Bernie Sanders has bragged about his ability to draw disillusioned people into the political process. One such person, a thirty-one year-old Louisiana rapper named Anthony LaVarry—who performs under the moniker I.S.A., which stands for "I'm Still Anthony" and "Infinity So Awesome"—has recently made an even more audacious claim: that he is responsible for Sanders's surge in the polls. "I started this BERNIE CRAZE," his Twitter biography announces, under an illustration of Sanders looking more disheveled and more cheerful than usual. For LaVarry, however, “Bernie craze” means a slightly different thing.

I.S.A. is best known for the song "Moving Like Bernie," which was released by the Shreveport-based Platnium Records in 2010. It includes the lyrics: “Well it's the weekend, we movin' like Bernie / Hey! Yeah, so awesome, got a dance, too / You gonna start moving even if you ain't plan to.” This was LaVarry's breakout song—mostly because it was paired with a catchy dance, he told me. "It was a movement," he said, "not just a statement. I wanted to show people: no matter what, you can keep moving. My little brother came up with the moves."

The "Bernie Dance" is performed by imitating the post-mortem movements of the character Bernie Lomax from the 1989 black comedy Weekend at Bernie's: leaning one’s head as far back as possible ("like a nose bleed coming through," I.S.A. instructs) and wobbling around barely upright with limp, outstretched arms. "Like you're coming back from the dead," LaVarry explained to me. The music video went viral and has now been viewed more than twelve millions times on YouTube—just a few million shy of "Harlem Shake," the breakout song and dance from 2013. (It was also adopted, somewhat oddly, as the Oakland A's ballpark theme song in 2012.)

LaVarry grew up singing "not very well" in his Shreveport church choir. His taste turned to rap—"Mystikal was my favorite," he says—as a teenager. He began writing and recording as I.S.A. in 2009, usually after finishing his shift in the "sandwich department" at a Shreveport chain restaurant called Newk's. "My little six-year-old girl came in the break room one day and asked me what I was doing," he said. "I told her I was aboutto watch a movie. She said, You need to go back in the studio. I said, I'm the parent,” LaVarry told me. “She wouldn't leave it alone, though, so I got my Coke and my bag of chips and I went back in and started free-styling about the movie I was watching: Weekend At Bernie's." Inspiration struck: "I came up with the concept: No matter what you're going through, you've gotta hold your head up and keep moving. Like Bernie!"

Over the years, there have been more than a few odd pairings of presidential candidates and popular songs—from Mitt Romney's choice of "Born Free" by Kid Rock (“You can knock me down and watch me bleed / But you can't keep no chains on me”) to Ross Perot's sampling of "Crazy" by Patsy Cline (“I knew you'd love me as long as you wanted / And then someday you'd leave me for somebody new”). But could a Democratic socialist from Vermont join forces with a dirty south rapper? "Why not?" said LaVarry's manager, Wade Lovelace, who goes by the name Moneybag Martucci. He got LaVarry on Twitter recently, "at long last."