OUR REVOLUTION Why Are There Any Liberals Supporting Gary Johnson? & Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren make the pitch to millennials for Clinton 17&18SEP16

IT blows my mind that people who supported +Senator Bernie Sanders I VT have turned to and plan on voting for libertarian gary johnson. Green party candidate Dr Jill Stein is more in line with Bernie's presidential platform for those who feel they MUST cast a protest vote. BUT disappointed Bernie supporter's who are supporting and planning to vote for gary johnson are totally rejecting and working to defeat everything the Sander's campaign fought for. I supported and voted for Bernie Sanders. I am now supporting and will vote for Hillary Clinton because we got a lot of Bernie's policies included in the Democratic Party's presidential platform and Hillary is actively supporting and is committed to these positions. Check out this expose from +Mother Jones and then Hillary Clinton's campaign website and then really think about your vote and who best deserves your support and vote on 8 NOV 16. Click here to join Our Revolution.

Why Are There Any Liberals Supporting Gary Johnson?

KEVIN DRUMSEP. 17, 2016 8:08 PM

Scott Morgan/AP

According to the latest New York Times poll, Gary Johnson is supported by 26 percent of young voters.¹ Of these Johnson supporters, how many are liberal former supporters of Bernie Sanders who would normally be expected to switch to Hillary Clinton? No one seems to have explicitly polled about this, but various pieces of evidence suggest that it's around half. If you make some reasonable assumptions and do a bit of arithmetic, this suggests that somewhere around a fifth of young liberal voters are casting their lot with Johnson.

In one sense, this is easy to understand. Johnson favors legalization of marijuana. He's good on civil liberties and wants to cut way back on overseas military interventions. He's moderate on immigration. He's pro-choice and supports gay rights. There are plenty of things for Bernie supporters to like about him.

On the other hand, Johnson is a libertarian. Here's a smattering of what else he believes:

• He supports TPP.
• He supports fracking.
• He opposes any federal policies that would make college more affordable or reduce student debt. In fact, he wants to abolish student loans entirely.
• He thinks Citizens United is great.
• He doesn't want to raise the minimum wage. At all.
• He favors a balanced-budget amendment and has previously suggested that he would slash federal spending 43 percent in order to balance the budget. This would require massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and social welfare programs of all kinds.
• He opposes net neutrality.
• He wants to increase the Social Security retirement age to 75 and he's open to privatization.
• He opposes any kind of national health care and wants to repeal Obamacare.
• He opposes practically all forms of gun control.
• He opposes any kind of paid maternity or medical leave.
• He supported the Keystone XL pipeline.
• He opposes any government action to address climate change.
• He wants to cut the corporate tax rate to zero.
• He appears to believe that we should reduce financial regulation. All we need to do is allow big banks to fail and everything will be OK.
• He wants to remove the Fed's mandate to maximize employment and has spoken favorably of returning to the gold standard.
• He wants to block-grant Medicare and turn it over to the states.
• He wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and eliminate the income tax, the payroll tax, and the estate tax. He would replace it with a 28 percent FairTax that exempts the poor. This is equivalent to a 39 percent sales tax, and it would almost certainly represent a large tax cut for the rich.

Some of her weirder beliefs aside, it's easy to see why former Bernie supporters might turn to Jill Stein. But Gary Johnson? He makes Hillary Clinton look like the second coming of FDR. Unless you're basically a single-issue voter on civil liberties and military force, it's hard to see why any lefty of any stripe would even think of supporting Johnson. What's the deal here?

¹Oddly enough, the story that originally reported this has been silently purged of this statistic, but let's go with it anyway.

KEVIN DRUM

Kevin is a political blogger for Mother Jones. Email Kevin calpundit@cox.net. For more of his stories, click here or follow him on Facebook.

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren make the pitch to millennials for Clinton

By JACQUELINE ALEMANY CBS NEWS September 18, 2016, 7:15 PM

Hillary Clinton dispatched two progressive icons to Ohio this weekend to reverse course with millennials — an increasingly substantial voting bloc that has drifted away from the Democratic nominee. 

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren campaigned on college campuses throughout the state after several polls this week indicated that Clinton’s lead with young voters had nearly evaporated. In Ohio, according to a Suffolk University poll released this week, Trump is even leading Clinton by 11 points, 43 percent to 31 percent, among 18 to 34 year-olds. 

Sanders, the overwhelming favorite of young voters​ in Ohio’s March primary, attacked Trump’s campaign for “bigotry” before touting Clinton’s plan to take on student debt and repeated rallying cries to get out the vote on Saturday. 

