BURLINGTON, Vt., April 28 (UPI) — Ralph Nader, the man many Democrats still despise for refusing to drop out of the 2000 presidential race, says Sen. Bernie Sanders should continue to campaign through the Democratic convention.
Asked whether he thinks Sanders should quit the race, Nader said no, citing potential political pitfalls for front-runner Hillary Clinton in the future.
In 2000, Nader ran as the Green Party candidate and siphoned many left-leaning voters away from Al Gore, who narrowly lost the election to Republican George W. Bush.
Nader wasn’t the only person encouraging Sanders to stay in the race Thursday.
While seeking to avoid the impression Sanders is a spoiler candidate, Jane Sanders predicted Thursday her husband would mount a comeback in the Democratic presidential race and could still claim the nomination.
This despite the news Wednesday the Sanders campaign was laying off “hundreds” of workers and focusing the majority of its remaining resources on winning the final state to vote, California, in June.
The past three days have been among the toughest for the Sanders campaign since he entered the race as a virtual unknown outside his home state Vermont. After putting together an impressive string of victories through the middle portion of the campaign calendar, Clinton has blunted that momentum after dealing him a lopsided defeat in her adopted home state New York last week, and in four of five Northeastern states on Tuesday.
Even though the news has been almost entirely bad for Sanders over the past two weeks, his wife said there is still time to turn around his flagging campaign.
“You remember in mid-March after a string of losses, the media wrote his political obituary and we came back to win eight in a row,” she said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “So we’re expecting to do the same here.”
