BRATTLEBORO-When it comes to voting, Brattleboro is as blue as the ceiling of the Latchis Theatre.
So when U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Becca Balint spoke to more than 250 people gathered there for a Democratic rally on Oct. 19, it was as if they were preaching to the choir.
And this choir was enthusiastic, offering more than one standing ovation to the two progressive politicians who represent Vermont in Congress.
Both are prohibitive favorites in their own re-election races, but their stated goal is to fire up the crowd to work for the election of Vice President Kamala Harris and rally attendees to help Democrats in states that are not quite as blue as Vermont.
It was the first of a three-stop Saturday tour that also took them to Randolph and then South Burlington.
Bernie and Becca - both politicians well-known here by their first names - were preceded on stage by State Treasurer and Brattleboro native Michael Pieciak, who is also running for re-election.
He called this election "the most consequential election of our lifetimes," and said it was imperative that the United States elect Harris over its former president, Donald Trump.
"Democrats have a history of electing historic candidates, like [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], [John F. Kennedy], and Barack Obama," Pieciak said. "Kamala Harris is going to be part of that legacy of the Democratic Party."
He cited the party's legacy of impactful legislation, which includes Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which he described as "the most significant investment in climate change in our country's history."
Pieciak also said, to cheers, that he had just married his husband this past summer, before pointing out that Project 2025, the right-wing playbook written by the Heritage Foundation, seeks "to curtail freedoms of all Americans, including LGBTQ+ Americans."
"I just hope we can celebrate our first wedding anniversary next summer," he said.
Pieciak was followed by Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, also running for re-election, who encouraged people to be active in the days leading up to election, by sending money, making phone calls, writing postcards, and/or going door-to-door in states whose outcomes are far from certain - like neighboring New Hampshire.
"The anger that's out there that Trump is tapping into comes from a place of pain and fear and economic struggle," Zuckerman said. "The rural parts of this country have lost 65,000 manufacturing businesses in the last handful of decades. Reaganomics has failed."
He also pleaded for another supermajority in the Vermont Legislature. Then he introduced Balint, describing her by her own catch phrase as a "scrappy little dyke."
Balint came bouncing onto the stage like a wound-up ball of energy. She admitted that her first two years in Congress have been intellectually and emotionally frustrating.
"It was the most unproductive Congress in the history of the United States," Balint said. "That's not hyperbole."
She said she "served with 118 people who did not certify the last election."
"So imagine how difficult it is to do the work when you don't agree on basic facts, when you don't agree that actually, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are things that we should stand up for," Balint said.
A battle against cynicism
Cynicism has taken root in Congress as well as the nation, Balint said.
"There's this sense that you can't make a change, so why even bother trying?" she said. "And this is something that we all have to be concerned about, because it's not just in elected officials."
She said that because she has travelled not just across the state but across the country, that she knows "we're all struggling with, 'Is this great experiment of democracy actually going to continue to work? And what is my place in that?'"
"That is the ultimate question that we're asking ourselves: Do I still have a place?" she said.
"The pendulum will not swing unless we swing the pendulum," Balint said, quoting a June Jordan poem, "We are the ones we [have been] waiting for."
"It's not somebody else that's going to come and do the work," Balint said. "We will do the work. It's only through mass participation that change is made."
She suggested that everyone in the audience find the time to work for candidates in Vermont and across the United States. She herself has been knocking on doors in Delaware; she will be in Pittsburgh soon.
"If you have money, and I know some of you don't, but if you have money, I need you to put that money to work," Balint said. "We have to flip the House of Representatives. We need to make sure we don't lose the Senate, and we do need to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz."
She said that it's not just about money.
"It is about volunteering. It is about signing up to phone bank. It's about canvassing," she said.
"Now, I know some of you are thinking to yourselves, 'That sounds miserable. I don't want to call people in swing states and talk to them about really hard issues.'" Balint continued. "I get that, but that's what it's going to take in this moment."
It is all about showing up, Balint said.
"I'm not going to ask you to do something I'm not willing to do," she said. "I show up in places where sometimes I'm the only one. I'm the only woman, I'm the only gay person, I'm the only left-leaning person, and there's a sea of Republicans in Washington, D.C. But if it's about an issue that I care about, I show up. You have to show up. You have to show up in hard conversations. it matters."
Balint introduced Sanders by teasing him.
"Windham County pushed him over the top when he first ran for the House, and I'm never going to let him forget it," Balint said.
Sanders came out in his traditional shirtsleeves, looking polished and senatorial. He said he has been crisscrossing the nation "trying to make sure that Kamala is elected president." He has already been to Texas, Nevada, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
"And I'll probably be in Pennsylvania next week," the 83-year-old Sanders said as he promised not to give the same speech he has been giving in the other states.
"I'm not going to spend a lot of time on Donald Trump, because I think you all know who Donald Trump is," Sanders said.
"And the issue here, I would say to anybody in Vermont, New Hampshire, any place else, who has any doubts, is that it is not appropriate, in any stretch of the imagination, that we elect somebody as president who is a pathological liar, who is clearly unfit to hold the office of the presidency," he said.
He quoted some important right-wing Republicans who agreed with him on that, such as former vice presidents Mike Pence and Dick Cheney.
Sanders said that climate change, while being denied by Trump, is real and demands action.
"We've seen it all over the country," the senator said. "We've seen it recently in Florida with Hurricane Milton. We've seen in North Carolina with Hurricane Helene. We've seen it in the horrible forest fires in California and Canada. We have seen heat waves in Europe, massive floods in China."
