Sanders sets sights on Trump in first New Hampshire campaign rally
By Kit Norton
Mar 10 2019, 5:06 PM
Excerpt:
Ray Buckley, chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, said Sanders has a significant advantage in the state compared to other candidates because of his history of working with and for people in New Hampshire.
“Sen. Sanders has a decades long relationship with New Hampshire Democrats and New Hampshire progressives. He has been here throughout the years campaigning for our candidates and the party,” Buckley said. While the Sanders campaign has no staff currently on the ground in New Hampshire, Buckley said the Vermont senator does have a contingent of about 75 “uber-activists” that have been meeting monthly since 2016 in order to formulate a grassroots campaigning strategy.
“He has that level of strong support in the state,” Buckley said. “He starts out with a level of enthusiasm and energy that other candidates are just building.”
While visiting a state where Sanders already has a strong base of support may seem a strange strategy, it is, according to Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir, part of a larger “five-core early state” plan put together by the Sanders campaign to target all the early primaries—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and California. Sanders will be making stops in South Carolina on Thursday and Nevada on Saturday, after already visiting Iowa last week. There are also plans for him to stop in California.
Shakir told VTDigger last week the campaign plans to build on strong support in the early primaries and then to move Sanders’ attention to historically Democratic states that Trump won during the 2016 national election.
“The first track is making it clear that Bernie Sanders has the strongest national electability to beat Donald Trump,” Shakir said. “States that have been historically blue but Trump turned red, like Michigan and Ohio, Bernie has a strong ability to turn those states back to blue.”
https://vtdigger.org/2019/03/10/sanders-sets-sights-trump-first-new-hampshire-campaign-rally/