Blowout campaign rallies with steadily growing crowds helped transform Bernie Sanders from an afterthought to a liberal idol during his 2016 bid for the presidency.
This weekend, as one of the frontrunners in the 2020 race, the Vermont senator is hoping to recreate the magic with a swing through California, holding a trio of outdoor rallies in the state’s three biggest regions and culminating in the Bay Area.
In his first Golden State events since declaring his presidential campaign, Sanders will meet fans at Waterfront Park in San Diego on Friday evening, Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday afternoon and Great Meadow Park at Fort Mason in San Francisco on Sunday, starting at 12:30 p.m.
“You’re gonna see the enthusiasm that’s there for Bernie in the Bay Area,” predicted Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, who is Sanders’ national campaign co-chair and will be among the speakers at his San Francisco rally. “And I think you’ll see him share more of his personal story in a way that he hasn’t in the past.”
That’s been a focus of Bernie 2.0 so far — more emphasis on his biography as the son of a Jewish immigrant and a young civil rights activist, instead of solely a barrage of rhetoric and policy proposals.
“He’s got a much better campaign this time,” said Khanna, who also supported Sanders during the 2016 race, when the senator had a smaller team and a more improvisational approach. “There’s a far greater diversity. It’s being run like a professional corporation… he’s got an extraordinarily well-oiled machine.”
Sunday’s event — with a backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge — is also likely to feature a more upbeat atmosphere than his last big campaign appearance in the City by the Bay in June 2016, when he held a rally at Crissy Field hours after the Associated Press declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee. He ultimately lost California to Clinton by about 7 percentage points, and came up short in all of the Bay Area’s counties except Sonoma.
One big challenge for Sanders this year is that unlike in 2016, he no longer can unequivocally claim the mantle of the progressive left. Many of the other candidates in the 2020 race share his stances on issues from Medicare for All to free college.
The National Parks Service, which operates Fort Mason, did not respond to a request for comment about preparations or crowd estimates for Sunday’s rally, and Sanders’ campaign said they did not have a crowd size prediction.
Sanders’ visit is a play for the home turf of his presidential rival Sen. Kamala Harris. But he’s hardly the only hopeful headed to the Golden State — a half-dozen other contenders have visited or will be here in the coming weeks for public events, in addition to the typical closed-door fundraisers in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. That’s in part because of California’s relatively early place on the primary calendar, just after the traditional early states on the “Super Tuesday” of March 3, as well as its massive trove of delegates.
During the 2016 presidential race, Sanders held 40 campaign events across California in the month leading up to the June 7 primary, according to the Washington Post, including five rallies that drew more than 10,000 people. But this year’s effort represents a much earlier investment of time in the California, with almost a year to go until the primary.
Harris, meanwhile, is on the road this weekend in two other likely Super Tuesday states: Texas and Georgia. She’s speaking at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s former church in Atlanta, meeting with local Democratic leaders near Dallas, and headlining rallies at two historically black schools, Texas Southern University in Houston and Morehouse College in Atlanta.
The schedule marks the latest example of Harris’ strategy to reach out to nonwhite voters and build up support in big Super Tuesday states — including, of course, California.