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Nina Sherwood told an audience of about 40 people at a Democracy For America meeting at the Silver Star Diner in Norwalk that she and her heavily invested, mostly millennial friends are still charging ahead.
She and two others, Chris Yerinides and Louis Magana, all from Stamford, will be delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
They, and all his delegates “plan to vote for Bernie on all ballots,” she said.
Sherwood told the group that Sanders “stands for us — the common workingman, who hasn’t been represented since FDR.”
The convention opens on Monday, July 25. But Sherwood expects demonstrations to begin on Saturday, July 23, with a large turnout of Sanders supporters.
Part of the fight will be over the Democratic Party's stance. Sanders “wants the most progressive platform since FDR,” Sherwood said. Some on the 15-member Platform Committee will fight for his causes — a $15 minimum wage, a change in trade policies, Medicare-for-all, and eliminating tuition at public colleges and universities.
Sherwood anticipates that Hillary Rodham Clinton will receive the Democratic Party's nomination. Asked what then those still Feeling the Bern will do, she said, “We can’t take our toys and go home.”
But Sherwood is not totally behind Clinton, saying “she has to earn my vote,” and “she hasn’t got my generation anywhere.”
But the Sanders' supporters understand the importance of beating presumptive Republican Party candidate Donald Trump. Some will vote for Clinton, and some for other progressive candidates. But others will skip the top line and only vote down ballot, while a few, Sherwood said, “will just stay home.”
Sherwood is already looking toward her next project: Brand New Congress. Groups of activists are starting to build a national network to place Sanders-style progressives on the ballot in every one of the 468 districts holding an election in 2018 that does not have a sitting progressive.
Sherwood said that they will also work for new DNC leadership — saying that Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary Clinton are part of the problem, not the solution.
Just as John F. Kennedy led a generational change in 1960, and Bill Clinton did in 1992, so perhaps Nina Sherwood and her allies across the country are working to do the same again today.
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