Symone Sanders-Townsend | |
---|---|
Personal details | |
Born | December 10, 1989 Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. |
Political party | Democratic |
Spouse | Shawn Townsend (m. 2022) |
Education | Creighton University (BBA) |
Website | Official website |
Symone D. Sanders-Townsend (born December 10, 1989) [1] [2] is an American political strategist and political commentator who hosts MSNBC's The Weekend. She served as national press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. She left the campaign in June 2016, following the end of the primaries. [3] In October 2016, she was hired as a Democratic strategist and political commentator by CNN. [4]
In April 2019, Sanders joined the 2020 presidential campaign of former vice president Joe Biden as a senior advisor, [5] [6] and after Biden won election, was named chief spokesperson and a senior advisor for Vice President Kamala Harris. [7] On December 2, 2021, Sanders announced her resignation from the White House to return to broadcasting. [8]
Sanders was raised in North Omaha, Nebraska. [9] Her father, Daniel Sanders, is retired from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. [10] Her mother, Terri Sanders, is the former publisher of the Omaha Star and former executive director for the Great Plains Black History Museum. [9] [10]
She attended Sacred Heart Catholic School. [11] As a child, Sanders wanted to grow up to host her own television show. She used to walk around the house acting as Donna Burns, an imaginary television host. [1]
Her first job was working at Time Out Foods in Omaha, a Black-owned restaurant. [12] She graduated from High School in 2008 from Mercy. [11]
Sanders attended Creighton University, and earned a bachelor's degree in business administration. [13] While in college, she interned at a law firm, where she realized she didn't want to work in law. [12]
Sanders worked in the communications office of former Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle, and she was deputy communications director for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chuck Hassebrook in 2014. [13] [11]
In August 2015, Sanders joined the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign as the national press secretary. [13] In December, Fusion listed Sanders as one of 30 women under 30 who would shape the 2016 election. [14]
In June 2016, she quit the Sanders campaign. [15] Later that year, she joined CNN as an analyst and commentator, [16] and was recognized by Rolling Stone magazine [17] as one of 16 Young Americans Shaping the 2016 Election.
She subsequently joined the presidential campaign of former vice president Joe Biden. [5] [6] In 2020, she published a memoir, No, You Shut Up, [1] relating her personal experiences of speaking up to effectively fight ideological battles.
On November 29, 2020, Sanders was named chief spokesperson and a senior advisor for Vice President Kamala Harris. [18] On December 1, 2021, Symone Sanders announced her departure from that role. [19]
Shortly thereafter, MSNBC announced she would host a weekend program for the network, as well as a program on Peacock's The Choice. [20] The new MSNBC program, Symone, premiered on May 7, 2022. [21]
As of November 19, 2023 the show was the 24th most popular show on MSNBC and 292nd overall on TV, watched by a total number of 438,000 people. [22]
On November 30, 2023, MSNBC announced that Sanders would move to weekend mornings to anchor a new program, The Weekend, along with Alicia Menendez and Michael Steele. Her weekend show on MSNBC and on Peacock, Symone, ended on January 7, 2024, with The Weekend premiering on the same day. [23]
Sanders-Townsend's husband is Shawn Townsend, [1] Washington D.C.'s former "Night Mayor". [24] The couple wed on Friday, July 15, 2022. [25] They live in Washington, D.C. [26]
MSNBC is an American news-based television channel and website headquartered in New York City. It is owned by NBCUniversal — a subsidiary of Comcast — and provides news coverage and political commentary. The network produces live broadcasts for its channel from studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York City, and aggregates its coverage and commentary on its website, msnbc.com.
Bernard ¨Bernie¨ Sanders is an American politician and activist who is the senior United States senator from Vermont. Sanders is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, but maintains a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career and sought the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.
Mercy High School is a private, all-girls, Roman Catholic high school in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy. It is located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha. It is the only high school in Omaha with a negotiated tuition program, so each family meets with the President at the start of each academic year to agree upon what they will pay for tuition. Mercy has approximately 385 students, 27 percent of whom are minorities. 98 percent of the graduating class goes on to college.
Nina Hudson Turner is an American politician, and television personality. A member of the Democratic Party, she was a Cleveland City Council member from 2006 to 2008 and a member of the Ohio Senate from 2008 until 2014. Turner was the Democratic nominee for Ohio Secretary of State in 2014, but lost in the general election against incumbent Jon Husted, receiving 35.5 percent of the vote. A self-described democratic socialist, her politics have been variously described as progressive, left-wing, or far-left.
