A top staffer for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has finished a distant third in his bid for a key swing House seat.
Pete D’Alessandro, who ran Sanders’ Iowa operation and a number of other states for the candidate, pulled just 16 percent of the primary vote on Tuesday, far behind newly minted nominee Cindy Axne’s 57 percent showing and trailing another Democrat in the contest. The Associated Press has called the race.
He’s one of the few Democratic candidates Sanders has gone all-in for this midterm cycle — and the latest to fall short in his bid for office, as many of Sanders’ endorsed candidates have lost their elections in the past few months.
Sanders held a February rally for D’Alessandro, cut a TV ad for him and helped him raise nearly half of his campaign funds in the race, but it wasn’t enough.
D’Alessandro told TPM on Monday that he wouldn’t have been competitive at all against Axne, who had most of the establishment support, and second-place finisher Eddie Mauro, who self-funded his campaign, without Sanders’ support. But it doesn’t appear that it ended up doing much for him in the end.
