Win or Lose, Will the Sanders Movement Last Beyond Election Day?

  People cheer during a campaign rally for Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders at The Family Arena on March 14, 2016, in St. Charles, Mo. (Jeff Roberson / AP)

How do the millions of young people supporting Bernie Sanders for president see the future of their movement? Do they think it will make a lasting difference in American politics beyond Election Day? Will it change their lives?

In my career, I have reported on such movements many times before—most recently with Occupy Wall Street—and lately I have been wondering whether the enthusiasm of the current generation will last beyond Election Day.

It has happened before: for example, when Occupy veterans moved into the Sanders campaign, and when DeRay Mckesson, a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, jumped into the race to become mayor of Baltimore.

In Michigan’s primary last week, Sanders won the 18-to-29-year-old vote by a big majority—81 percent, according to one postelection poll. For many in that age range, the Sanders campaign is their first dip into politics, just as the anti-war movement was for an earlier generation coming of age during the Vietnam War.

“I do think that you’ll see people running for office, to be on school boards, be on commissions, and working to change the system from within,” Mckesson told Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times.

In addition, Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote recently, “With Sanders winning young voters overwhelmingly, his campaign may eventually be seen as an incubator for the [Democratic] Party’s future politicians.”

To learn more, I pulled up a list of organizers in College Students for Bernie.

I emailed Brendan Eprile at Oberlin College—a politically active campus that is actually both a liberal arts college and a conservatory of music, about 35 miles from Cleveland. (Interestingly enough, Oberlin is the alma mater of Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, D.C., from 2007 to 2011, as well as Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the current mayor of Baltimore.)

The Ohio primary was days away at the time, and Oberlin’s Sanders supporters there were busy.

Here’s what Eprile told me in an email:

At Oberlin, we have started a college chapter called Oberlin Students for Bernie Sanders. In that chapter we host weekly meetings. We’ve raised awareness by planning events and putting up flyers, and we have participated in extensive phone banking. …

Overall at my school I would say there is overwhelming support for Bernie Sanders. When I started the chapter in the fall I was not expecting the level of support we have received. I’d say as Bernie’s campaign has continued to grow nationally, it has grown at my school as well. We use multiple mediums to communicate with each other such as Facebook and Slack and we have had many students stepping up and taking a leadership role in the movement.

I think there is something special about the Bernie campaign in terms of how young people have gotten involved. I have never heard of a presidential candidate that has inspired so many young people to actively participate in a political campaign. I have friends who spend hours of their free time phone banking for Bernie’s campaign.

I truly believe that even if Bernie Sanders does not win the nomination, he has still changed the way the country views politics, especially the youth. I think Bernie’s grassroots approach has really struck a chord with the American people. Bernie Sanders has made it this far not because he has the support of the establishment or Super PACs but he has the support of the American people. It has been inspiring to help out in a campaign where we can see that we are actively making a difference.

I also talked to students at Occidental College in the middle-class Eagle Rock neighborhood in the heart of urban Los Angeles. Occidental is another campus that is famous for political activism, producing leaders as diverse as Barack Obama and Jack Kemp, the professional football quarterback who became a congressman and conservative idol.

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