KEENE, N.H. -- Has the backlash to President Trump radicalized the Democratic Party?
By James Hohmann
March 11 at 10:09 AM
Excerpts:
Distaste for Trump has made a swath of party regulars and Democratic-leaning independents more open-minded about ideas and approaches that they dismissed as far-fetched and unrealistic not long ago.
“I used to think you have to be pragmatic. I just don’t believe that anymore. A lot of it is because of Trump,” said Brigid McNamee
Pudlo-Schirmer said her job as a paramedic and her husband’s ongoing fight against lupus have given her a firsthand window into the dysfunctional health-care system. Her thinking has changed in recent years, and she now believes the only tenable solution is Medicare-for-all. “There’s a lot of really fractured stuff I see,” the resident of Northwood said. “This would give a lot of people hope.”
“When you live in an unprecedented moment, you need to have an unprecedented response,” Sanders said in Concord. “That’s what this campaign is about.”
-- Despite a heavy snowstorm on Sunday morning that created whiteout conditions on the roads for a few hours, Sanders drew an impressive crowd of 850 in Concord and another 1,000 people to a late-afternoon rally at a theater on Main Street here in Keene.
Brooke Hanson, 28, used to be a teacher. Now she works in the cannabis industry. She lives in New Bedford, Mass., but braved the snow to see Sanders at both of his rallies on Sunday. She drove up here four years ago to cheer him on as well. “People were laughing at a lot of what he said back then,” Hanson recalled. “They’re not ‘crazy’ ideas anymore. Now they’re common sense.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/03/11/daily-202-bernie-sanders-sounds-less-radical-than-he-did-in-2016-because-democrats-have-moved-his-way/5c856a8e1b326b2d177d6040/