In an effort to counter Hillary Clinton’s lead in New York, Bernie Sanders has scheduled a number of campaign events in the state, including a rally outside his childhood home in Brooklyn. Photograph by Eric Thayer / Getty Images

On the face of it, Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have much trouble winning the New York Democratic primary on April 19th. In the 2008 version of this contest, when she was running as a two-term, home-state U.S. senator, she got more than fifty-seven per cent of the vote and defeated Barack Obama by about seventeen percentage points. This time around, Clinton again has a big lead in the polls. A Fox News survey that was released on Sunday showed her getting fifty-three per cent of the vote, and Sanders getting just thirty-seven per cent.

Clinton has Governor Andrew Cuomo campaigning for her, as well as Mayor Bill de Blasio and virtually ever other Democratic leader in New York. She also has the backing of some of the biggest labor unions in the state, including the service-workers’ union and the teachers’ unions. And it will be a surprise if any of New York’s major newspapers don’t endorse her.

Sanders, despite hailing from Brooklyn, is effectively a newcomer to Empire State politics. He only opened his first campaign office here a few weeks ago, and he has been away from New York City for so long that he thought you could still use tokens in the subway. But, despite all of the disadvantages Sanders faces, his supporters and allies are still hopeful that he can defy the polls and score an upset, as he did in Michigan.

Ten days ago, Sanders held an outdoor rally at a park in the hardscrabble Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. About eighteen thousand people showed up. The crowd was so large that it couldn’t entirely fit into the allotted space. Now Sanders is campaigning full-time in New York, seeking to eat into Clinton’s lead, and drawing on a small army of volunteers.

“Normally when you run a campaign, you have a lot of people working for you—you have to drag them places, and you have to pay people to do things,” Bill Lipton, the New York director of the progressive Working Families Party, which is supporting Sanders, told me. “This is a different type of campaign. There is a movement out there for Bernie Sanders. He has the type of energy we’ve rarely seen in New York politics, where thousands of people come out for a rally in response to an e-mail. Many of them leave with sheets of paper telling them how to get involved, and the next day they are knocking on doors.”

The mobilization isn’t restricted to New York City, Lipton said. He cited support for Sanders among environmental activists in the Hudson Valley, and said that an organizational meeting in Buffalo—where Sanders is scheduled to speak on Monday—that was called at short notice still attracted hundreds of volunteers. State officials have reported an unprecedented surge in last-minute registrations by new voters, which may also owe to the Sanders effect. “I think turnout will be high,” Kenneth Sherrill, an emeritus professor of political science at Hunter College, whose memories of state politics go back to the nineteen-sixties, told me. “A lot of people who haven’t voted in primaries before are going to be voting, and that introduces a random factor.”

The Sanders campaign is also hoping to build on some recent precedents that are encouraging for insurgent candidates. In the September, 2013, Democratic mayoral primary, de Blasio, who started his campaign as a rank outsider, defeated Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker, who was heavily favored. A year later, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor, who was virtually unknown to the general public prior to her campaign, bloodied Governor Cuomo’s nose, getting more than a third of the vote. In some counties upstate, Teachout, who had only a minimal campaign operation, beat the Governor.

Given this history, and Sanders’s success in other states, some experienced observers of New York politics are reluctant to write him off. “Could anything happen in New York? The answer is yes,” Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant who has worked for numerous Democrats over the years, including Bill Clinton, told me. “If the left turns out, Bernie Sanders can do better than expected.” Sherrill, for his part, said, “I think any outcome is plausible.”

The response from people close to the Clinton campaign is that numbers are numbers. In the 2008 New York primary, about fifty-five per cent of the people who voted were women, and almost two-thirds of them voted for Clinton. About three in ten of the 2008 voters weren’t white. Despite the presence of Obama in the race, Clinton received more than a third of the black vote and almost three-quarters of the Hispanic vote. (She also performed very well upstate, getting about two-thirds of the vote there.) The breakdown of the new Fox News poll suggests that Clinton’s core support remains intact. Among women, the polls showed her leading by sixty-one per cent to thirty per cent; among black voters, she was ahead by sixty-one per cent to twenty-nine per cent.

Clinton cut short her campaign in Wisconsin to concentrate on shoring up her home base. She kicked off her New York campaign with a rally at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She stumped at black churches in Brooklyn, where she talked about gun violence and accused Sanders of voting with the National Rifle Association. On Saturday, she attended an organizing event in Sunset Park, a heavily Hispanic part of Brooklyn, with Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez and the singer Toby Love, who is of Puerto Rican descent. If Clinton can get large numbers of Latino and African-American voters, as well as women over forty, to turn out, Sheinkopf told me, “she should swamp Bernie Sanders in New York City.”

Another factor playing into Clinton’s hands is that the primary is a closed one. In Wisconsin and other states with open primaries, Sanders drew in a lot of independent voters. But voting in New York will be restricted to registered Democrats, and the deadline for switching from independent to Democrat was last October, which means that some of Sanders’s supporters may not be able to vote.

Despite this, the Sanders campaign is confident that it can generate substantial turnout among young voters and progressives. In the Fox poll, the Vermont senator was leading Clinton by eleven points among people under the age of forty-five. But Sanders knows that he needs to narrow Clinton’s lead among minority voters, and that is where he is concentrating a lot of his efforts. On Saturday evening, he, too, appeared at the Apollo, for a panel discussion that also featured Spike Lee, Harry Belafonte, and Erica Garner, whose father Eric died, in 2014, after being placed in a choke hold by an officer from the New York City Police Department. Lee has also produced a new television ad for Sanders, which features testimonials from Belafonte, Garner, and Shaun King, the writer and activist.

Some Sanders supporters believe that he can win the election if he gets between thirty-five and forty per cent of the black vote. But that calculation also depends on him doing well outside of New York City. (In 2008, the Democratic electorate was split about half and half between the city and the rest of the state.) Clinton is expected to get a lot of votes in Westchester, where she has a home, and on Long Island. The Sanders campaign is hoping to do well in the Hudson Valley, where there is a large environmental movement, and where fracking, which Sanders wants to ban, is a potent issue. (In 2014, Teachout, who was vehemently opposed to fracking, won a number of counties in this area.)