Bernie Sanders predicted at a Tuesday get-out-the-vote rally that millions won’t go the polls on Election Day, and blamed the media for covering the race like a personality contest instead of focusing on the issues.
“There are a lot of people who are, for good reasons, very discouraged about … the ugliness of this campaign. You’re going to have millions of people who aren’t going to vote at all,” the independent senator said during a speech in support of Hillary Clinton at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.
The Tyndall Report, which has tracked nightly network news programs for decades, released a study in late October concluding that ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “CBS Evening News” and ‘NBC Nightly News” devoted just 32 minutes combined for policy and issue coverage since the beginning of 2016. Sanders criticized those networks for spending far too much time on the candidates and how they fight each other.
“Virtually all the discussion is about Hillary Clinton’s problems and Donald Trump’s problems, very little discussion about your problems,” said Sanders. “And our job is to understand that this campaign is not a personality contest. We’re not voting for class president of Hanover High School. We are voting for the most powerful person on the planet.”
Sanders told the students in the crowd that it is their responsibility to take a “hard look” at each candidate’s policy platform before encouraging them to support Clinton.
“I think, without hesitancy, on every major issue, Hillary Clinton is far, far superior to Donald Trump,” he said.
