Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders will not be joined by his son in the halls of Congress anytime soon.
If you didn’t realize that Levi Sanders was running for congressional office, don’t feel too bad. After managing to raise just under $40,000 for his campaign to win the Democratic nomination for New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District, Sanders clearly didn’t garner much attention, even among members of his own party in his own state.
Despite having his father’s impassioned endorsement and running on all the democratic socialist ideals that secured Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the nomination in New York, Levi Sanders, 49, couldn’t quite pull off the victory. In fact, he came in seventh out of eleven candidates.
The Daily Beast provides a succinct breakdown of the identity politics-heavy race:
Chris Pappas, an openly gay member of the New Hampshire Executive Council, won the primary after also beating back Maura Sullivan, an Iraq War veteran and former Obama administration official who raised more money than him and had been criticized for moving to the state last year. When the race was called, Sanders was in seventh place out of eleven candidates.
So what was Sanders’ son running on? See if any of this sounds familiar:
- Medicare For All
- Free College Education
- A Living Wage that guarantees “food, utilities, housing, healthcare, education, clothing, transportation, and savings”
The Huffington Post provides some background on the younger Sanders’ “controversy”-plagued past:
Past controversies that plagued him included an aggressive online argument he carried on with fellow alumni of his 1987 high school graduating class in Burlington, Vermont, over the charging penalties to reunion attendees who didn’t RSVP (he was against it).
He also tweeted that he isn’t in favor of “white privilege garbage” arguments and criticized MSNBC’s Joy Reid for employing “identity politics.”
At an August debate in the primary race, Sanders had his microphone turned off by the moderator after refusing to stop talking when his allotted time expired. He was also booed by the crowd for attacking his fellow candidates.
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