said in January. “He stays on the mission. People sometimes try to knock him off the path but he’s right there, and he never wavers in that. And that’s a hard thing to do, to be the one who’s pushing the vision even when it’s not popular. It’s easy to come on board when things are popular.”

But Sanders’ increased influence has also invited stricter scrutiny from the political opponents, including a vocal faction inside the Democratic party who blame him for dampening support for Clinton ahead of her loss to Trump, the press and even some of his most dedicated advocates.

In January, he was forced to publicly confront allegations of sexual harassment by staffers on his 2016 campaign. Sanders apologized but, during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, said he was unaware of the misconduct at the time because he “was little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case.” The explanation fell flat and, days later another report emerged accusing an operative on the campaign of forcibly kissing a younger female staffer. When Sanders met with a group of men and women who wrote a letter to his office detailing their experiences in 2016, he was, according one former staffer in attendance, “conciliatory” and opened his remarks with what she described as an “honest apology.”

Both Sanders critics and allies will keep a close eye on the makeup of his early hires, most notably his choice of a campaign manager to replace Jeff Weaver, who ran the show in 2016 and will remain on as a senior adviser. An aide told CNN in January that the process was already underway. There is also the question of whether influential progressives like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who volunteered on Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and traveled with him during the midterms to campaign for progressive hopefuls, will offer their public support. California Rep. Barbara Lee, one of the most respected progressive lawmakers in the country, endorsed Sen. Kamala Harris last week.

From the backbench to the front lines

Sanders’ increased visibility has yielded substantial gains for the Democratic party’s left flank and — through an unlikely alliance with a Republican — helped deliver a historic rebuke to the Trump administration’s policy in the Middle East. Along with GOP Sen. Mike Lee and Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, Sanders last year won bipartisan backing for a War Powers resolution calling for an end to military support for the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen. His pressure campaigns on major corporations like Amazon also helped secure a $15 minimum wage for workers there and a pledge from the company to back legislation raising it nationwide.

“He has reached out more to work with colleagues in the last few years to show that effectiveness and that’s his biggest plus point on a substance level,” said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who led the successful push for a matching resolution this year in the House.

The policy principles behind a second Sanders campaign are expected to be largely the same as in 2015 and 2016. Still, he has over the past few weeks begun to roll out or re-up proposals to combat economic inequality and fortify programs like Social Security. He is also planning to reintroduce his Medicare for all legislation in tandem with Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who has taken over developing and shepherding the accompanying House bill.

Over two weeks in January and February, Sanders unveiled plans to buy more than 50 years of padding for Social Security by raising payroll taxes on income above $250,000 and hike the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans — suggesting a top rate of 77% on billionaire heirs.

“Our bill does what the American people want,” Sanders said in a statement ahead of the rollout, “by substantially increasing the estate tax on the wealthiest families in this country and dramatically reducing wealth inequality. From a moral, economic, and political perspective our nation will not thrive when so few have so much and so many have so little.” </s> Online sources Friday night were reporting that Sen. Bernie Sanders is poised to announce his second presidential campaign.

Yahoo News, the Huffington Post and The Hill all reported Friday night, citing sources with direct knowledge of the Vermont senator’s plans, that Sanders will make his announcement “imminently.”

The Sanders campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the sources told Yahoo News that Sanders was encouraged by multiple national polls showing him near the top of a crowded pack of possible Democratic candidates.

Sanders has widely been viewed a possible top-tier candidate in 2020 after challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2016.

Recent polling figures have suggested he could expect higher popularity among African American and Hispanic voters in 2020 compared to 2016. He also has reportedly been heartened by polling that showed him as the most popular politician in the country.

“What the senator has this time that he didn’t have last time is he is the most popular elected official in the country right now,” a source told Yahoo News. “That’s light years away from 2016 when very few people knew who he was.”

A third source told Yahoo News that Sanders would announce a presidential exploratory committee.

Sanders burst onto the presidential scene in 2016 with a progressive campaign that proved more competitive than election prognosticators expected. Though he ultimately failed to get the Democratic Party’s nomination, he succeeded in electrifying the party’s progressive wing and pushing the party further to the left.

Sanders is likely to enter a primary field that could see as many as 30 candidates run in 2020, including a number of senators and former government officials from diverse backgrounds.

Last month, in an editorial, The Times Argus and Rutland Herald urged Sanders not to run for president, after he had handily won re-election to his congressional seat representing Vermont. The editorial suggested Sanders’ priorities were not in the state’s best interest if he was planning to seek another run at the White House.
Vermont Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders announces on Vermont Public Radio that he is running for President of the United States as a Democrat in 2020.