 During the 2016 Democratic Party primary process, the Working Families Party endorsed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. That was obviously an easy choice because if you purport to represent the working families of America, then it's not even a question. Of course, you opt for Bernie Sanders over someone who is a neoliberal centrist like Hillary Clinton. So this time around, they were planning to make another endorsement and as of September 3rd, they announced that they would be holding an official vote for the party's 2020 endorsement between five candidates, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Now, first of all, I don't necessarily know what criteria they used to narrow it down to these five candidates, but Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Bill de Blasio, I mean, come on. Now, if if I'm remembering correctly, as a DSA member, when they did their endorsement process, it was just an up or down vote for Bernie Sanders. They sent us the card and we voted yes or no if we wanted to endorse Bernie Sanders. And look, that's the way that it should be. If you are truly a grassroots organization, then it's not even a question. You just should be savvy enough to know the difference between someone who wants social democracy and someone who wants a little bit more humane version of capitalism. It's not even a question. So the fact that they even had Cory Booker and Julian Castro in the running is pretty much an embarrassment for the working party's family. Nonetheless, they held the vote and the way it works is leadership gets 50% of the vote share and members who pay monthly dues of $10 per month. They get the other 50% of the vote share and it's conducted using a ranked choice voting system. And now the working party's family has made their choice. The results are in and they have officially chosen to endorse Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders. Yeah. Now, as Daniel Moran's of HuffPost reports, the endorsement reflecting the views of 61% of working family's party members and leaders in a ranked choice voting system is a particularly sharp disappointment for Sanders, who picked up the group's backing in the 2016 election cycle, but received just 36% of the vote from participating members this time around. The Sanders campaign's political director, Annelia Mejia, is the former executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Party. So they made their endorsement. There's nothing we can do about it. But let me just say this, if you are opting to endorse a candidate and you're choosing between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and you're really trying to make that choice, then you can say, sure, these are both solid candidates. But when it comes down to the differences between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, there are many. It's not like, you know, they're indistinguishable from one another. These are two very different candidates with very different views for the future of this country. Bernie Sanders supports social democracy and Elizabeth Warren supports a reformed version of capitalism. And when it comes to policy differences, Bernie Sanders has supported Medicare for All for 40 plus years, whereas Elizabeth Warren has been waffling back and forth multiple times throughout the course of this year. In addition, Bernie Sanders has a progressive, non-interventionist, anti-imperialist foreign policy agenda, whereas Elizabeth Warren hasn't really laid out her agenda when it comes to foreign policy. And what we've heard is troubling. She also recently failed to explain why she voted for Donald Trump's military budget. On top of that, she's only swearing off big fundraisers until the general election. Then if she wins, all bets are off. And then it's fundraisers, I guess, in big money. That's what she said to Cenk Yugarov, TYT, in an interview, at least, whereas Bernie Sanders has permanently sworn off PAC money. He's sworn off these private fundraisers because they are a corrosive influence. Also, Elizabeth Warren is assuring Democratic Party elites that she doesn't want to fundamentally change the status quo, and she's getting buddy-buddy with people like Hillary Clinton, who represents everything wrong with the Democratic Party, and Bernie Sanders is not doing that. Now, let me just emphasize here, I'm not an Elizabeth Warren hater. I think she's a solid candidate, and I think that she is running a really good campaign. But if we are forced to choose between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren during a presidential primary, the choice is clear if you truly care about working families in America, if you truly want to get us on that trajectory of social democracy. It's Bernie Sanders, it's clear. It's not like the only difference is that, well, Elizabeth Warren, you know, she is a little bit more wonkier and she's stronger on areas X, Y, and Z. No, that's not the case. When you have Bernie Sanders in the race, the one candidate who has explicitly said that he wants social democracy, that's an obvious choice. It's Bernie over Elizabeth Warren. Now, of course, because they made this endorsement, this led to a lot of backlash on Twitter. And let me remind you that the reason why they're getting backlash, I think rightfully so, is because this goes against their stated agenda. And they've been doing this lately. So in 2018, in New York's 14th Congressional District, they endorsed Joe Crowley over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And here they are again, endorsing the candidate who clearly is not the best for working families. Is Elizabeth Warren bad for working families? No, but is she anywhere near as good as Bernie Sanders? Absolutely not. And people vocalized that in the responses here. So for example, Michael Brooks tweeted, the most pro worker candidate in modern history, building a multiracial working coalition and a clear social democratic platform, and you don't endorse that campaign. You guys will be known for this now. Instead of just getting played by Cuomo, also change your name. Megan Day of Jacobin writes, working families party should have endorsed Bernie Sanders. Bernie has a much more working class and racially diverse base. And he's focused explicitly on building working class movements on the ground. He's the most pro-labor presidential candidate in living memory. This is a real shame. Ben says he canceled his recurring donations. And when you just look at the level of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders on the YouTube page for the working families party, it's evident that the only videos that gain any sort of traction whatsoever are the videos that feature Bernie Sanders. Any other video, you know, they'd be lucky to get 10 views. And the