A Utah lawmaker has bolted from the GOP after attending last week's Republican convention in Cleveland and wondering where his party has gone, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.
Republican State Sen. Mark Madsen announced he was leaving the party for the Libertarian Party during a press conference on Monday when he also endorsed that party's presidential candidate, Gary Johnson.
According to Madsen, he has been looking at changing parties, and decided to make the move after attending the GOP convention in Cleveland where New York City businessman Donald Trump formally accepted the nomination as the party's candidate for president.
Speaking about the Republican convention, Madsen said, "I'm wondering what this party is all about."
Madsen, who calls himself a "small government conservative," said he specifically parts ways with his former party over its stance on the legalization of medical marijuana which he, along with candidate Johnson, supports.
In April, Madsen gave the keynote at the state Libertarian Party convention, stating, "I've been kind of an oddball legislator," before adding, "I don't fit. And it's been 12 years [in office] of kind of a square peg in a round hole."
Donald Trump eagerly injected himself into the Democratic Party's email controversy on Monday, calling the revelations that the party apparatus backed Democrat Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders proved his charges that the system is rigged.
Trump, kicking off a three-day campaign swing with his vice presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, returned to his freewheeling style after giving a scripted speech on Thursday accepting the Republican presidential nomination.
During an hour-long event in Roanoke, Virginia, Trump labeled Clinton "low-energy," the same characterization he lobbed at Republican rival Jeb Bush; attacked her running mate, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia; and complained about the air conditioning in the hotel ballroom where he spoke.
"I think the ballroom and the people who own this hotel ought to be ashamed of themselves," Trump said.
Trump took particular delight in making light of Democratic disunity as party loyalists gather in Philadelphia this week to anoint Clinton as their nominee, after a week in which Republicans struggled to unify behind Trump at their convention in Cleveland.
Trump waved away Republican disunity as essentially isolated pockets of resistance and made an apparent reference to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who was booed off stage in Cleveland when he did not endorse Trump after losing to him in a bitter primary race.
"We had a couple people who probably destroyed their career, but who knows," Trump said. "Look what's going on in Philadelphia. ... We had no riots, no nothing. It was unbelievable. I'll never forget it as long as I live."
Trump's strongest words were for Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign on Sunday in the fallout over leaked emails showing the committee backed Clinton over democratic socialist Sanders.
The New York businessman said it was proof the "system" is rigged against outsider candidates.
"Debbie was totally loyal to Hillary, and Hillary threw her under the bus," Trump said, adding, "I don't want her covering MY back."
He then launched into a riff about "Hillary Rotten Clinton," a play on her full name, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Under the interim leadership of the Donna Brazile, who has taken over for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee has issued a formal apology for comments made by DNC staffers in emails uncovered after the hack of the party's email system.
Signed by the board, the apology called comments by staffers "inexcusable."
“On behalf of everyone at the DNC, we want to offer a deep and sincere apology to Senator Sanders, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party for the inexcusable remarks made over email. These comments do not reflect the values of the DNC or our steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process."
It continues, "The DNC does not -- and will not -- tolerate disrespectful language exhibited toward our candidates. Individual staffers have also rightfully apologized for their comments, and the DNC is taking appropriate action to ensure it never happens again."
The DNC hopes the apology will quell some of the protests inside and outside the hall by Sanders supporters who were outraged by some of the revelations.
Tim LaHaye, evangelical leader and best-selling author of the Left Behind series died earlier today, July 25, 2016 after suffering a stroke. He was 90. LaHaye had made a career out of preaching a version of Christianity that saw gay people as monsters and Catholics as pagans among other views. Here is a list of reasons that Raw Story suspects he may be "left behind" should the Rapture turn out to be anything more than a fictional event.
1. LaHaye was prompted to write his best-selling book series after judging others' behavior. At LaHaye's bio page, he explained that he was prompted to write the first book in the series of Left Behind novels, which tell the story of a post-apocalyptic world where Christ has selected deserving Christians in the Rapture and left behind those who sinned, after observing a couple flirting.