Jennifer Rene Psaki is an American television political analyst and former government official. A political advisor who served under both the Obama and Biden administrations, she served the Biden administration as the 34th White House press secretary until May 2022. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served in the Obama administration as the White House deputy press secretary (2009); the White House deputy communications director (2009–2011); the spokesperson for the United States Department of State (2013–2015); and the White House communications director (2015–2017). Psaki was a political contributor for CNN from 2017 to 2020. As of March 2023, she hosts the talk-show Inside with Jen Psaki on MSNBC.
Neera Tanden is an American political consultant and government official serving as director of the United States Domestic Policy Council since 2023. Tanden previously served as a senior advisor and staff secretary to President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2023 and as president of the Center for American Progress (CAP), a center-left policy research and advocacy organization, where she worked in different capacities since its founding in 2003 until she joined the Biden administration in 2021.
Presidential primaries and caucuses were organized by the Democratic Party to select the 4,051 delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention held July 25–28 and determine the nominee for President in the 2016 United States presidential election. The elections took place within all fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories, and Democrats Abroad and occurred between February 1 and June 14, 2016. Between 2008 and 2020, this was the only Democratic Party primary in which the nominee had never been nor had ever become President of the United States. This was the first Democratic primary to nominate a woman for President.
In the 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sought the Democratic Party's nomination in a field of six major candidates and was the runner up with 46% of the pledged delegates behind former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who won the contest with 54%. Sanders, the junior United States senator and former Representative from Vermont, began with an informal announcement on April 30, 2015, and a formal announcement that he planned to seek the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States on May 26, 2015, in Burlington, Vermont. Sanders had been considered a potential candidate for president since at least September 2014. Though he had previously run as an independent, he routinely caucused with the Democratic Party, as many of his views align with Democrats. Running as a Democrat made it easier to participate in debates and get his name on state ballots.
A total of ten debates occurred among candidates in the campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination for the president of the United States in the 2016 presidential election.
Presidential primaries and caucuses were organized by the Democratic Party to select the 3,979 pledged delegates to the 2020 Democratic National Convention held on August 17–20 to determine the party's nominee for president in the 2020 United States presidential election. The elections took place in all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories, and through Democrats Abroad, and occurred between February 3 and August 11.
Karine Jean-Pierre is an American political advisor who has been serving as the White House press secretary since May 13, 2022 and a senior advisor to President Joe Biden since October 7, 2024. She is the first black person and the first openly LGBT person to serve in the position of White House press secretary. Previously, she served as the deputy press secretary to her predecessor Jen Psaki from 2021 to 2022 and as the chief of staff for U.S. Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris during the 2020 presidential campaign.
On April 25, 2019, former vice president Joe Biden released a video announcing his candidacy in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. On November 3, 2020, Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, defeated incumbent Republican president Donald Trump and vice president Mike Pence in the general election.
Debates took place among candidates in the campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination for the president of the United States in the 2020 presidential election.
The 2020 presidential campaign of Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. representative for Hawaii's 2nd congressional district, began on January 11, 2019. In January 2020, she was polling at about 1 to 2 percent. Had she won, she would have become the first female, Hindu, and Samoan president in American history, and the youngest person to ever hold the office. She made reducing military activity abroad a central message of her campaign.
The 2020 presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, a United States senator from California from January 2017 to 2021, officially began on January 21, 2019, with an announcement on Good Morning America. Harris had widely been considered a "high profile" candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries since 2016.
The 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders was an election campaign from the junior United States senator from Vermont. It began with Sanders's formal announcement on February 19, 2019. The announcement followed widespread speculation that he would run again after running unsuccessfully in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries.
The media coverage of Bernie Sanders, a U.S. Senator from Vermont, became a subject of discussion during his unsuccessful 2016 and 2020 presidential runs. His campaigns, some independent observers, as well as some media sources have said that the mainstream media in the United States is biased against Sanders. Others say that coverage is unbiased or biased in his favor. The allegations of bias primarily concern the coverage of his presidential campaigns.
#KHive is the hashtag used by an informal online community supporting Kamala Harris, the 49th vice president of the United States and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. The hashtag is also a term that is always pronounced and occasionally transcribed as K-Hive, and refers to the wider online community that is not formally affiliated with her campaign or office. The community formed prior to and during her 2020 presidential campaign as an effort to defend Harris from perceived misinformation and attacks perceived as racist and sexist. The movement has been cited as an example of social media fandom or stan culture.
Ashley Danielle Etienne is an American political advisor who served as the communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris. She is the former communications director and senior advisor to Nancy Pelosi, the first woman and person of color to hold the position of Communications Director for the House Speaker. She was also a former special assistant to Barack Obama.