Bernie Sanders Stumps for Hillary Clinton in Michigan Thursday

DEARBORN, MI — U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will campaign for Hillary Clinton, his one-time rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, in four Michigan cities Thursday, including Dearborn, the campaign said Tuesday.

The Dearborn rally starts at 10:30 a.m. at UAW Local 600. From there, the Vermont senator will campaign at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor at 1 p.m., at Adams Field in East Lansing at 3:45 p.m., and at Central High School in Grand Rapids at 6:45 p.m.

The self-proclaimed socialist, who was slammed in leaked emails among Democratic national party leaders and staffers, has said that he will work to ensure Republican nominee Donald Trump is not elected.

Sanders is stumping for Clinton to shore up her support among union members, young voters and college students.

Some previous events where Sanders was expected to campaign to amp up Clinton’s support among millennials and blue-collar workers, including a handful in Iowa, were cancelled earlier in this week after Clinton faced a torrent of criticism over leaked audio of the nominee calling Sanders’ supporters overly idealistic “basement dwellers.”

It’s unclear if the cancellations were a result the comments the now-Democratic nominee made at a private fundraiser in Maclean, Virginia:

“Some are new to politics completely. They're children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents' basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don't see much of a future.

“If you’re feeling that you’re consigned to being a barista or some other job that doesn’t pay a lot and doesn’t have much of a ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing,” she continued. “So I think we all should be really understanding of that, and we should try to do the best we can not to be a wet blanket on idealism.”

Trump, who has been trying to convince Sanders’ former supporters to join his outsider campaign, quickly seized an opportunity to appeal to those voters, The Associated Press reported.

“Hillary Clinton thinks Bernie supporters are hopeless and ignorant basement dwellers,” Trump said Saturday at a rally in Pennsylvania.

He also took to Twitter to try and woo Sanders’ supporters.

However, Sanders said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” that Clinton was “absolutely correct.”

“Millions of young people, many of whom took out loans in order to go to college hoping to go out and get decent paying good jobs, and you know what? They’re unable to do that,” Sanders said “That is an issue that we as a nation have got to address.”

Sanders was scheduled to hold rallies for Clinton in Iowa and Wisconsin on Wednesday, and was back on the stump Tuesdayat the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities and the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Michigan is one of about a dozen battleground states that could decide the 2016 race to the White House. The latest average of Michigan polls by Real Clear Politics gives Clinton a 5.3-percentage-point lead over Trump with about a month before the Nov. 8 general election. Nationally, Clinton’s advantage is less significant — 3.8 percent.

Michigan, with 16 electoral votes, has been fairly safe territory for Democrats in the past several election cycles and hasn’t supported a Republican candidate since 1988.

Trump has been in the state five times since he was crowned the GOP nominee, including a stop in Novi Friday where Tump unleashed a fresh round of criticism against Clinton.

Clinton has been in the state only once since Michigan primary, when she suffered a humiliating loss to Sanders. Surrogates former President Bill Clinton and the power couple’s daughter, Chelsea have campaigned for Clinton in Michigan.

Bill Clinton campaigned Monday in Flint, where the city’s drinking water crisis has been a centerpiece of his wife’s campaign.

Democratic National Committee staffers showed a fair amount of prejudice against Sanders. Emails leaked in July purported to show that DNC staffers mocked the Sanders campaign and reacted negatively to criticism in the media that they were biased toward Clinton.

Amid criticism over the email contents, shared by WikiLeaks, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned from her post after the convention in Philadelphia as the party came together under a semblance of unity to back Clinton.

Sanders’ former supporters are not solidly in Clinton’s corner. Some have coalesced around Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and others are backing Libertarian Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons