HENDERSON, Nev. — After spending much of the final day before the Nevada Democratic caucuses prospecting for votes in the northern part of the state, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders returned to the population-rich Las Vegas area Friday night to reconnect with some of his core supporters: people who like to attend indie-rock concerts.
I’m only half kidding.
Sanders did address the crowd at the very end of his three-hour “A Future to Believe In” rally here, delivering his signature spiel about the need for “a political revolution” and urging Nevadans to caucus for him on Saturday.
“Tomorrow morning all of you have the opportunity to make American history,” Sanders said after walking on stage to the sound of Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own” (the same song, intentionally or not, that President Barack Obama played at his reelection rallies in 2012). “That’s not just phraseology. That’s reality. It could well be that 10, 20, 30 years from now, people will look back on what happens in Nevada and say this was the beginning of the political revolution.”
But while Sanders was the headliner Friday night, the vast majority of the program — which featured a culturally and racially diverse roster of California-based bands —was more musical than political.
This isn’t a new strategy for Sanders. On the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders teamed up with Killer Make and Vampire Weekend for a similar concert, even joining the latter on stage to croon “This Land is Your Land,” an old Sanders favorite.
The question is why Sanders keeps rocking out — and whether it will make any difference in Saturday’s caucuses.
“These concert rallies speak to the diversity of the political revolution,” Sanders press secretary Symone Sanders told Yahoo News. “People young and old coming together for the enjoyment of music, but also because they are moved by the message of Bernie Sanders.”
The bands themselves were certainly on message. Chicano Batman, a besuited psychedelic-soul four-piece from Los Angeles, played a song called that included the lyric “freedom isn’t to be bought and sold.” Fantastic Negrito, a multiracial black-roots quintet from Oakland, kicked off their set with “Nobody Makes Money” — a track that frontman Xavier Dphrepaulezz wrote, he said, when he was “playing on the streets.”
“The food and gas prices are really starting to soar,” Dphrepaulezz sang.
And shortly before the show Cold War Kids singer Nathan Willett took to Twitter to champion his favorite Sanders policy proposals. “In my former life, as a high school teacher in LA, I was so discouraged by the education system that I had to get out,” Willett tweeted. “@SenSanders ideas for education alone make me genuinely hopeful. In the future we don’t want to lose all the best teachers to rocknroll.”
But the real reason Sanders invited Cold War Kids & Co. to Henderson doesn’t have anything to do with messaging. It has to do with turnout.
Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama by six percentage points in the 2008 Nevada caucuses, running up huge margins among union workers, Latinos, and suburban women, especially in Clark County, home of Las Vegas. If Sanders is going to upset Hillary Clinton in Nevada, he needs to convince thousands of new voters to spend several hours locked in a caucus room debating politics with their neighbors on a Saturday afternoon — not the easiest sell in a state that only started caucusing in 2008.
“If it’s a sky-high turnout, that’s good for Sanders,” David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, told Yahoo News earlier this week. “Most of the new entrants… some of them will go to Hillary, but he’ll probably win more of them.”
The campaign’s thinking seems to thing the best way to get new voters in the door on a Friday night — or a Saturday night, in the case of Iowa — is by staging events that don’t feel like politics as usual. The audience doesn’t even have to care about the bands. Only one guy at the Henderson rally was dancing during Cold War Kids’ set; an older couple, seemingly perturbed by the volume, left long before Sanders even spoke.
Andrew Romano.
Culled from Yahoo News.
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