In North Las Vegas, Bernie Sanders casts nation’s struggle as wealthy vs. working class

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked the crowd at Craig Ranch Regional Park in North Las Vegas what it means to live paycheck to paycheck, something around half of Americans say they experience.

The crowd Thursday yelled responses ranging from deciding between paying for medication or rent to the impossibility of putting their child through college.

“Our life expectancy … is about four years shorter than people in most other wealthy countries,” Sanders said. “But what is even more embarrassing is that working-class Americans are living seven years shorter lives than the wealthy.”

“Why is that?” he asked. “The answer is stress.”

Sanders, along with U.S. Reps. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., drew thousands to the park, framing the battle with President Donald Trump’s second administration not as left versus right but as the country’s richest people against the working class.

Sanders has gone barnstorming through the United States on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour since Trump was inaugurated in January, making stops in Iowa, Nebraska and soon Colorado and Arizona.

Illustrating the country’s wealth disparity, Sanders noted that three Americans — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — own more combined wealth than the bottom half of Americans.

“We are (going across the United States) because this country faces enormous crises, and how we respond to these crises today will impact not only our lives, but the lives of our kids, future generations, and in terms of climate change, the very well-being of the planet,” Sanders said.

The new administration, Ocasio-Cortez said, is going after Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and veterans’ benefits to pay for massive tax cuts for the country’s wealthiest people.

“Now that (Trump’s) in power, we can see it clear as day,” she said. “He’s handed the keys to Elon Musk and is selling this country for parts to the richest people on the planet for a kickback.”

Asked about whether America is now an oligarchy, where a small group of wealthy people control the government, Horsford pointed to a series of ZIP codes in North Las Vegas where he says corporate speculators and hedge funds have priced Nevadans out of owning a home.

Horsford said one of his bills, the HOME Act, would mitigate that problem. The legislation would allow the president to declare a national emergency on housing and prevent selling or renting at “unreasonable levels” while that’s ongoing, according to his website.

“When we talk about oligarchy, we’re talking about billionaires and big corporations and tech tycoons who want to own and dominate everything,” Horsford told the Sun. “That is why we have to be strategic about how we attack this problem, because it’s our very future that’s on the line.”

Ocasio-Cortez thanked Horsford and Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., but left out Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., who helped Republicans reach the 60-vote threshold to pass a GOP funding bill to avoid a government shutdown.

Many in the crowd had also soured on Democratic leadership. A few shouted that AOC should run a primary campaign against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who sent the party into chaos when he announced that he’d also get Republicans across the 60-vote threshold.

They aren’t alone. Democrats hit record-low approval ratings this week, with only 27% of voters having a positive view of the party, according to an NBC News poll.

At the same time, 65% of Democratic voters want party members “to stick to their positions even if that risks sacrificing bipartisan progress,” according to the poll.

Wearing a “protect our national parks” shirt, John McDaniel, 57, said he believes Democrats aren’t doing enough to fight back against Trump but saw Sanders’ event as a bright spot.

“This looks like a grassroots thing happening today, and I think this can be the start,” McDaniel said.

Horsford agreed that events like the oligarchy tour are part of how Democrats can dig themselves out of their low approval by 2026. That theory was partially tested when Ocasio-Cortez asked the crowd who among them was attending their first political rally, and a large number of hands shot up in the air.

Instead of capitulating to Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez said the party needs to support “brawlers” willing to fight for working people.

“We have some immediate fights,” Horsford said. “We’ve got the fight to protect Medicaid and Social Security, to protect our families against tax cuts for the very wealthy at the expense of all the rest of us to protect our schools.”

Sanders said he is fighting for an expansion of Social Security, guaranteed health care for all, ridding politics of big money, and free tuition at public colleges.

Speaking to the Sun, Horsford stopped short of endorsing Medicare for All but said “bold ideas” are needed for the Democrats to win again.

“I’m an angry, pragmatic elected official ,and while I work across many coalitions, one thing I know is this is broken,” he said. “We need to work together to win because it’s only through that model that we’re able to defeat these tech tycoons.”

Sanders ended by saying that American history is one of a group of people defeating insurmountable odds. The revolutionaries took down the British, the abolitionist movement and the Civil War ended slavery, and the unionists of the 20th century fought for better working standards.

Again, he said, Americans are engaged in a similar fight.

“American people understand that there’s something very wrong today where so few have so much,” Sanders said. But “while I am not a mathematician, I do know that 99% is a lot bigger number than 1%.”