A number of former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign staffers were reportedly geared up to hold their own Zoom celebration to mark the end of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) ill-fated 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, according to Buzzfeed News.
After their plot was exposed, the staffers quickly changed the invite to a “celebration” of the end of the primary and a reunion of former “HFA” — Hillary for America — staffers.
“Invitation: Bye, bye Bernard (HFA celebration toast),” an email to former HFA staffers read, according to the outlet. The invite went out about an hour after news broke Wednesday morning that Sanders was suspending his campaign and conceding the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race to former Vice President Joe Biden.
“He’s finally gone (again!). Join for a celebratory toast if you can! And yes, you can loop,” according to the message.
Later on on Wednesday, Buzzfeed says, the invitation was changed to read “HFA end of primary celebration toast,” and then canceled just a half hour before it was slated to begin — but, apparently, after some recipients had alerted friendly members of the media that Hillary’s former staff was toasting the end of Sanders’ campaign.
The Hill adds that, “screenshots of the invitation” list former Clinton presidential campaign “staffers who went on to work for many 2020 Democratic candidates, including former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand, (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA.). Some of the staffers also worked on the campaigns of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) and businessmen Andrew Yang and Michael Bloomberg.”
There is clearly no love lost between the two former rivals, and Clinton was depicted, in the Hulu documentary, “Hillary” as criticizing the Vermont socialist and his followers.
“He was in Congress for years,” the failed 2016 presidential contender said in the online docu-series. “He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to work with him. He got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
Clinton may have been reacting to evidence, collected in the days and months after the 2016 presidential election, that showed Sanders supporters reticent to join her campaign for president — a problem that may have cost her the White House.
Sanders announced Wednesday that he was shuttering his campaign, despite saying just days ago that he and his team believed they had a “narrow path” to the nomination. Unfortunately for Sanders, it seems his movement, which he built in 2016, was limited and despite his own initial claims, never quite materialized in 2020.
Sanders did not expand the electorate, failed to draw out even reliable Democratic voters and, despite winning a handful of early states, went on to lose to Biden in places like South Carolina and Michigan, where Sanders had performed admirably just four years before.
The Vermont socialist stopped short of endorsing Biden Wednesday, as did many of his key staffers, and says he will continue to stay on the ballot in upcoming primaries so that his movement has a voice when the Democratic party redrafts its platform at its August convention.
