This past Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought his campaign rolling through South Carolina at top-speed.
The senator from Vermont whipped up packed crowds at venues in Greenville, Columbia and Charleston in a powerful weekend tour. In his Columbia address, Sanders declared, “This is a campaign on the move!” He wasn’t lying, as the campaign reported crowds of over 2,000 in Greenville and Columbia on Friday, and another 3,000 in Charleston. Perhaps more important than the large numbers, these Sanders crowds were comprised of a variety of demographics.
The over-capacity crowd cheering for Sanders was not a group of simply politically active students (both college and high school students were in attendance). The audience in Columbia Friday evening featured a wide spectrum of potential Sanders supporters, and the candidate demonstrated an ability to get all of them to their feet.
It was impossible to tell from where I was standing if the man who screamed out “I love you, Bernie!” halfway through the speech was a young father, a middle-aged biker or manual laborer. And when Sanders replied, “I love you too!” in his hoarse, powerful, New Englander voice it was a diverse crowd of southerners that jumped to their feet.
If the 73-year old Sanders makes a serious upset run for the Democratic nomination, he will require this wide base of support. In the polls, Hillary Clinton still leads with an average support of 49 percent, but the summer of 2015 has shown a spike in support for Sanders. He's currently second with a 25 percent average. While there’s still a significant gap, it’s certainly an improvement from poll numbers in May that showed Clinton leading Sanders 60 to 7. For reference, Vice President Joe Biden is averaging 12 percent support as he currently considers a late presidential run.
There are a significant number of hurdles the Sanders campaign has in the road towards the Democratic nomination, and the candidate himself stresses that he cannot do it alone. But if Sanders can continue to appeal to a diverse field of voters, he’s got a fighting chance.
Friday night’s audience in Columbia certainly felt the candidate’s fighting spirit, and he showed all the makings of a true crowd-pleasing candidate.
Sanders' campaign staff would argue that right now, he is exactly where he wants to be: rising in the polls and showing stark contrasts to the politicians with super-PAC campaign funds and cookie-cutter speeches. Perhaps that is enough for now, if he keeps his well-oiled campaign rolling at a steady speed towards the Iowa caucus.
Political wizards will likely contest that Sanders’ calls for a “political revolution” are too harsh to be palatable to the average American voter. The Clinton campaign certainly hopes that the experts are correct. As of today, it's still likely that the experts are correct and Clinton will be able to ramp up her campaign as the primaries approach.
But this outcome somehow seems less certain than earlier this year, when Clinton was viewed as the only viable DNC presidential candidate. As of today, nothing is certain for the 2016 presidential candidates, so the fighting senator from Vermont will likely continue to whip up his political revolution until somebody makes him stop.
After I left the rally, I noticed the different cars in the parking lot: new and old, minivans and sports cars, Dodge trucks and BMW sedans. There was one common denominator — a lot of Sanders 2016 stickers.