“Eighty-three percent of American families should be able to send their kids to public college and universities tuition free​,” Sanders said to an auditorium filled with students at the University of Akron. “So when you go out and talk to your friends and they say, ‘Oh God I’m not going to vote it’s a waste of time everybody is terrible,’ ask them how much they’re going to leave school in debt with. Ask them about that.”

Warren, meanwhile, electrified a Cleveland crowd with what was perhaps her most forceful and urgent condemnation of Trump to date on Sunday morning. 

“Trump has more support from Aryan nation and the Ku Klux Klan than he does the leadership of the Republican Party,” Warren said during an appearance at Cleveland State University. “For years, Trump has led the charge on the birther movement, and only when his handlers tied him down and made him, did he finally admit that it wasn’t true. What kind of a man that does that? A man with a dark and ugly soul, a man who will never be president.” 

The Massachusetts Senator also played the part of cheerleader, pumping her fists as she sang praises of Ohio Senate candidate Ted Strickland, who is lagging in the polls behind incumbent Sen. Rob Portman​. Warren shouted “I’m with Hillary,” before urging the group of students, parents and grandparents to register to vote and volunteer for the campaign. 

The frenzied crowd reveled in Warren’s flogging of the Republican party. Even actor John Lithgow, the Clinton celebrity surrogate who introduced Warren and Strickland, wanted a selfie with the Massachusetts Senator on the rope line. 

Still, support for Clinton’s progressive surrogates in the room doesn’t appear to have translated to real enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee just yet. 

“I was an avid Bernie supporter and now I’m undecided,” Ryan Wile, a 20 year-old student from Akron, told CBS News. “I mean, I’m anti-Trump but I don’t know if I’ll vote for her. She flip-flops a lot. I’m leaning her direction but I don’t know.”

Tommy Watral, a 19 year-old student at Kent State University from Mentor, Ohio who served as a delegate for Sanders to the Democratic Convention, flatly stated that he was voting for Clinton because she was the nominee and the alternative to Trump. “That’s just how it is,” he said. 

“She’s struggling especially with the youth vote because we have so much access to information so we can look up her voting records and what she has done as First Lady and Secretary of State,” Watral explained of the lackluster enthusiasm. 

Sarah Melissa Miller, a 31-year-old voter from Canton, Ohio, was critical of Clinton’s style, saying “when she first starts talking her voice sounds flat.” 

“But when you actually listen to her, and how she feels about the issues, you realize she is actually working more for younger people than the other candidates,” Miller said. 

Nevertheless, the outreach was welcomed by members of the generation that Obama won by 29 percentage points over Mitt Romney in 2012. 

“The fact that Sanders is actually endorsing her is really important because I wasn’t really the biggest fan of hers but now that I see that he is going out of his way to promote who she is, I think it’s super important,” said Zach Fradette, a 21-year-old student from Westerville, Ohio. 

Brooke Babyak, a 27 year-old Clinton supporter from Akron, Ohio, who was in attendance at Warren’s event in Cleveland on Sunday said Warren’s brand as a champion for young people and infectious enthusiasm would certainly benefit Clinton. 

“Warren has a lot of ideas for changing how college is paid for and addressed the issues that younger voters are for,” Babyak said. “Hillary has these same ideas and if they can combine that with the enthusiasm, it’ll help.” 

Watral even offered some unsolicited advice for the Clinton campaign with regards to Sanders’ role in the campaign. 

“I think he should really just do a college tour until voting day to get college students voting enthusiasm up because now it’s just faltering,” he said. 

According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia would have flipped from blue to red without the youth vote in 2012. 

Fortunately for Clinton, she has amassed a bench of powerful surrogates who have vowed do whatever it takes to get the former Secretary of State elected. 

Clinton’s most popular resource, First Lady Michelle Obama, campaigned with Tim Kaine at George Mason University in Virginia on Friday. There, to chants of “four more years,” she made an explicit appeal for Clinton.  

“Let’s be clear, elections aren’t just about who votes, but who doesn’t vote. And that is especially true for young people like all of you,” Obama said. “Without those votes, Barack would have lost those states and he definitely would have lost that election. Period, end of story.” 

Supporters and critics alike have suggested that Clinton’s message has been overshadowed by her near constant attacks on Trump. “Millennial voters want to talk about the issues. That’s what will get them to the polls. They aren’t scared of Donald Trump,” Symone Sanders, the Vermont Senator’s former National Press Secretary, tweeted on Saturday. 

Clinton is scheduled to give a speech aimed at millennial voters at Temple University in Philadelphia on Monday where she’ll lay out her plans to make debt free college and community college available to students. 

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