In 2008, Grinnell College served as a microcosm for Hillary Clinton’s disappointing letdown in Iowa. Eight years later, it has become ground zero for the movement surrounding the insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

Clinton supporters didn’t even reach the 15% threshold needed in a Democratic caucus on the college campus eight years ago. Instead of supporting Clinton, her meager band of supporters there were forced to caucus for Joe Biden instead.

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Clinton’s poor performance didn’t come as a surprise. The elite liberal arts college in central Iowa has long been a bastion of progressive thought and for Democratic votes. With the exception of 2004 when students rallied around John Kerry, students have regularly supported liberal, insurgent, so-called “wine track” candidates ranging from Bruce Babbitt to Bill Bradley to Barack Obama in 2008. Even Martin O’Malley is currently doing well there. “He’s got a big following in Grinnell,” one student, Peter Hansen, told the Guardian. “A couple of my teammates on the cross country team are big organizers for him.”

But Sanders was still in first place on campus and students seemed ready to flock to the Vermont senator’s insurgent campaign. On a college campus of 1,600 students, 1,280 people flocked to a gleaming new gymnasium to hear Sanders speak on a snowy afternoon that marked the first day of classes after winter break.

The idealistic young students who flocked to him seemed unconcerned about his prospects in a general election. They were not concerned about the self-proclaimed socialist’s perceived unelectability. “If I have to vote for someone just because I think they are more electable that’s messed up,” said Thomas Grabinski, a recent college graduate.

Others were confident about Sanders’ prospects in a general election. “I think a lot of people in this country are liberal enough to vote that way,” said Charlotte Love, a student originally from near Asheville, North Carolina.

The Sanders campaign’s effort on campus is dominated by what one unaffiliated student described as “Bernie Bros”, the strident, earnest and ardently liberal men who view Clinton with a certain contempt. They protest against other candidates and try to plant questions about capitalism to throw rivals off guard. “I almost feel like they are not as respectful of other people’s opinions,” said John Lof, a high school student who volunteered for the campaign, guardedly. “I don’t thing that’s Bernie in general but more people who side with the further left liberal part of the spectrum,” he added. “It’s not every single Bernie supporter, but a fair amount.”

Despite the Bernie Bros, the Clinton campaign’s organizer in Grinnell, Jimmy Dahman, told the Guardian that he felt confident that the former secretary of state would be viable in Grinnell this year. He said “women’s issues were of big importance” on campus, and said students had been knocking on doors in college dormitoriesand working to register students on campus, although many had already previously been registered in the years before.

Student voting had been a hot point of contention eight years ago. Then, with the surge in support among young people for Obama, the Clinton campaign actively tried to discourage college students who came to Iowa from outside the state from participating in the caucuses.

Clinton denigrated student participation in the caucuses then by saying that it is “a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here”, something amplified when Bill Clinton came to Grinnell’s campus, a school where a vast majority of the students are from out of state, and said students not from Iowa should consider not caucusing there as “a matter of conscience”. This had particular resonance at Grinnell, where local Republicans have long sought to try to prevent college students from voting.

Dahman himself was unfamiliar with this history, and current students, who were in middle school eight years ago, did not remember it either. But the rapturous reception and repeated standing ovations that Sanders received here suggested history would repeat itself at Grinnell and Clinton would lose this liberal oasis yet again. The drama is only in whether she can stay competitive and keep Sanders from running up the score on caucus night.