Bernie’s Young California Fans Spent Tuesday Celebrating—by Organizing

Fernanda Echavarri / Mother Jones

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

While Bernie Sanders locked down a primary win in frigid New Hampshire, a group of student Berners in the exact opposite corner of the country spent their evening celebrating and recruiting others to join their outreach efforts ahead of the big prize: Super Tuesday.

“What do we want? Bernie! When do we want him? Now!” chanted a group of roughly 80 to 100 students at the University of California–Los Angeles, holding up Bernie 2020 signs in both English and Spanish. The campaign event—one of several planned this week in Southern California—was smaller than I’d expected, perhaps due to midterms or what some students called “freezing” weather. (It was in the mid-50s.) But the folks I talked to were all-in, listing similar reasons for supporting Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination: climate change, student debt, free college tuition, universal health care, and immigration reform.

Not surprisingly, the main theme of the campus event was the role of young people will play—on Super Tuesday, and beyond. FiveThirtyEight has predicted that Sanders could clean up in California; as Nate Silver pointed out on Twitter, that prediction is “a fairly big reason” why his organization’s model currently has Sanders as the frontrunner. The speakers encouraged the crowd to mobilize for the next three weeks to win Sanders the nomination, and then to stick with it throughout what promises to be a long campaign to defeat Donald Trump. 

“Political is personal,” emphasized Joseline Garcia, the student organizer manager for the Sanders campaign in California. Throughout the event, the 25-year-old daughter of Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants hyped up the crowd in her Bernie shirt, cowboy boots, and black cowboy hat, leading chants and imploring students to hold their lit-up cellphones to the sky. When I pulled her away for a moment after the event, Garcia was quick to talk up Sanders’ popularity with Latinx students and noted that this younger cohort of Latinx voters would be vital in mobilizing older generations.

Take Garcia’s family, for example. “My mother is going to be voting for the first time,” she told me. “For Bernie.” 

Listen to Tim Murphy describe Bernie Sanders’ journey to frontrunner status, from inside the roaring Sanders celebration party, on this special New Hampshire primary edition of the Mother Jones Podcast:

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate