Bernie Sanders criticizes Hillary Clinton’s support of trade agreements such as NAFTA and says we need to demand that corporations invest in jobs here, not just in China and Mexico.
Video by Brian Sharp and Tina MacIntyre-Yee BRIAN SHARP and TINA MacINTYRE-YEE/staff
Story by Brian Sharp
With one week to go until the New York presidential primary, Bernie Sanders rallied supporters to show up in record numbers — telling a capacity crowd on Tuesday that with a large voter turnout “we’re going to win.”
“This is the political revolution,” the Vermont senator said, touching off thunderous applause from the estimated 6,400 people who filled Bill Gray’s Regional Iceplex in Brighton.
He spoke for about an hour, with a wide-ranging address that hit on familiar themes: guaranteed health care for all, a call for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage, making public colleges and universities tuition free, and reforming a “rigged economy” to restore the middle class.
During a later interview, he discussed helping minority businesses to address unemployment in the inner city, New York’s SAFE Act and the need for “a revolution in mental health treatment in this country.”
Sanders is the latest presidential candidate to visit the area during this unusual election year in which both the Republican and Democratic nominations are still in play. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was here last week. On the Republican side, Ohio Gov. John Kasich was here Saturday; GOP front-runner Donald Trump visited Sunday; and Sen.Ted Cruz of Texas is expected to hold a rally in the area on Friday.
Clinton still leads Sanders in New York by double digits (53 percent to 40 percent) in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. Trump, meanwhile leads with 55 percent of likely Republican voters, with Kasich at 20 percent, and Cruz at 19 percent.
The rallies are providing thousands of western New Yorkers with an experience many had only seen on television. Said Patty Preston, 41, an English teacher from Belfast, Allegany County, who hoisted a sign that read: “Teachers for Bernie”: “It’s the first chance we’ve had to have the candidates be this close to us.” That excitement is spilling into her school, where students are wearing candidate T-shirts, recently held an election poll, and are writing papers about the election.
All this is new, she said. “It will be interesting to see how it goes once the primaries are over.”
While Clinton and Trump sought to tailor their remarks to Rochester during their stump speeches, Sanders did not. He pledged, as he has in other stops around the state, to fight for a national ban on hydraulic fracturing, called action on climate change a “moral responsibility,” and said he would use executive action if necessary to enact immigration reform.
He also promised to invest in inner cities, “instead of giving tax breaks to billionaires.” In a later interview, he said his administration would review and likely increase federal contracting goals for small and disadvantaged businesses.
