Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders won the Democracy for America endorsement on Thursday with 87.9 percent of the votes cast by many of the progressive group’s 1 million members.
Sanders far surpassed the required 66.67 percent of the vote required to win DFA’s endorsement. Front-runner Hillary Clinton only received 10.3 percent of the vote and Martin O’Malley received 1.1 percent of the vote from the 271,527 voters.
Sanders welcomed the endorsement, saying he was “proud to have DFA and its one-million members join our people powered campaign.” And he noted that he won the endorsement even though the group’s founder, Howard Dean, is a Clinton supporter who made a personal appeal to members to back the former secretary of state.
“It is no secret that the founder of DFA — my friend and fellow Vermonter former Gov. Howard Dean — has chosen not to support my candidacy. Yet the leadership of DFA allowed a fair and free vote to take place which we won,” Sanders said in a statement. “That’s pretty impressive.”
Prior to the Sanders endorsement, DFA was allied with MoveOn.org to help encourage Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president, but after the suspension of the “Run Liz Run” campaign in June 2015, the groups turned their efforts elsewhere. The PAC said that its members endorsed Sanders because of “his lifelong commitment to taking on income inequality and the wealthy and powerful interests who are responsible for it.”
“Throughout his campaign, Bernie has repeatedly said that the huge problems of income inequality, money in politics, and structural racism that our country must confront are bigger than a single campaign — they need a political revolution,” DFA executive director Charles Chamberlain said in a statement. “With today’s endorsement, DFA members are joining Bernie’s ‘political revolution’ and working to take it both to the White House and up-and-down the ballot, in races coast to coast.”
Since the grassroots organization grew out of Dean’s presidential campaign 2004, it has contributed over $32.7 million to help progressive candidates get elected. The group pledges to run a “100 percent positive campaign” in support of Sanders.
