[N]EW YORK — The closer you got to Greenwich Village on Wednesday afternoon, the more the city resembled a socialist metropolis.
Hours ahead of a massive Bernie Sanders rally in Washington Square Park, a crowd estimated at more than 27,000 lined the sidewalks and filled the streets to have some fun.
The supporters consisted mostly of young people, many of them students at neighboring New York University. They wore Bernie hats and held Bernie tote bags. They had homemade Bernie signs that showed artistic technique.
The sun was out all day, and the scent of marijuana mixed with the smell of budding spring plants. The New York police on hand didn’t seem to mind the smoking, and one officer even reassured a man in line that “I don’t enforce the smoking laws.”
In the early afternoon, a guitarist and saxophonist jammed on West Fourth Street in a Bernie Sanders ballad. Various radical newspapers were given out to eager attendees, including the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Petitions circulated calling on Sanders to run as an independent if his Democratic chances are dashed.
In the late afternoon, striking Verizon workers, dressed head-to-toe in red, marched around the park, greeted with cheers from Sanders fans in line.
“Workers up, bosses down, make New York a union town,” protesters chanted.
Two Donald Trump impersonators gallivanted about. “Birdie Sanders” was also spotted, standing on University Place.
The crowd’s size and energy created a good media moment for the Sanders campaign, which is desperately hoping for a New York upset over Hillary Clinton.
But recent polls suggest Sanders has a double-digit margin to make up before Tuesday’s primary.
Sanders is polling strongly upstate, and he drew thousands in a western tour of the Empire State earlier this week. But results suggest he remains unpopular in racially diverse regions of the state, where the bulk of the population resides. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Clinton is beating Sanders by a 65 percent to 28 percent margin among black voters.
Sanders is performing well among very liberal New Yorkers, and he crushes Clinton among young people, 55 percent to 36 percent.
But while young people could be a potent force in New York, they are a hard demographic to count on.
In a quick Wednesday survey of 100 young people waiting in line for the rally, 16 said they had missed the voter registration deadline. An additional dozen or so explained they were temporary residents of New York, often because they were attending school in the city, and that they were registered in other states.
The deadline to register for voting in the New York primary was March 25, but the last day for changing party affiliation passed in October. Only those registered as Democrats may vote in New York’s primary.
A number of people in line expressed annoyance that they could not vote for Sanders, blaming a lack of registration information or deadlines that passed before the Vermont senator’s campaign started heating up.
While the state’s system has been criticized, there was a March surge in voter applications that added 41,000 people to the rolls.
The Sanders campaign seems to sense that the technicalities of the registration process — plus the exclusion of independent voters on primary day — makes its fight even harder. Sanders acknowledged the drawbacks of a closed primary system for his candidacy, saying that “it’s going to be a tough primary for us.”
The priority now is to reach as many registered voters as possible and get them to the polls. The campaign has set a goal of calling 2 million New Yorkers over the weekend.
Staffers deployed hordes of volunteers at the Wednesday rally to walk around and recruit other volunteers, hoping to staff a big get-out-the-vote effort Tuesday.
“We will lose this election if we don’t get enough volunteers,” one staffer told volunteers in NYU’s Native Woodland Garden. “Really go for it!”
During the rally, actress Rosario Dawson, a Sanders supporter, also jolted the crowd by demanding political participation.
“Are we just gonna ‘boo’ about it? Are we just going to complain about it?” Dawson said. “Or are we going to march to the polls? Are we going to make it our business to have five people come with us?”
“Seriously,” she pleaded. “This is the easiest way to join the political revolution.”
Brooklyn native and acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee spoke after Dawson, introducing the main act with a mellifluous set of questions for the crowd.
“Are you tired of being led astray? Run amok?”
The crowd yelled “Yes!” so Lee continued.
“Hijinked? Monkeyshined? Shenaniganed?”
After the set of questions, Lee shifted to a statement.
“April 19, you’ve got to show up,” he said, and was done.
When Sanders took the stage, the crowd went its wildest.
People sparked up joints and snapped photos. Behind Sanders, in the VIP section, a number of hip New York city types looked on. They included actor Alex Karpovsky of the HBO show “Girls” and singer Ezra Koenig of the band Vampire Weekend.
Framing Sanders for his speech was Washington Square Park’s arch of white Tuckahoe marble, lit up against the dark. Above him, squirrels scurried around in ash and oak trees.
“When I look at an unbelievable crowd like this,” Sanders said, “I believe we are going to win here in New York next Tuesday.”