"Dr. LaHaye said the idea for the apocalyptic series came during a flight when he noticed a married pilot flirting with an attendant. The incident prompted the minister to wonder what would happen to the pilot if the pre-tribulation rapture came at that moment."
For the record, LaHaye doesn't actually approve of the word "gay." Or at least he didn't in 1978. The third chapter of The Unhappy Gays is titled, seriously, "Gay It Isn't!" LaHaye explains: "Not many years ago 'gay' meant 'fun' and was a word utilized by all kinds of people....It costs the taxpayers of California approximately $20 million a year to treat homosexuals for VD. Taking massive doses of penicillin to cure VD certainly is not gay!" Uh, I guess not. LaHaye goes on to list "sixteen reasons why 'gay' isn't gay." These include loneliness, guilt, selfishness, depression, and my personal favorite, "vulnerability to sadism-masochism." LaHaye's image of gays seems to have been wholly informed by those horrible '70s melodramas about the evil dark side of the gay world. Think Al Pacino's Cruising -- which, in fairness, was released after LaHaye's book was published.
3. He was one of the founding members of the Moral Majority. The right-wing Christian political organization was founded by Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, and Greg Dixon. Among the campaigns that the Moral Majority was associated with included supporting Anita Bryant's campaign to discriminate against gay people in Florida, and running evangelist Pat Robertson for president.
4. LaHaye dismissed Catholicism as a "false religion." He was removed as chair of the Jack Kemp presidential campaign in 1988 after just four days when his anti-Catholic views came to light. LaHaye had founded a mission to Catholics that was virulently anti-Catholic and sought to convert them to evangelical Christianity.
Writing about Pope John Paul II, LaHaye and his co-writer for the Left Behind books were described as believing:
The present pope," the pair assert, "is on record as believing in the Trinity and may indeed pray in the name of Jesus Christ. However, his infatuation with the vision of Fatima and his reverence for Mary (whom he credits with saving his life from an assassin's bullet) concerns some who fear he could be setting up his church and the religions of the world for the fulfillment of Revelation 17, where the 'Mystery Babylon, the mother of harlots,' unifies all the religions of the world during the first half of the Tribulation."
5. He believed that the "Illuminati" controlled worldly events. According to an article published by the organization "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State," LaHaye wrote in one of his books:
In Rapture Under Attack, LaHaye writes, "I myself have been a forty-five year student of the satanically-inspired, centuries-old conspiracy to use government, education, and media to destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish a new world order. Having read at least fifty books on the Illuminati, I am convinced that it exists and can be blamed for many of man's inhumane actions against his fellow man during the past two hundred years."
Saying he understands their frustrations, the campaign manager for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has a warning for some of the candidate's more boisterous supporters in Philadelphia.
Stop the "lock her up" chants aimed at presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton.
According to The Hill, Sanders campaign head Jeff Weaver was pressed about protesters in the street and at a Sanders rally on Monday who echoed the chant heard at the Republican convention last week.
Asked if they should stop chanting, "lock her up," Weaver simply answered "Yes."
"I know emotions are running high right now but I think people really have to consider the implications of what a Trump presidency would mean for those of us who support the kind of agenda that Bernie Sanders has laid out for the country," Weaver stated. "I would encourage them to continue the political revolution by advancing the cause of progressive change."
"And the best way we're going to do that at this point is to elect Democrats up and down the ballot," he continued.
The Democratic National Convention began under a cloud. It seems the previously unthinkable has happened: Donald Trump is now leading polls in the race to become the president of the United States.
Trump is winning because he is absolutely trouncing Hillary Clinton among white voters. In the latest CNN/ORC poll conducted July 22-24, Clinton only has the support of 34% of white voters, compared with 56% for Trump. That differential of 22% seems shocking. After all, in the 2010 census, 63.7% of Americans identified as non-Hispanic white.
But what most political observers don’t realise is that this white voter advantage for Republican candidates is nothing new, even if it is starker than it has been in the past.
In Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election bid against former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, six in ten white voters voted for Romney – but Obama won the race handily, taking 51% of the vote to Romney’s 47%.
Thanks to the US’s changing demographics, winning white voters is no longer necessary to win the White House. Exit poll data from 2012 found that non-Hispanic white voters comprised about 72% of the electorate, but that share is already a sharp drop from past elections; in the 1980’s, this same demographic comprised as much as 85% of the electorate.
In fact, it now appears certain that Trump will carry white voters overall, with a huge advantage among white men in particular, but could still lose in November. This is possible because the US’s sizeable and growing minority groups are overwhelmingly flocking to the Democrats.
In 2012, Romney won a lacklustre 27% of Latino voters, and an abysmal 6% of African-Americans. And even though more white women voted for Romney than for Obama, the president nonetheless scored an 11-point win among women overall.
When the dust settled from Romney’s defeat, the Republican national party commissioned an election “post-mortem” report, the Growth and Opportunity Project, to determine why it had lost. The report had many findings, but one was key: the Republican party can only hope to be competitive in future presidential elections if it does a better job at reaching out to women and Latino voters.
Yet if the Republican party had hired Dr Frankenstein as a political consultant and tasked him with creating a candidate who would alienate Latinos and women, it’s hard to imagine him coming up with someone more effective in doing so than Trump.
Lowest of the low
Trump has painted Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. He has suggested that an American-born judge was professionally biased against Trump’s business interests simply because his ancestry was Mexican. He then tried to defuse the justifiable accusations of racism by tweeting a photo of himself eating a taco bowl.
And whether it was suggesting that Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly was aggressively questioning him because of her menstrual cycle, or a long history of using derogatory terms to refer to women, Trump has done little to soften his sexist image.
And yet, Clinton’s flawed campaign has struggled to capitalise on this divisiveness. In the latest CNN poll, as in others before it, her advantage among women was thin, particularly among younger women, whom she lost to Bernie Sanders during their marathon primary. (The rancour of their contest was revived just as the convention began, when the chair of the Democratic National Committee was forced to resign after Wikileaks released a trove of emails indicating that she and her staffers had at least mouthed off and at worst plotted against the Sanders campaign.)
The same cannot be said, however, for Clinton’s advantage among non-white voters: just as she won decisively among them against Sanders, she currently leads Trump among non-whites by a margin of 66% to 21%, with 13% yet to decide.
But alongside all these numbers, it’s important to remember that the road to the White House goes through the electoral college – an arcane and obscure method of picking the world’s most powerful person that makes these demographic splits all the more crucial.
Where to win
The electoral college system was designed to give greater power to individual states. As a result, each state is allocated a certain number of “electoral votes”, equal to the number of representatives in Congress that each state is apportioned (in turn a reflection of its population).
My home state of Minnesota, for example, has eight representatives in the House of Representatives and two senators (like every other state), so Minnesota has ten votes in the electoral college. California, the largest state by population, has 55 electoral votes. In order to win the presidency, a candidate needs to reach 270 electoral votes.
This gives Clinton a major advantage. Since 1992, 18 states and the District of Columbia have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election. Assuming this so-called “blue wall” doesn’t crumble, Clinton starts with 242 electoral votes already in the bag. If she simply adds Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, she will reach 271 and therefore the White House.
Put more simply, if Clinton wins Florida – which has voted for Obama twice – she will almost certainly be America’s 45th president. And even if she loses Florida, she could still win with a variety of other state combinations: the blue wall plus Ohio plus Virginia, for example. Again, Obama managed that feat in 2012, winning many other “swing states” besides.
Playing to the crowd
Clinton’s electoral challenge is therefore much more straightforward than Trump’s. Only 13 states have voted Republican with the same regularity as the “blue wall”, and they are less populous; as a result, Trump can only count on a guaranteed 102 electoral votes.
This means Trump’s path to the White House will necessarily run through a string of swing states, not just one. More challenging still, most of those swing states – Wisconsin, say, and Pennsylvania – have leaned Democratic in recent elections. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Trump both loses Florida and wins the White House.
