As the race for the White House continues on, the field of Democratic candidates has gotten smaller.
Julian Castro dropped out of the race on Jan. 2 and soon threw his support behind Elizabeth Warren, appearing on stage with her in Brooklyn and Las Vegas. He told Buzzfeed News that his “vision for America matches up very well” with Warren’s.
On Jan. 10, Marianne Williamson also dropped her bid for president amid continually dismal polling numbers. In a statement posted to her official campaign website, Williamson wrote that she had “learned many things about America” during her campaign.
“I’m more convinced than ever that we’re a good and decent people, that democracy matters, and that what our country has always stood for is worth struggling for. I will continue in that struggle, and I know that you will too,” Williamson wrote.
Cory Booker also bowed out of the race, thanking his supporters on his official campaign website.
“I am so proud of what we built, and I feel nothing but hope,” Booker wrote.
While many polls have consistently shown Joe Biden leading the pack, FiveThirtyEight reported on Saturday that a new poll shows Bernie Sanders in the top spot with 20 percent of the vote, followed by Warren, Pete Buttigieg and then Biden, who garnered only 15 percent of the vote in that poll.
Sanders’ rise in the polls did not go unnoticed by President Donald Trump, who tweeted “Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!”
“It means you’re going to lose,” Sanders tweeted in response.
The president has continued on with the massive rallies that he has been holding since he was campaigning during the last election, with the most recent rally being held in Toledo, Ohio. During the rally, Trump engaged in his familiar attacks against the political left, at one point referring to them as “vicious, horrible people.”
The president also had harsh words for the media, describing them as “bad,” “sick” and “dishonest.”
“We have some great journalists, great reporters, but you’ve got a tremendous number of dishonest media people like I have never seen in my life before,” Trump said.
Back over on the left side of the run for the Oval Office, Tulsi Gabbard has been outspoken against the potential for war with Iran. She tweeted on Jan. 9 that “Trump’s war with Iran is undermining our national security and putting all Americans in greater danger.”
Gabbard further criticized the president on Twitter, writing that Trump “disgraces our military by using our men [and] women in uniform as mercenaries serving the interests of multinational corporations (e.g. Exxon) [and] foreign countries (e.g. Saudis)” in response to an interview that Trump did with Laura Ingraham where he said that he would send troops to Saudi Arabia as long as they paid the U.S.
The most recent debate for some of the Democratic candidates was hosted by CNN and, in one of the more tense moments of the evening, Bernie Sanders shook his head and laughed as moderator Abby Phillip asked him about a conversation he was alleged to have had with Warren.
The aforementioned questions stem from an article by MJ Lee which appeared on CNN on Jan. 13. Having talked to four anonymous sources — two connected to Warren and two who were “familiar with the meeting” — Lee wrote that Sanders told Warren that he did not believe a woman could win.
At the debate, Phillip asked Sanders “I do want to be clear here: you’re saying that you never told senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?”
“That is correct,” Sanders replied.
“Senator Warren, what did you think when senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?” Phillp asked Warren, prompting the seemingly incredulous response from Sanders as well as laughter from the audience.
Journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted that “This is an unusually vile performance by CNN.” The next day, he published an article on Rolling Stone’s website where he criticized the network, writing that “[o]ver a 24-hour period before, during, and after the debate, CNN bid farewell to what remained of its reputation as a nonpolitical actor via a remarkable stretch of factually dubious reporting, bent commentary, and heavy-handed messaging.”
In a Jan. 15 piece for The Nation, Jeet Heer wrote that the “big loser” of the evening was none other than CNN.
“CNN was so consistently aligned against Bernie Sanders that it compromised its claim to journalistic neutrality,” Heer wrote.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson described how CNN’s treatment of Sanders on the debate stage seems to have backfired.
“[L]egions of Bernie supporters understood for the very first time why Donald Trump is always attacking CNN. Why? Because CNN deserves it, and thousands of them reached for their credit cards in response,” Carlson said. “By Wednesday morning, the Sanders campaign was reporting its best-ever fundraising on a debate day, with more than 100,000 individual donations, so it turns out it’s possible to level attacks that are so stupid and so unfair, that they wind up helping the person you’re trying to hurt.”
Graphic: Maggie Claytor/ The Johnsonian
