  Pictured are U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, also a front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, and former Ohio senator Nina Turner, also a former Cleveland councilwoman and currently the co-chair of the Sanders campaign
By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief. Coleman is an experienced Black political reporter who covered the 2008 presidential election for the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio and the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 at Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com Field reporter Johnette Jernigan contributed to this story
CLEVELANDURBANNEWS.COM-CLEVELAND, Ohio – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a front-runner among a crowded field for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 and a 2016 presidential candidate, will bring his campaign to Lordstown, Ohio on Sunday, April 14 where he will visit the General Motors plant that closed there last year and will meet with members of the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of Teachers at Lordstown High School.
The event is closed to the public, organizers said.
Sanders, 77, is a socialist Independent from Vermont who trails potential candidate former vice president Joe Biden in the polls for the Democratic nomination for president and leads all others, including U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke.
O'Rourke visited Lordstown last month for a campaign stop and Rep. Ryan made the Lordstown plant closing the subject of his announcement last week of his bid for president, the auto plant of which is in his 13 congressional district, an industrial district suffering from the loss of manufacturing jobs and the impact of the long term post-industrial revolution.
The GM automaker announced last year that the company would leave transmission plants in Warren and White Marsh, Maryland, and assembly plants in Detroit, Ontario and Lordstown, Ohio “unallocated in 2019.”
Some 14,000 GM workers will either be displaced or will lose their jobs relative to the plant closings, which GM says is part of its global restructuring initiative.
Lordstown is a village in Northeast Ohio and Trumbull County. and is some 100 miles southeast of Cleveland.
It is part of the Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA metropolitan statistical area
The Lordstown GM plant has become a political football for the presidential election, and across partisan lines in general, U.S. Sens, Sherrod Brown, of Cleveland, and a Democrat, and Rob Portman, a Republican, also among those fighting against the plant closings.
Sanders has political friends in the pivotal state of Ohio where no Democrat has won the White House without first winning Ohio and neither has any Republican of remembrance.
He announced earlier this year that former Ohio senator Nina Turner, who is a Black Democrat and former Cleveland Ward 1 councilwoman, will co-chair his 2020 presidential campaign.
Turner lost a bid for Ohio secretary of state in 2014, and she leads Our Revolution, the political action organization spun out of Sanders' 2016 campaign.
“Senator Sanders’ 2020 campaign is a reflection of his work and I look forward to joining his team as a co-chair to ensure we have a true progressive champion in the White House dedicated to racial, social, economic, and political justice," said Turner, 48.
Considered a long shot in 2016, Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses and 43% of pledged delegates in his loss in the 2016 primary to Hillary Clinton, who got 55% and went on to lose the general election to current president Donald Trump, a Republican real estate mogul and former television personality star.
Currently an MSNBC and CNN visiting political analyst, which could change because of her current role with the Sanders' campaign,Turner's popularity took off after she dumped Clinton in 2015 and became an articulate spokesperson for the Sanders political campaign, and one of his top campaign affiliates.
She introduced him before an energetic audience of more than 6,000 people at the Wolstein Center at Cleveland State University in November 2015 when Sanders made his first campaign visit to Cleveland as to to his 2016 run for president, Cleveland a pivotal city and Ohio a pivotal state for presidential elections.
"Senator Sanders can win this race, don't listen to the pundits," said Turner at CSU in 2015 to a wealth of applause, " I am feeling the Bern."
Before speaking in Cleveland in 2015, a largely Black major American city he would visit again during his 2016 campaign for president, Sanders acknowledged Turner, and thanked his supporters.
And he acknowledged politicians there in support, including Ohio Sen. Michael Skindel, former state representative Mike Foley, former Cuyahoga County commissioner Tim Hagan, and former state senator C.J. Prentiss.
The longtime U.S senator said during his speech in Cleveland in November 2015 that if he is elected president that he and Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, a Toledo Democrat with Cleveland constituents and the nation's longest serving female in the U.S. House of Representatives, would push to protect pensions of the teamsters, who were among organized labor there, including nurses, public school teachers, state, county and city employees, and factory workers.
"We will not submit to racism, not be divided, and not succumb to "Islamophobia," said Sanders to am empowered Cleveland audience in 2015, the latter pertaining to heightened fear surrounding attacks by ISIS in Paris that year that claimed the lives of at least 129 people and left some 352 others injured.
A senator since 20o7 and the longest serving Independent in the U.S. Senate, Sanders covered an array of issues during that speech and pushed his 2016 political campaign platform, including support for an increase in the minimum wage, universal health care, free college tuition over prisons that house a disproportionate number of Black people, and Planned Parenthood. He also spoke on sane sex marriage, voter suppression, and the history of the disenfranchisement of Black America.
Ohioans, he said, need relief too, as do others nationwide, and from what he says is a crippled and capitalistic system of government that caters to the rich and undermines middle and working class Americans and the poor.
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