Again, demographics are his problem. Of Floridians, 23% identify as Hispanic/Latino, and the state is home to the third-largest bloc of Latino voters in the US.
Clinton’s campaign is well aware of this, and is working hard to make hay of it while the sun shines. For proof, look no further than her recently unveiled running mate, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine.
His addition to the ticket is an attempt to stem the flow of alienated white male voters to Trump, but it’s also a clear overture to Latino voters. Kaine’s debut on stage with Clinton in Florida saw him effortlessly slipping between English and Spanish; he is fluent in Spanish due to a year spent living in Honduras as a young man.
Kaine will be a powerful weapon as he crisscrosses battleground states, particularly ones like Florida with large Spanish-speaking populations.
So even as the Democrats gather to nominate Clinton with Trump apparently leading the polls, they know full well that if they play their cards right, his startling advantage among white voters (and men in particular) can still be trivialised. Winning white voters no longer necessarily wins you the White House.
CNBC host Michelle Caruso-Cabrera demanded on Monday that presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and other establishment Democrats "disavow socialism" to prove that Bernie Sanders had truly been defeated.
"The Republican Party got the candidate that the Republican Party voted for and wanted to," Caruso-Cabrera asserted to former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D). "The establishment lost at the RNC. Right?"
"But when it comes to the Democrats, you have a lot of Democrats who say they actually didn't get the candidate they want," she continued. "The establishment won. That's the difference, and that's why you could have discord [at the Democratic convention]."
Richardson pointed out that the Democratic Party had incorporated many of Sanders' ideas into its platform.
"He's been respected, he's endorsed Hillary Clinton," Richardson explained. "I think he's energized the Democratic Party. If you look at what happened in the Republican Party, the fact that the governor of the state where the convention was held, John Kasich, a very good moderate -- he's not going to be happy when I call him that -- didn't even attend, didn't even endorse."
Caruso-Cabrera interrupted: "That's what I find so interesting about the differences between the two parties. You've had so many Republicans disavow Donald Trump. But I haven't heard a single Democrat disavow socialism."
"It's progressivism," Richardson insisted.
"He's a socialist!" Caruso-Cabrera exclaimed. "Bernie Sanders is a socialist. He's a socialist."
According to Richardson, there had been a "convergence of the Clinton wing, the Sanders wing."
"It's not going to be all the Sanders people supporting Hillary Clinton, but I think you're going to see on the issues, on the platform, on income inequality issues, on national security," he said.
Along with the Democratic party officials, delegates, lobbyists and members of the media who flocked to Philadelphia this weekend came tens of thousands of activists — a number that will likely continue to grow during the four days of the party’s presidential nominating convention, officially kicking off Monday night with speeches from first lady Michelle Obama and former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.
The activists’ causes were numerous. Front and center was a push to get the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton, to pay greater attention to policies espoused by Sanders during his campaign for president. On Sunday, more than 10,000 people gathered in sweltering heat to attend at least one of two rallies that originated over the course of the afternoon in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall. The first called for a ban on fracking — a major industry in western and northeastern Pennsylvania — and a transition to a clean energy economy. The second was a demonstration in support of Bernie Sanders. Other protests occurred over the weekend: Black Lives Matter events called for an end to policies that disproportionately harm black people, and activists demanding health care for all and a $15 minimum wage joined the many in Philadelphia to make their voices heard.
The day before the big climate and Sanders marches, during a quieter event at a Quaker meeting hall, representatives from many of these causes met to lay out a platform in a formal, online document. The “People’s Convention,” as participants called it, was designed to look beyond this year’s presidential race, toward creating the sort of wide-reaching political movement the Vermont senator so often invoked on the campaign trail.
The initiative came about largely through the efforts of two organizers, Jack “Jackrabbit” Pollack and Shana East. Both had volunteered for Sanders in the Chicago area. East was hired by the campaign once it started ramping up its organizing efforts in Illinois. But in April, they decided they would have to step away from the Sanders campaign to foster a wider movement.
