Lacking cash and staff, Bernie Sanders looks to volunteers

NEW YORK — Tens of thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters around the country gathered in local town halls and house parties Wednesday evening as the Sanders campaign ramped up its efforts to build a grassroots volunteer infrastructure. More than 100,000 people sent in RSVPs for 3,500 events, according to an early campaign estimate.

The candidate addressed all the events — held in studio apartments, private venues that could seat hundreds, and everything in between — via a live webcast. Attendees were asked to volunteer for the campaign, donate what they could and sign up to receive updates on the left-wing challenge to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“The only way I know we can do this is if we put together a strong grassroots movement of millions and millions of people,” Sanders said during his brief remarks over the webcast. “And that is what I mean by a political revolution.”

Without either a comparable war chest or a large campaign staff, Sanders is attempting to translate enthusiasm for his candidacy into a nationwide volunteer network. President Barack Obama relied on a similar grassroots organizing base for his successful 2008 presidential campaign. As in that instance, the Sanders campaign appears to be betting on its ability to mobilize large groups of young people who may never have been politically active before this election cycle.

So far, the campaign appears to have been successful in generating some enthusiasm among young political outsiders. Brooklyn-based actor and bartender Joe Beuerlein, 33, told Al Jazeera that his past campaign work had been limited to doing some volunteer phone banking on behalf of Obama’s presidential campaign. On Wednesday night he helped organize a gathering of supporters at a German-style beer hall in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope, for an event called “Brooklyn feels the Bern.” Beuerlein says he plans to stay involved in organizing efforts. “I will see this campaign through to its end,” he said.

The crowd of about 300 people, mostly young, watched Sanders speaking on the webcast on a projector set up at one end of the bar. Anwar Munroe, a 20-year-old Brooklyn native currently taking time off from studying at Carnegie Mellon University, said he has little experience in politics but became interested in the Sanders campaign after reading about the candidate on social media. “The impression I got from Bernie is of someone who’s really interested in helping the people,” Munroe said. “He doesn’t just go in there to be a career politician. And that was really attractive to me."

The Sanders campaign stumbled in its outreach to the African-American community two weeks ago, when protesters from the group Black Lives Matter confronted the candidate at a town hall in Phoenix. But Munroe, who is black, said he feels that Sanders is generally on the right side of things when it comes to racial inequality, in both wealth and access to education. “When I started hearing about Bernie’s platform, I could recognize and point out a lot of what he’s talking about,” Munroe said. "So that’s what really drew me to this event."

Sanders appears to have slightly adjusted his stump speech following some of the criticism he received over his handling of the Black Lives Matter protest.  During his Wednesday evening remarks he decried the death of Sandra Bland, a black woman from Illinois who died in police custody in Texas earlier this month after being detained over a minor traffic offense. Bland’s death has become yet another galvanizing moment for Black Lives Matter, which was formed after the shooting death in Florida of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, by a white man, George Zimmerman.

“Enough is enough,” Sanders said. “We have got to combat institutional racism in the United States."