7 Things Bernie Sanders is Saying on the Campaign Trail

Sen. Bernie Sanders is gaining significant support among Democrats, according to a new poll.

The independent senator from Vermont describes himself as a “Democratic socialist,” and is seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.

A Suffolk University poll shows Sanders trailing Hillary Clinton only by 10 points among likely Democratic primary voters in the early primary state of New Hampshire. Clinton leads at 41 percent, Sanders follows at 31 percent. No other Democratic candidate polls higher than 7 percent.

According to Sanders’ campaign, he is drawing “overflow and enthusiastic crowds.”

“We’re going to win this campaign by establishing a very, very, very strong grassroots campaign involving millions of people,” Sanders told Rolling Stone. “And that’s the only way we win, and I think we’re in the process of doing that.”

Here are seven positions Sanders has taken on the campaign trail.

1. During a campaign stop at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on June 12, Sanders told the crowd he wanted “to talk about what real family values are.”

“My Republican colleagues talk a lot about quote-unquote ‘family values,’” Sanders said. “What they mean is opposition to a woman’s right to choose, opposition to women getting contraception and strong opposition to gay rights. And on all of those issues I strongly disagree.”

2. During that same stop in Iowa, Sanders expressed support for mandatory paid family leave.

“Let me be very clear. It is not a family value to force the mother of a newborn baby to go back to work a few days after she gives birth because she doesn’t have the money to stay home and bond with her baby. That is not a family value,” Sanders said. “That is an insult to everything that I know about what family is about.”

3. At a town meeting in Keene, N.H., on June 6, Sanders told the crowd he wants to address the “growing gap in wealth” and “income inequality” in the United States.

“We live in a nation which is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world but almost all of that wealth rests in the hands of a handful of billionaires and that is something that has got to change,” he said. “The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time. It is the great economic issue of our time, it is the great political issue of the time and we are going to address it.”

4. Sanders wants to eliminate tuition at public universities.

“As president, I will fight to make tuition in public colleges and universities free, as well as substantially lower interest rates on student loans,” Sanders said at his campaign launch in Burlington, Vermont, on May 26.

5. Sanders also said at his campaign launch that he wants to raise the minimum wage.

“The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and must be raised. The minimum wage must become a living wage—which means raising it to $15 an hour over the next few years—which is exactly what Los Angeles recently did—and I applaud them for doing that. Our goal as a nation must be to ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty,” Sanders said.

6. He wants to “establish pay equity for women workers.”

“It’s unconscionable that women earn 78 cents on the dollar compared to men who perform the same work,” Sanders said at his campaign launch.

7. He wants a single-payer health care system.

“The United States remains the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care for all as a right. Despite the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act, 35 million Americans continue to lack health insurance and many more are under-insured,” Sanders said at his campaign launch.