“The Sanders campaign didn’t really seem to be interested in actually working with the grass roots,” Pollack said. “Once Shana and I realized that that was the case, we figured that for the political revolution that Bernie had been calling for since the beginning of his campaign, it was really essential that we be building for something, toward something. We were kind of giving a form and a framework to a movement that is currently very amorphous.”
“The reality is that Bernie, if you really listened to his speeches and the things that he said over the course of the campaign, he never actually said ‘I’m leading this movement,'” Pollack continued. “I think the mistake that a lot of people have been making is to think that they needed to look to him for this movement. The movement is us.”
The Democratic Party may have one of the most liberal platforms in recent memory, in no small part because of Sanders and his impassioned supporters. But those at the People’s Convention were disappointed. They lamented the absence of planks calling for a ban on fracking, for universal health care and opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Fueling the discontent: Clinton’s choice of the relatively centrist Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) as her running mate over more populist options like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
“I told somebody Friday before she announced: If she picks Kaine, every Berner in the country’s going to be at the DNC. It’s just the biggest slap in the face you could possibly have,” said Douglass Paschal, a resident of the Philadelphia suburbs who attended the People’s Convention.
A number of Sanders delegates to the Democratic Convention were in attendance. “I came here as mostly an interested observer. I’m excited to see a lot of people I know here,” said Christine Kramer, a delegate from Nevada. “When you get to the actual convention, the discussion ends. It’s a scripted TV show. So this is where we have the catharsis: This is what we all know needs to happen for our country and how do we get there.”
Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who became a national spokeswoman for Sanders after switching her allegiance from the Clinton campaign to his during the primaries, delivered one of the convention’s keynote addresses.
“This nation needs people from all walks of life like those of us in this room today to be able to stand up and speak truth to power and not be afraid. Both major political parties need people like us in this room to keep us honest and keep them on task,” she said, also encouraging voters to check out other parties, including the Green Party and the Libertarian Party. “If we truly are a representative democracy where everyone’s voice matters, we shouldn’t be afraid of a little competition.”
There were plenty of people at the convention who still held out hope for a Sanders presidency, and others who looking elsewhere: Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, served as the end-of-the-day keynoter. But Pollack and East emphasized that their Peoples’ Convention was not about pushing a specific outcome at the Democratic Convention, but instead about building an enduring movement.
The products of months of input, submitted through the internet, and months of drafting, led by Pollack and East, the People’s Platform that the alternative convention ratified Saturday afternoon contained five planks: economic justice, health care as a human right, racial justice, climate justice and “creating real Democracy” — which dealt with decreasing the influence of money in politics and increasing access to the ballot. All of the planks will be reopened for amending in August.
Contributing to the document were activists affiliated with Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Green Party, the Sanders campaign, environmental groups and groups trying to limit the influence of money on politics.
The People’s Convention was not without its points of contention. In particular, many expressed discomfort with lingering signs of segregation, pointing to the whiteness of the movements behind some causes represented, while the movement for racial justice remains, primarily, black.
But overall, many of the people who stopped by the Quaker meeting hall for some or all of the day cheered the advent of a formal progressive platform after years of diffuse activism and disorganization on the left.
“As far as the theater of power at the DNC is concerned, I don’t think this is going to make a big dent in that,” said Paschal, a veteran activist who has been following movements on the left since his time with the United Farm Workers in the early 1970s. “But as far as the Bernie movement, or the left movement, this meeting here showed everyone that it will continue. It’s a continual struggle. It’s going to continue in others’ hands.”
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on Monday she will not open the party's national convention in Philadelphia, the Sun Sentinel newspaper reported.
"I have decided that in the interest of making sure that we can start the Democratic convention on a high note that I am not going to gavel in the convention," Wasserman Schultz told the Florida paper.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
In an interview with Yahoo News, a DNC staffer focused on doing research on the business dealings of Donald Trump's campaign chairman claims her personal email account was hacked.
DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa, who works for the committee as a director of “ethnic engagement,” states she received a warning when she logged into her private Yahoo email account.
“Important action required,” she said the pop-up stated. “We strongly suspect that your account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”
According to Chalupa, she "freaked out," before contacting DNC officials about the hack.
Chalupa was in the midst of looking into Paul Manafort's dealings with pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine after the political consultant took control of the Trump campaign after previous campaign head Cory Lewandowski was ousted.
"Since I started digging into Manafort, these messages have been a daily occurrence on my Yahoo account despite changing my password often,” Chalupa wrote in an email to DNC communications director Luis Miranda, with an attached screengrab of the Yahoo security warning attached.
Manafort has a long history of dealing with pro-Putin politicians, including Viktor Yanukovych, as well as Russian billionaires accused of corruption.
While news of the DNC memo leak has roiled the start of the Philadelphia convention, the disclosure of hacks of personal accounts brings a new dimension to the links between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Chalupas warning set off a panic at the DNC.
“That’s when we knew it was the Russians,” a Democratic Party source told Michael Isikoff at Yahoo, before stating,“we told her to stop her research.”
Monday the FBI announced they had opened up an investigation into the hacks.
The Democratic National Convention got off to a rocky start Monday, with a major internal row over leaked emails playing havoc with nominee Hillary Clinton's bid to present a united front against Donald Trump.
Two new polls showed Trump surging since his nomination last week as the Republican presidential candidate, with a CNN poll putting him three points ahead of Clinton.
The Democratic convention gets gaveled to order at 4:00 pm (2000 GMT), but even before it began Democrats were scrambling to contain the damage caused by thousands of leaked emails that showed party leaders had sought to undermine Clinton's primary rival, Bernie Sanders.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was investigating the "cyber intrusion" at the Democratic National Committee, which the Clinton campaign blamed on Russian hackers bent on helping Trump.
The agency said in a statement it was "working to determine the nature and scope of the matter."
Sanders lost the primary race but he has endorsed his bitter rival, and in a show of unity he has been offered a prime speaking slot on the opening day of the four-day confab.
Sanders will stress that the party mission is to elect Clinton in November and prevent Trump from becoming the 45th president of the United States.
The brash billionaire topped Clinton 48 to 45 percent in a two-way matchup in the CNN poll. The figure represents a dramatic six-point convention bounce.
While the former secretary of state is set to make history as the first female nominee of any major American political party, the process has been thrown into turmoil.
Anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks at the weekend released nearly 20,000 emails from between January 2015 and May 2016, gleaned by hackers who apparently raided the accounts of seven Democratic National Committee leaders.
At least two of the messages showed senior committee members were keen to undermine the Sanders campaign by seeking to raise questions about Sanders's faith and Jewish heritage.
Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz abruptly announced her resignation on Sunday, effective at the end of the convention.
But frustrations about the crisis boiled over Monday when delegates loudly booed the DNC chief as she addressed her Florida delegation.
Delegates chanted "Shame!" and held up laser-printed signs that simply read "E-mails."
After a hard-fought primary campaign, the party had seemed to be heading to the convention far more unified than the Republicans, whose fissures were laid bare at their convention in Cleveland last week.
Instead, Democrats now are struggling with the fallout from the DNC scandal just as the party was about to coalesce around its nominee.
"The Democrats are in a total meltdown," Trump taunted on Twitter. "E-mails say the rigged system is alive & well!"
Trump has long sought to scoop up disaffected voters who feel Sanders -- a self-described democratic socialist -- was denied a fair shot at the nomination.
Wasserman Schultz's announcement came after Sanders on Sunday repeated calls for her to go, with her leadership already under fire and her impartiality called into question by the leaks.
Shortly after she resigned, Sanders said in a statement that Wasserman Schultz "has made the right decision for the future of the Democratic Party."
- 'Move on' -
Wasserman Schultz said she would still open and close the convention, but the move carries risks, especially if she is booed like she was in the pre-convention meeting.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook on Monday sought to deflect questions about the row, saying he believed Wasserman Schultz still planned to open the convention.
