Sanders supporters launch six-figure ad campaign explaining why they’re voting for Biden

A progressive group that opposed Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries is rolling out a new campaign to urge progressive voters in battleground states to back the presumptive presidential nominee in November.

RootsAction.org, a group run by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), launched its #VoteTrumpOut campaign Wednesday and said while it hopes to help push the former vice president over the edge against President Trump, it will work to hold him accountable should he win the White House. 

“Donald Trump is waging a war on truth, on decency, on our planet, and on working people. For the sake of everything we care about, we have to get him out of the White House in 2020,” the group said on its website. “As progressives and leftists, we are not going to minimize our disagreements with Joe Biden. But we’re also clear-eyed about where things stand: supporting the Democratic nominee in swing states is the only means we have to defeat Trump.”

“If Biden wins, we’ll be at his door on day one, demanding the kinds of structural reforms that advance racial, economic, and environmental justice. But before that, it’s clear what we have to do: This November, we have to #VoteTrumpOut in swing states.”

Among the activists backing the new campaign are some of the progressive movement’s most prominent members, including professor Noam Chomsky, former Sanders surrogate Linda Sarsour, Medicare for All advocate Ady Barkan, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who served as a Sanders campaign co-chair. 

The group is rolling out the new effort with a six-figure ad buy. It’s opening video features an over two-minute clip of Chomsky underscoring the dangers he says climate change and Trump pose. 

“Another four years of Trump may literally lead us to the stage where the survival of organized human society is deeply imperiled,” Chomsky says. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. It doesn’t matter whether you like Biden or not. That’s your personal feelings, irrelevant, nobody cares about that. What they care about is what happens to the world. We have to get rid of Trump, keep pressure on Biden, just as Sanders and associates have been doing.”

The campaign comes after months of hitting Biden during the primary battle, when Sanders was the former vice president’s main opponent and the group called Biden’s record “abysmal.”

RootsAction.org now says Biden will be more open to its ideas should he be in the Oval Office.

“In messaging to persuade voters who dislike Biden’s record to vote Biden in swing states, we’ve learned that it works well to characterize Biden as a far better opponent to be fighting against in the White House than the immovable Trump,” RootsAction.org co-founder Norman Solomon told Politico, which was the first to report on the effort, in reference to his group’s testing of Facebook audiences.