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Kori Feener
The crowd waits for Bernie Sanders to take the stage.
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UW-Madison student Jorge Perez attends the rally with his husky puppy “Nova.”
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Cheering crowd at the Bernie Sanders rally in Madison.
Cheering crowd at the Bernie Sanders rally in Madison.
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Bernie Sanders greets the crowd on his way to the podium at James Madison Park.
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Bernie Sanders takes a pause in front of supporters in Madison, WI.
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A supporter watches Bernie as he delivers his speech.
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Bernie Sanders speaking at James Madison Park.
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Bernie Sanders amidst a large crowd in James Madison Park.
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Bernie Sanders thanks members of the crowd after his speech at James Madison Park.
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After his speech, Bernie shakes hands with the crowd.
Tammy Wood and her two daughters drove from Sauk County to attend Bernie Sanders’ April 12 rally for one simple reason: “We accepted the invitation to the political revolution.”
Wood and her daughters — including one who will vote for the first time next year — joined about 2,500 other people who braved temperatures in the high 30s and a biting wind off of Lake Mendota to hear Sanders speak.
“I want my daughters to have a better life than I had,” said Wood, explaining why she had come. “I want them to have clean water, clean air, good jobs, healthcare, education, a happy life. That American dream that we were promised, you know, is constantly being ripped from us.”
Sanders is trying to complete the “revolution” he started in the 2016 election. He was in friendly territory. He won Wisconsin’s 2016 April primary by 136,000 votes over eventual nominee Hillary Clinton, carrying 71 out of the state’s 72 counties. Seven months later, Donald Trump would narrowly win the state with 47 percent of the vote.
As Sanders pointed out during the rally, the themes he ran on in 2016 are now part of the political conversation.
“All of you will recall that wherever we went around the country, the ideas we brought forth four years ago were considered by the political establishment, by the media establishment, as ideas that were radical, that were extreme — ideas that nobody in America supported,” Sanders said. “Well, I think it’s fair to say that things have changed over the last four years.”
Although Sanders’ message may be mainstream now, Howard Schweber, a UW-Madison political science professor, says that doesn’t assure the Vermont senator the Democratic nomination. In the last election, many younger and more progressive voters were “uninspired” by Hillary Clinton, he says.
“That is not likely to occur if Bernie is pitted against someone like Kamala Harris, for example,” Schweber says.
Barry Burden, another UW-Madison political science professor, agrees that the competition will make it harder for Sanders to stand out this time around. “He is just one among almost 20 Democratic candidates rather than being seen as the main alternative to the establishment frontrunner,” Burden says. “Many of his fellow candidates have positions that mimic his agenda, so it will be harder for Sanders to differentiate himself in such a field.”
But Burden adds that Sanders is wise to give Wisconsin attention.
“There is no doubt that Wisconsin will be a central battleground state in 2020,” he says. “Both parties are already planning to target the state. The campaign for Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes will be intense.”
At the April 12 rally, Sanders delivered what worked well for him here during the 2016 campaign. He called health care a human right and pledged to expand the federal Medicare program to cover everyone. He wants to make all public universities tuition-free and to help graduates shackled with student debt. He vowed to spend a trillion dollars on roads, bridges and other public infrastructure and to get the energy sector off of fossil fuels in order to combat climate change. He promised a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
And Sanders returned, again and again throughout his speech, to his signature promise to “end the corrupt political system that allows the rich to get richer at the expense of everyone else.”
The promises were identical to those he made on July 1, 2015 when he spoke to 10,000 supporters at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Madison. “We believe that the time has come when people in Wisconsin, Vermont and all over the country, create a political movement which says to the billionaire class you can’t have it all,” Sanders told the massive crowd.
At the time, it was the largest political rally of any candidate running in the 2016 presidential race.
On April 12, Sanders said his agenda can help Democrats avoid repeating the 2016 loss. Clinton may have won the popular vote by almost 2.9 million nationwide, but she lost every state in the Midwest, except for Illinois and Minnesota, delivering Trump an electoral college victory.
“Together we are going to make sure that does not happen again. We are going to win here in Wisconsin,” Sanders said. “We are going to win in Indiana. We are going to win in Ohio. We are going to win in Michigan. We are going to win in Pennsylvania. And together we are going to win this election.”
Although the crowd was clearly pro-Bernie, not everyone had made up their minds who to support.
Jorge Perez, a UW-Madison student, will be able to vote for president for the first time in 2020. Although he rooted for Sanders in 2016, he’s keeping his options open for now. Immigration reform is the most important issue to him.
“In the Obama era we made a strong imprint in going forward with kind of a more humanitarian or altruistic approach to [immigration reform]; with the Trump era, we took a few steps back,” he said. “You take a step back sometimes to move a couple forward.”
Some in the crowd weren’t on the Bernie train last election. Debbie from Monroe, who declined to give her last name, hasn’t yet picked a candidate to back. “I wanted to hear what [Sanders] had to say,” said Debbie. “Maybe I should have voted for him in 2016. I voted for Hillary Clinton.”
State Rep. David Bowen (D-Milwaukee), who endorsed Sanders in the 2016 election, believes the senator can make in-roads with some supporters of Trump. The president, he says, hasn’t lived up to his promises to revive manufacturing jobs. He says people are starting to doubt whether the Foxconn deal, which Trump supported, will materialize.
“It is a facade,” said Bowen, who attended the Sanders rally. “We are depriving communities of resources that could go on to other committed folks that could invest into the state, invest into the lives and the people in the state of Wisconsin.”
Sanders argued he can reach both his leftist base and Trump’s supporters.
“Donald Trump wants to divide our country up based on the color of skin, based on our gender, based on where we were born, based on our sexual orientation,” he said. “What we are going to do — and what the American people want — is exactly the opposite. We are going to bring our people together.”
