[V]ermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign hopes to re-engage a disaffected electorate and deepen voter involvement in the political process.
Key to that effort is shifting an outpouring of online support into offline political action. The campaign will launch an initiative to do just that this month by having Sanders “appear” at hundreds of house parties simultaneously.
Just before the first reporting period of the 2016 presidential election cycle ended, the independent senator’s campaign sent out an email blast emphasizing the role it hopes political newcomers will play in electing Sanders to the presidency.
Tapping into an otherwise apathetic electorate is integral to the candidate’s success, said campaign spokesman Michael Briggs. A Sanders victory will ultimately rely on a renewed sense of urgency among voters, he said.
There are early signs that the strategy is working. Sanders is drawing large crowds at campaign events — recently a reported 10,000 turned out to hear him speak in Madison, Wisconsin. He reports raising $15 million since April 30, with 99 percent coming through individual donations of $250 or less.
That’s respectable even when compared to Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who raised a record-setting $45 million during the same period.
Sanders’ ascent has been marked by big crowds, surging poll numbers and solid fundraising figures, and his success has been particularly visible on the Internet. Virtually all of Sanders’ contributions were made online, according to the campaign.
Still, it’s unclear what bearing that will have on the Democratic primary. The big question for Sanders’ campaign is whether his online admirers can be leveraged into primary voters.
Kenneth Pennington, 24, is the campaign’s digital director. He previously worked in Sanders’ Senate office on digital media reporting to the senator’s press secretary.
The first step was using platforms, particularly Reddit — the message board often called the front page of the Internet — to inspire voters based on the issues driving the campaign: addressing income inequality, making college tuition free, getting big money out of politics, etc.
Those are winning issues online, just visit the /r/Politics the page, where politically minded users share and vote on the relevance of news items and commentary. It’s a venue where Sanders dominates. Sanders’ consistent message and lack of big money donors has led many online supporters to view him as a trustworthy voice in a corrupt political culture.
“Our next step is to start engaging those people and turning them into grassroots volunteers,” Pennington said.
The campaign will launch a set of “house parties,” hundreds across the country, on the same day in late July, where Sanders will deliver a message, either live or prerecorded, meant to fire up partygoers, Pennington said. The purpose will be to bring Sanders’ online supporters together IRL (an Internet acronym that stands for “In Real Life”). It’s a chance for people to meet neighbors who they might not know are also Sanders supporters.
At the parties, local campaign staff will unveil an agenda of action steps attendees can take offline, such as traditional canvassing, voter outreach and other elements of grassroots campaigns, Pennington said.
“The action starts online and then we put them to work offline,” he said.
Pennington said Sanders online supporters are already a font of welcome, but unsolicited, digital content that is helping to build the candidate’s brand online.
Aidan King, 23, of Montpelier works for Fresh Tracks Farm in Berlin where he does digital marketing and social media. King is among those pushing Sanders-related content online in a volunteer capacity.
A year-and-half-ago, King created the SandersForPresident subreddit with the help of another Redditor named David Fredrick of San Jose, California. The page drew 1,000 subscribers in its first week. As of Monday morning, they had close to 57,000.
The two serve as moderators, curating the page where users aggregate all things Bernie. They also plug the page in other subreddits where they think Sanders supporters might be lurking.
King said while he’s attended rallies and town hall meetings in Vermont, he’s never done something so overtly political before. That leaves him unsure how all this translates into primary voting.
“It’s hard to tell,” he said, adding that Reddit’s users skew younger, and young people traditionally have low turnout rates in elections. Still, he said he’s optimistic.
Joe Kiernan, 27, is an engineer who grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, who has lived in Vermont for the past two years. Kiernan is an avid Redditor, who after learning that Sanders was running for president, pulled out his cellphone and donated $50. It was his first political contribution.
Outside of voting in the past two presidential elections, he’s never done anything political before, he said. Kiernan plans to cast his first primary ballot for Sanders in 2016, he said.
“[Sanders] is one of the only political candidates I’ve encountered that I don’t think is lying to me all the time; well, not lying, but he’s clearly telling it like he sees it,” Kiernan said.
Kiernan is less sure that “being popular on Reddit” will help Sanders attain the presidency because the candidate’s message already appeals to the demographic Reddit attracts.
“I think the Internet in general is extremely liberal. There’s a lot of social justice warriors,” Kiernan said, using a pejorative born on the Internet to describe people who frequently argue about social justice issues online — though it didn’t appear Kiernan was using it as a pejorative in his remark.
Still, Kiernan said he’s ready to take action IRL, and the Sanders camp is hoping he’s not alone.
