Howard Dean to FL Jews: Time to Schlep Your Grandkids to the Polls

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has a message to Florida’s senior Jewish community: tell your grandchildren to return favor and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Referring to Sarah Silverman’s 2008 call to young Jews to encourage any grandparents who live in Florida to vote for Obama, Dean said, now it is time for those “bubbes (grandmas) and zaides (grandpas)” to encourage their grandchildren to support Hillary Clinton.

“We have to get the vote out, it’s really critical. Florida is a state that we must win,” Dean said in remarks to a mostly senior and middle-aged crowd of Jewish Democrats at a DNC-hosted event on Thursday. “Remember when Sarah Silverman [was quoted] as saying, especially to the people of Florida, ‘Tell your bubbe, tell your zaide: get out and vote in Florida’? Now you have to do that to them. You have to tell your grandchildren, ‘Okay, you made us vote for Obama, now you have to go out to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

According to Dean, most supporters of Bernie Sanders are young and there’s no doubt that they would vote for Clinton if they go to the polls. “It’s your job to get them to the polls,” he said.

In 2008, Silver starred in an online video called “The Great Schlep” in which she made the case for Obama and urging young Jews to persuade their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama for president. “The people that vote there are the elderly Jews, and they’re not voting Obama because his name is scary,” Silverman told The New York Times at the time. “But who has more power with them than their grandchildren?”

President Barack Obama made a similar case to the American people in his speech at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night. “Tonight, I ask you to do for Hillary Clinton what you did for me,” Obama said.