It was a muggy Wednesday evening in St. Pete’s Warehouse Arts District.Cars rolled into a vacant lot bordered by a junkyard, dog and all, and other industrial scenery. Bumper stickers touted WMNF, Sierra Club and Bernie Sanders, the man of the hour.
Activists had rented the Venture Compound, the experimental music venue, to serve as one of thousands of sites across the country to stream a speech by the Democratic presidential hopeful.
The Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont has been turning heads and attracting massive crowds despite relatively little media attention, energizing progressives underwhelmed by the Democratic establishment’s choice, Hillary Clinton.
To supporters, Sanders is a rare honest politician not afraid to use the word “socialism” in a positive light. He passionately supports a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health care, a gentler foreign policy and paid family leave for all. Last week he filed a bill in the Senate that would grant free tuition for students attending any public college or university, not that the proposal has much traction.
Compared to Clinton’s centrist — some would consider right-leaning — platform, many people, especially younger ones, find Sanders refreshing.
“I’ve been a fan of Bernie Sanders ever since I found out he was one of a few senators on Capitol Hill that actually stands for the people and is not beholden to corporations,” said Tampa activist Asher Edelson, 21, in a phone interview. “And that’s rare.”
Also rare was Sanders’ early embrace of civil rights causes, supporters say.
“Our choices are the Republican side, which are all off the rails on civil rights, and Hillary Clinton, whose husband signed [the Defense of Marriage Act] in the first place,” said 26-year-old Ben Barrett, who helped organize the Venture Compound event. “Bernie Sanders was against DOMA, he was at the Martin Luther King speech, he did sit-ins against segregation in the ’60s. He just has a huge, long record, more than anyone else, as being on the right side of history.”
There were dozens of such gatherings throughout the Tampa Bay area that night. At least 60 people were packed into the Venture Compound to see the candidate’s speech projected onto a massive canvas. At Atwater’s, an eatery not too far away, organizers said some 90 people showed up.
The speech garnered applause throughout, and was followed by supporter and former union leader Larry Cohen urging viewers to get involved by pulling out their smartphones and texting the campaign.
Many did.
Sanders’ appeal has translated into dollars. If you don’t count the money that Republican candidates have received from super PACS (which Sanders refuses to use), he’s actually raised more funds ($15 million) than any of them. Even so, he remains a quintessential underdog; Clinton’s campaign war chest dwarfed his more than threefold in mid-July.
Besides refusing money from big banks or other large corporations — another reason progressives like him so much — Sanders is also reluctant to make out-and-out asks for donations. But his campaign has ramped up an effort to collect contributions on the web ($8 million to date), and has collected about $200k in donations from 50 states, at an average amount of $37 each.
But openly embracing policies the Fox News crowd so vehemently detests could be a problem in what will certainly be a polarized election cycle. Sanders supporters, though, argue that Clinton would be the more vulnerable candidate in the general election, given the right’s obsession with Benghazi and the email scandal that makes voters on both sides question her.
Some analysts point out how odd it is that a majority of liberals support Clinton because her centrist positions make her “safer” in the general, even as conservatives support the notoriously unfiltered billionaire Donald Trump.
The crowd at Venture Compound skewed young, though there were some baby boomers. Attendees were mostly, but not all, white and the male-female split appeared pretty even.
There wasn’t an empty chair in the house.
“We’ve been paying attention to Bernie Sanders in the news,” said Justin Shafran, 25. “Very honest, open. Consistent… Everything he says I agree with, most everything.”
Millennial supporters throughout the Tampa Bay area say the same thing: His message touts a different America, one where policies that genuinely promote equality and fairness actually see the light of day.
“I’ve had an interest in politics for a long time but have never before been inspired to volunteer for a campaign,” said Tampa resident Tim Bednar, 27, in an email. “I believe that our country has been heading in the wrong direction for a long time and it has reached a critical point with this upcoming election. We need to make serious changes fast.”
Many younger millennials don’t remember popular progressive Democrats surging in presidential primary polls only to lose, either because voters feared losing a general or mainstream media fixated on a perceived flaw. Those around in the 2004 presidential cycle, when the “Dean Scream” essentially ended Howard Dean’s primary run in 2003, can attest to mass media’s ability to take down a candidate with one wrong, if innocuous, move, a trend that will likely intensify in the age of social media.
Barrett said even if that were to happen, there’d be a silver lining, in that by simply being in the running, Sanders forces conversations that otherwise wouldn’t take place.
“If we can pull Hillary to the left, and then have her win a victory overall [and then hold her accountable] for the things she had to say during the primary,” he said.
Shafran said he’s hopeful Sanders would overcome any supposed faux pas with enough support.
“I think that with everything else in the media, as long as there’s enough people to stand behind him, he can overcome something silly like that.”
Edelson said he’s not as worried about a Dean Scream moment as he is about another factor often detrimental to candidates like Sanders: apathy among Edelson’s voting-age contemporaries.
“As a young guy, not a lot of young people vote,” he said. “And it saddens me because I’m seeing my generation getting screwed over by older generations and we’re not doing anything about it, even though if we all voted we could take the system easily. Easily.”