one with Elizabeth Warren only got a couple hundred Bernie Sanders. However, he clearly has a lot of support. So this doesn't make any sense. It's perplexing. And it makes less sense when you consider that one of the working families parties main issues is single payer Medicare for all. Now, in an interview with Anna Kasperian on No Filter, Ben Bergus explains that that was one of the main issues for the working families party. So to support Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders, when the working families party has been a champion of single payer healthcare, Bernie Sanders has been promoting single payer Medicare for all for decades. And Elizabeth Warren only formally came out and endorsed it in 2017. And on top of that, she's been going back and forth, back and forth. And she finally put up Medicare for all on her website. And as Ben Bergus is going to explain here, it's really not that clear that she supports the same version of Medicare for all as Bernie Sanders. Yeah, I think that's disappointing. And it's especially strange to me because one of the working families parties big issues has always been a single payer health insurance. And and Bernie is, I think, much clearer on that issue than Warren. She just finally put a health care plan on her website. And I was just looking at it. And if you look at the part that especially disturbs me about that, about mental health care, that makes it sound like that would be separate from whatever sort of Medicare for all thing she's endorsing. She talks about Medicare for all. And then she talks about affordable mental health care. And usually when I hear that word affordable about health care, I start worrying because that's that's kind of the buzzword for, you know, it's still in the market system. You know, we're just going to try to do some sort of cost control thing. So I'm with Ben here. It's confusing. You know, does she mean that she supports single payer for everything? But mental health, is that something where, you know, she would just offer a subsidy? You know, there's no questions like this when it comes to Bernie Sanders. He just supports single payer Medicare for all that includes mental health care, that includes dental vision. So there's these open questions about Elizabeth Warren that makes it an obvious choice. If there is a choice between Bernie and Warren and single payer is one of your main issues, you opt for Bernie Sanders. So this is confusing and makes no sense. And to clear up some of the confusion, National Director for the Working Families Party, Maurice Mitchell, appeared on CNN with Chris Cuomo and he tried to explain why they made this endorsement. But rather than clearing up the confusion, this actually made me feel even more confused. Why Warren and not Sanders? So let me just first say that it's 2019 and we have two structural change, big, bold, progressive candidates that have built huge grassroots followings in the democratic process. But you picked one. Why? Right. And so our grassroots members and our volunteers and our state committee, we engaged in a very long process and we came out and I'm so proud of the process and so proud that we chose Elizabeth Warren. Let me tell you why. So, I mean, if you look at her, you know, they joke about she has a plan for it, right? But if you look at it and you take a step back, so the Green New Deal so we could save the planet, a historically big picture housing policy, you know, the Medicare for All to take the insurance companies between you and your doctor, right? So health care could be a right and not a commodity that's traded. Bernie does the same things that he wrote the damn bill. That's that's absolutely right. OK, so this is confusing. The reason why he's happy that the Working Families Party opted to endorse Warren over Bernie Sanders is for the following reasons. One, the Green New Deal so we can save the planet. OK, well, how do you reconcile the fact that Bernie Sanders scored higher when it comes to the Green New Deal than Elizabeth Warren? So if you truly want to save the planet and you want the strongest policy proposal, well, you can't really say it's because of Elizabeth Warren's Green New Deal if Bernie's is stronger. He also says Medicare for All, take the insurance companies between you and your doctor. So health care is a right and not a commodity that's traded. I don't know what that means to take the insurance companies between you and your doctor, take them out. Is that what do you mean? You want to take them out of the equation because we don't necessarily know that that's what Warren is going to do because she only recently endorsed Medicare for All and she was talking about there being many paths to Medicare for All. And at the end of the day, all Democrats have the same goal when it comes to Medicare for All and health care and whatnot. So these are horrible reasons if the Green New Deal and Medicare for All are your biggest issues than to support Warren over Sanders is nonsensical. So I don't get it. There's really nothing that we can do about this. They made their endorsement. They're not going to unendorse Elizabeth Warren, but simply we just have to make the case that Bernie Sanders is the stronger candidate. So the entire situation is incredibly frustrating. And it just feels like, you know, these people who claim to care about certain policies that claim to stand up for working families to endorse Crowley, to not endorse Bernie, I mean, what are you doing? I just it doesn't make any sense to me. And, you know, you can see why they don't have a good reason because when they try to explain it, they're frailing. You know, you could tell that, you know, Mitchell was frazzled there because if you're trying to explain to people that from the standpoint of you being a progressive Warren is better than Bernie, you're going to come off as either a troll or someone who isn't very politically savvy because it's evident to anyone who is engaged with politics that Bernie has the strongest ground game. He's the strongest politically. He is more electable to take on Donald Trump because he has that anti-establishment appeal whereas Elizabeth Warren is getting buddy buddy with the establishment. And he is just stronger on policies like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. So I don't know what else to say. This endorsement is completely nonsensical and the Working Families Party has discredited themselves. And, you know, it's not like they only discredited themselves now. I think that when they endorsed Joe Crowley over Alexandria, okay, as your grotesque, that in and of itself should have been the red flag that we all needed to see that maybe there's something wrong with this organization. But now to do this, it's just it's it's a complete joke.