He cited temperatures in Saudi Arabia, which have exceeded 120 degrees, "with people dying by the thousands."
"Every scientist who has studied the issue understands that climate change is real, that it is an existential threat to our country and to the world," Sanders said. "And Donald Trump believes today that climate change is a hoax originating in China. Now, that is not just incredibly stupid, but it is extraordinarily dangerous."
If Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change might be over, Sanders said.
"The United States will withdraw from the movement towards sustainable energy," he said. "And if we do that, China will do the same, Europe will do the same, and God only knows the kind of planet that we will be leaving to our kids and future generations."
Sanders then talked about women's rights. He said that when he became mayor of Burlington in 1981, the city did not have one woman on the police force. He said his administration fixed that during his eight-year tenure, noting that women have been struggling for their rights for a long time.
"The idea of a woman 40 years ago becoming a construction worker, a welder, or an electrician?" he said. "It's like, 'That's not women's work.' But women fought, and they struggled, and maybe the most important struggle of all was the right of women to be able to control their own bodies.
"A Trump victory will go a very long way to sustaining that disastrous Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade," Sanders said. "So, you know, the stakes in this election are monumental."
Looking at the root causes
Then Sanders slipped into professorial mode and started talking about the American economy. He explained how important it was to recognize that the anger in America is legitimate - but, he said, it is being directed against the wrong people.
"Unfortunately, in terms of Trump supporters, what they have managed to do is to direct that anger against people who are even worse off than many working class people in this country," Sanders said.
"So it's OK to be angry, but you got to know why you are angry, and know who the right people to get angry at," he said.
Those people are the oligarchs now running America, Sanders said. The economy is doing fine. The upper 1% are doing very well. But ordinary working people are struggling with challenges like the higher costs in food and rent.
"Today, you have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had in the history of this country," Sanders said. "The people on top have never done better."
"Today, you have three billionaires, including one who was campaigning for Trump very aggressively in Pennsylvania, the one who owns Twitter," said Sanders, referencing Elon Musk, the owner of the social media site, X.
"Three billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. Got it? So 160 million people here, three people over here. Never had that kind of inequality," Sanders continued.
"And with all of that wealth, what the billionaire class has done is rig the tax system so that today you have a tax structure in which billionaires pay an effective tax rate that is lower than [that which] a nurse or a truck driver [pays]."
It is not just wealth inequality, but concentration of ownership, that has become a problem for average Americans, Sanders said.
"We have a country of small-business people," he said, "Everyone's competing. And quite the case, in sector after sector, whether it's agriculture, transportation, financial services, media, you think of it, what you find is a few huge multinational corporations dominating that sector. And when you have so few in a monopolistic situation, they can, to a large degree, control prices.
"That is one of the reasons why, in recent years, we have had an uptick in inflation," he said.
Three firms control $20T in assets
Corporate profits are soaring while average Americans are struggling, Sanders said.
"We don't like to talk about power in America," he said. "Who has it? There are three major Wall Street investment firms called BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street."
These three companies control over $20 trillion in assets, he said, and together they comprise the major stockholders of 95% of the Standard & Poor's 500 corporations.
"Three boards of directors. Three companies are the major stockholders in 95% of major American corporations," Sanders said, calling it "unbelievable political and economic power."
"So go out, go to Google, check it out, and find out who owns this company or that," he said. "And invariably, you'll see BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard."
"And when you talk about the power of the people on top - and again, we don't talk about this much because we understand who owns corporate media - we understand that most members of Congress are dependent on large wealthy people for their contributions," Sanders charged.
Addressing the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision - which protects political expenditures by corporations under the umbrella of the Constitutional guarantee of "free speech" - is critical, Sanders said. It has been "disastrous," he added.
Toward public funding of elections
The United States should also move toward public funding of elections, Sanders said.
"Billionaires love the system," he said. "It's an opportunity. They own the economy, and now they can completely own the political system. That's the truth. All of which leads me to believe this country is moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society."
Sanders touched on the high costs of health care which leave many working class Americans bankrupt - 25% of Americans diagnosed with cancer go bankrupt, he said.
He also talked about the fact that Americans no longer lead the list of countries in life expectancy, that 85 million people here are uninsured or underinsured, that "we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," and that the minimum wage should at least be $17 per hour across the United States.
Harris wants to build affordable housing across the country and expand Medicare to include home health care, hearing, and vision care.
"Bottom line: It's terribly important that Trump be defeated," Sanders said. "But what I want to tell you is, if you think the struggle for the kind of America we want and need is going to be over the day that Kamala wins, you'd be mistaken. It's not. So we've got a lot of work to do."
The good news, Sanders said, was that in one part of his speeches, Trump equates Harris with Sanders and say she is "left wing."
"But what is the Trump definition of the far left?" Sanders asked. "It's an agenda supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people.
"The agenda that Becca is fighting for, that I am fighting for, is the agenda not only of Democrats, but of many Republicans and many independents," he continued. "They understand that we are living in an economy which is working great for the people on top, but failing working families."
Sanders urged those attending to do "everything you can in the next several weeks to make sure that Kamala wins the state in as big a number as she can, and help your friends out in New Hampshire or anyplace else."
"But the day after the election, let's continue our effort to develop a strong progressive grassroots movement all over this country, so that we have a government and economy that works for all of us, not just the people on top," he said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.