[L]ess than a month before the midterm congressional elections, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is headed on a nine-state tour to campaign for Democrats.
His road trip will include stops in Iowa, South Carolina, Michigan, Indiana, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado and California in the run-up to the Nov. 6 election.
Sanders’ plans to stump across the country for Democratic and liberal candidates for Congress comes on the heels of the swearing-in of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, whose confirmation hearing has mobilized both Democrats and Republicans.
The Vermont lawmaker’s decision to throw his weight behind Democratic candidates to unseat Republicans in battleground states comes after he delivered what many political observers termed a crucial and deciding endorsement to Andrew Gillum in the Florida gubernatorial primary in August.
We need a massive grassroots effort from coast to coast to revitalize democracy. We need to mobilize people in an unprecedented way at the grassroots level now more than ever.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 6, 2018
Last week, Sanders announced his intention to help build a groundswell of support for liberal candidates, tweeting that the United States needed a “massive grassroots effort from coast to coast to revitalize democracy.”
The Vermont senator is also expected to decide whether he will run for president again in the coming months, and is using this trip as a way to gauge national support for his social-democratic platform, as outlined in a Washington Post report Tuesday.
Lawrence Zupan, Sanders’ Republican challenger, said in a statement that “it’s no surprise that Bernie Sanders has scheduled all of October everywhere but in the state where Vermonters elected him” and that Sanders has spent “the last four years running for president, and he wants to use Vermont as a footstool to do it again.”
In spite of the busy campaign schedule stumping for other candidates, Sanders plans to be in Vermont on Oct. 29 to debate Zupan in the VPR/Vermont PBS U.S. Senate Debate and the CCTV Channel 17 General Election Forum.
Zupan, who is running on a platform of cutting taxes and making Vermont a more attractive home for businesses, had originally called on Sanders to appear in no fewer “than eight debates across Vermont” in order to give “all Vermonters a chance to determine who would best represent their interests.”
In the statement, the Zupan campaign said that Sanders would see his “presidential dreams go up in smoke” if he debated Zupan and that “Humpty Dumpty would look like Captain America compared to Bernie Sanders debating Lawrence Zupan.”
The Zupan campaign also offered to fly to any of the nine states to debate Sanders and broadcast it back to Vermont.
In a statement, the Sanders campaign said the senator plans to hold additional campaign events in the week before the election to visit all 14 counties by the end of the campaign.
To date, Sanders has held 13 public rallies in 11 counties during this election season, according to the campaign.