The Bernie Sanders Campaign Is Firing Staffers
According to The Politico, the Bernie Sanders campaign is streamlining operations after losing every state but Rhode Island last night in the five-state Northeast primary.
Field staffers working on those state campaigns were “told to look elsewhere for work rather than continue onto the next voting states,” campaign sources tell the website.
The Politico report doesn’t indicate how many staffers in all were let go, though it does describe the terminations as “the first significant scaling back of his campaign apparatus now that the majority of states have voted in the primary.”
Sanders’ campaign reportedly entered the month with $17 million on hand after spending $46 million in March, when the chances of him catching up to Hillary Clinton were slim, though arguably less so.
Sanders’ communications director Michael Briggs was predictably vague about the cuts. “We’re 80 percent of the way through the caucuses and primaries and we make adjustments as we go along,” he told Politico. “This is a process that we’ve done before of right-sizing the campaign as we move through the calendar.”
The news squares with reports yesterday that the Sanders’ campaign would “reassess” his candidacy should he lose big in the primary, which included Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, the only state Sanders won.
“If we have a really good day, we are going to continue to talk about winning most of the pledged delegates because we will be on a path toward it. If we don’t get enough today to make it clear that we can do it by the end, it’s going to be hard to talk about it. That’s not going to be a credible path,” Sanders senior strategist Tad Devine explained to the New York Times. “Instead, we will talk about what we intend to do between now and the end and how we can get there.”