It’s not yet the last stand for Bernie Sanders, but the rallies he is holding across Michigan right now have a growing whiff of desperation about them.
In 2016 Michigan was the state that resurrected Sanders’ campaign with an upset win over frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
This time, the same Midwest state threatens to up-end his hopes of a comeback in the race for the Democrat presidential nomination, with Joe Biden leading the polls ahead of the crucial primary on Wednesday (AEDT).
“This is our moment, the time is now,” congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez screamed to a roaring crowd of more than 5000 young supporters at a Sanders rally at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Make your list of the five people you are going to bring to the polls on Tuesday (US time).”
Soon enough she was joined on stage by Sanders, who pointed his finger at them and said: “We need you to come out and vote, we need you to bring out your friends and families and co-workers.’’
At every Sanders rally now this same catchcry is heard over and over: vote, vote, vote. The hard truth for the Sanders campaign is that the vast majority of those thousands of cheering crowds of mostly millennials at his rallies are not actually going to vote for him.
Sanders had repeatedly predicted his grassroots movement, focused heavily on millennials, would generate the largest turnout in American voter history. Instead, in the early primary contests, while almost half of all voters under 30 voted for Sanders, their turnout was a paltry 13 per cent.
“Have we been as successful as I would hope in bringing young people in?” Sanders said last week. “The answer is no.”
Sanders needs to make lots of progress on this front, and quickly, to strike a blow at Biden in Michigan. He needs more people like Alyssa Thomas, a 19-year-old student at the University of Michigan, who was at the rally and said she was “absolutely telling all my friends to go out and vote”.
“If we can motivate young people like this to get to the polls I think he has a chance,’ she tells The Australian. “Part of the reason I want Bernie for president is I am a college student struggling with student debt on top of the fact that my mother is struggling with stage-four breast cancer and is struggling with medical bills. So if we got Medicare for All and student loan debt it would revolutionise my life.”
Thomas says she initially supported another liberal in Elizabeth Warren but when Warren dropped out last week she realised Sanders had policies that were more important to her.
“For example, Biden’s policies about the Green New Deal and tackling climate change aren’t as strong as they need to be for such a huge issue,” she says.
Ever since Sanders lost his frontrunner status to Biden on Super Tuesday last week, he has sharpened his attacks on the former vice-president.
“Here we are a few days before a major primary in Michigan and we are taking on not just Joe Biden (crowd boos), we are taking on the 60 billionaires who are funding his campaign … but we are going to win this election,” he says as the crowd chants “Bernie, Bernie’’.
“I understand Joe Biden has the support of the entire political establishment, I got that … but we have grassroots support.”
At events across the state, Sanders has attacked Biden on everything from his support for the invasion of Iraq and the NAFTA free-trade pact to his record on social security and abortion.
Teacher Joseph Kinitzer attended the rally with his wife Tania and children Inara, 4, and Aida, 1, because he wanted to see Sanders speak for the first time. “I think Bernie has a much better character than Biden,” he says. “He is honest, the Green New Deal is one of the most important policies of our day, we need a future that is sustainable and that is going to last for my kids and my grandkids.
“I have read Bernie’s policies and I like his foreign policy, the way he treats the US relationship to the rest of the world, particularly with Israel, Palestine and Latin America.”
Farmer and Vietnam veteran John Benbzick says he has come along to hear Sanders speak. He says he hasn’t made up his mind who to vote for but he finds it hard to forgive Biden for his support of free-trade pacts that Benbzick says helped destroy manufacturing in Michigan.
“I don’t know if Biden is really up to it,” he says. “We were a leading manufacturer in pharmaceuticals, furniture, but they’ve all gone overseas to Mexico or China and I don’t know if Biden understands this. I think my fellow Vietnam vets would be sitting in disgust and shame at the situation in this country right now.”
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