"Our party is coming together here to unify to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump, and that's what you're going to see today," he said.
But on the event's periphery, concern persisted.
"We need to move on. This is about unity," Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf told CNN.
Democrats "continue to have disagreements within the party," he added. "At the end of the day, we're going to have to unite to defeat Donald Trump in November. If we don't unite we're not going to win."
Sanders and First Lady Michelle Obama headline the first day of the Democratic convention.
Recently added to Monday's program is liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose support for Clinton could help convince skeptical left-wing voters to get behind the nominee.
Thousands of pro-Sanders protesters have gathered in Philadelphia, with the largest demonstration expected Monday.
Many in the Sanders camp have also voiced disappointment with Clinton's choice of a center-left running mate, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, instead of a more liberal firebrand like Warren.
Former president Bill Clinton is the star speaker at the convention Tuesday, while President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden take the stage Wednesday.
Bernie Sanders fired up his supporters at the Democratic National Convention on Monday afternoon -- until he mentioned the need to elect Hillary Clinton.
While Sanders drew cheers when he trashed Donald Trump during his address, the audience erupted into boos when he said that "we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine."
In the run up to his statements about Clinton and Kaine, Sanders touted his campaign's many achievements, including writing a more progressive Democratic platform and reducing the total number of Superdelegates in Democratic primaries.
But even after getting the crowd pumped up by talking about their positive achievements, Sanders could not contain the boos that rained down on him when he endorsed Clinton and Kaine. He responded by reiterating how dangerous of a candidate Donald Trump is, and he talked about how Trump would be a disaster for all of the causes he cares about.
"Trump is a bully and a demagogue," Sanders said. "Trump has made bigotry and hatred the cornerstone of his campaign."
While this calmed things down a little bit, he didn't try to make a positive case for Clinton, and with good reason: It's likely he would have been booed again had he mentioned her name.
The suspected Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee is part of a broader cyber campaign against the U.S. -- which may include efforts to elect Donald Trump.
The FBI is investigating the DNC hack, which resulted in the ouster of party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and raised tensions among Democrats heading into this week's convention.
This comes as concerns have been raised about Trump and his campaign's friendly relationship with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager has suggested that the Republican platform was changed to "make it more pro-Russian."
One reporter who has written extensively about Russia's cyber warfare efforts has warned for months that the former Soviet Union appears to be actively invested in getting Trump elected to weaken the U.S.
Adrian Chen reported in June 2015 in the New York Times Magazine about Russia's "troll factory," where online commenters spread disinformation and pro-Kremlin propaganda on social media and other websites.
Those efforts range from anti-American or pro-Russian comments left on news sites to sophisticated hoaxes -- such as phony reports, including bogus videos and photos, about a Sept. 11, 2015, terrorist attack on a Louisiana chemical plant.
"One thing that the Russian propaganda always focuses on are any kind of unrest or social problems or disasters in the United States to prove, you know, that the United States isn't all that, that we have our own problems and why are we lecturing Russia?" Chen told NPR. "Why are we sanctioning Russia? And I can only assume that maybe this is an attempt to take that strategy further, not just report on this, but actually manufacture this."
Months after reporting on those campaigns, which he described as "information warfare," Chen began to notice something odd about many of the online accounts he had followed during his research.
"A very interesting thing happened," Chen said during a December podcast with Longform. "I created this list of the Russian trolls when I was researching, and I check on it once in a while, still. And a lot of them turned into conservative accounts, like fake conservatives. I don't know what's going on, but they're all tweeting about Donald Trump and stuff."
Chen said he couldn't determine who was behind those pro-Russian online accounts posing as American conservatives, but he has some idea what motivated them.
"I feel like it's some kind of really opaque strategy of electing Donald Trump to undermine the U.S. or something -- like (a) false flag kind of thing," Chen said. "You know, that's how I started thinking about all this stuff after being in Russia."
