Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – just plain “Bernie” to his backers – is the unlikeliest of political sensations. The self-styled “democratic socialist” has packed arenas and meeting halls from Seattle to L.A. to Atlanta, drawing nearly 400,000 supporters to his rallies. Decrying a “rigged” economy and a political system corrupted by billionaires, Sanders has refused Super PAC politics, instead drawing on 750,000 grassroots donors. On the strength of $30-average checks, he has built a campaign war chest to rival the Hillary Clinton juggernaut.
Sanders has already altered the course of the 2016 campaign. His resonance with the Democratic Party’s activist base has forced Clinton to tack left, repeatedly. But don’t mistake this as Sanders’ endgame. “Bernie’s campaign is more than symbolic – it’s real, and it can succeed,” says senior adviser Tad Devine, a veteran of Al Gore’s 2000 bid. The Sanders machine is built to slingshot to an early lead, propelled by grassroots excitement in Iowa and New Hampshire, and then to fight, delegate by delegate, all the way to the convention. And recent polls counter the notion that Sanders is “unelectable.” An October NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey shows Sanders besting Donald Trump by nine points, Marco Rubio by five.
Sanders has a unique ability to drive turnout among “lower-income working whites,” Devine insists. But an October National Student Town Hall at George Mason University – a public school in leafy Fairfax, Virginia – suggests a far broader resonance. Sixteen hundred roaring students pack the volleyball stadium to the rafters. The audience is startlingly diverse: African-American and African immigrant, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, white, preppy, hipster, jock and dreadlocked. Kianoosh Asar, a 22-year-old Iranian immigrant, wears a homemade T-shirt that reads “CAUTION THE POLLS MAY CAUSE SERIOUS BERN.” For Asar, Sanders’ substance is the selling point: “I really care about all the issues,” he says. “And I care about a candidate who talks for my generation.” That Sanders would be 75 on Inauguration Day doesn’t even seem to register.
Rolling Stone spent three days on the campaign trail with Sanders in May.
The town hall is intimate in physical scale, but expansive in virtual reach: simulcast to watch-parties in all 50 states at campuses as unexpected as Mississippi State. Sanders’ stump speech is heavy on facts – about wealth inequality, marijuana arrest rates, young-voter turnout – and short on rhetorical lift. But amid the fierce statistical urgency of his pitch, a moment of raw emotional power emerges. A Sudanese-American student who wears a blue hijab, pinned with a Bernie 2016 button, asks Sanders how he can counter Trump and Ben Carson “bashing Muslims.” Sanders motions the student, Remaz Abdelgader, up to the stage, pulling her into a hug. “Let me be very personal,” he says. “My father’s family died in concentration camps.” The tableau of a bald white Jew from Vermont embracing a young black Muslim woman to denounce America’s “ugly stain of racism” has the audience fighting back tears. After the rally, Abdelgader, an aspiring human rights lawyer, is euphoric, declaring without a trace of irony, “I feel like he’s my Jewish dad.”