On Tuesday, at the Bernie Sanders primary-night rally at the Southern New Hampshire University Field House, in Manchester, the mood was jubilant from the beginning. The day before, volunteers had knocked on some two hundred and fifty thousand doors, the Sanders campaign reported; Monday night, in Durham, a rally of more than seventy-five hundred people, at U.N.H., gave Bernie’s ever-fomenting revolution the feel, and sound, of a rock concert. It had featured, among others, Sunflower Bean, Cornel West, Cynthia Nixon (“We need a hero and that is Bernie Sanders!”), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“FORward! FORward! FORward!), Sanders (“The entire world is looking at New Hampshire”), and the Strokes (“Greetings, people of the great Northeast . . . of these beautiful, stolen American lands”). The Strokes covered “Burning Down the House” and wore fanciful suits—a pink one, a red one, a cartoon-print one, and so on—looking like a bunch of foppish, aging Chalamets. The audience cheered like mad for everyone, waving things, crowd-surfing, messing with cops, moshing under swirling colored lights. Afterward, hundreds of college kids ran outside and burst onto an icy field, whooping, laughing, making out with one another. Meanwhile, Joe Biden was campaigning at a sports bar.

Sanders’s Monday-night rally, thick with impassioned speeches and near-militaristic intensity, had felt like a megachurch making a joyful noise; the senator’s primary party, in contrast, was a buzzy auditorium of people waiting to confirm what was suspected. The party was short on talk: no announcements, no preliminary speakers, no audio on the screen showing CNN. For three and a half hours, the only words we could hear were lyrics from the looping Sanders playlist—“Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World,” “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution,” “On the Road Again,” and so on—and from the people, in cheers and chants. “Bernie beats Trump!” “Green New Deal!” “Wall Street Pete!”

Sanders was in the lead all night. When the TV went on, at 7:44, a roar went up: Sanders had twenty-eight per cent to Pete Buttigieg’s twenty-two per cent, with Amy Klobuchar not far behind, and the other candidates looking anemic. Just before 8 p.m., when the polls closed, a countdown arose, like on New Year’s Eve—and another roar, because now Sanders was at thirty-eight per cent. Soon, Andrew Yang dropped out; then Michael Bennet did, too.

In the thick of the crowd, a man near me said, to his friend, “This is what democracy looks like.” A young woman in a cute vintage coat with buttons bearing messages like “FEMINISTS FOR BERNIE” told me that she was first drawn to Sanders because of “how seriously he took the student-loan crisis—especially in New Hampshire.” She said that young people were leaving the state because of low wages, high cost of living, and other economic factors; she works in data entry and volunteers for the campaign. Next to me, three festively dressed twentysomethings started jumping up and down, shout-chanting, “We—are—unstoppable! Another—world—is possible!” Others joined in, also jumping and yelling, and the cheer spread to the whole room. After it died down, with everyone beaming, I smiled and asked if they’d like to chat. “No thanks!” one said, curt. Why? “I don’t like the press.” One campaign worker was willing to talk about her face paint, of a red handprint around her mouth and jaw. Her mother’s tribe, she said, was the Fort Peck Oglala Lakota, and the handprint is a native symbol of empowerment, worn lately to raise awareness about missing and murdered native women.

Jill Herbers, a writer who lives in New Hampshire, has been canvassing for Bernie in recent weeks. “It’s a deeply human experience,” she said. “The teacher’s speaking, and so is the nurse—and so is the person in the five-million-dollar lake house, because they don’t want to see the loons damaged. People love Sanders and love what he’s for. Everyone has been brought up in this system that isn’t working anymore.” Being progressive, to her, “is just human. What’s radical is five hundred thousand people sleeping on the streets. Amazon not paying any taxes.” Sanders’s campaign was a serious one, she said, but also fun, and about love. “Cornel West says, ‘Justice is what love looks like in public.’ ” She smiled.

A minute later, Cornel West jogged in, slapping people’s hands, to cheering. The campaign co-chair Nina Turner’s entrance got cheers, too. “Green New Deal!” people chanted. “No more war!” When I returned to my seat in the press bleachers, three startlingly preppy white guys in the next section took a selfie with the Bernie scene as a backdrop, then left. What was that about? I wondered aloud. “Trump supporters,” a neighbor said, looking playful, or grim. By then, more than half the districts had reported, and the CNN chyron said “RACE TIGHTENS.” Now Bernie was leading Pete by only two or three points. The room got quieter. When Buttigieg appeared on TV, ready to speak, he was booed like a silent-movie villain. “Bernie Beats Trump!” the crowd chanted. “People power!”

At 11:05, Bernie took the stage, with his wife, children, and grandchildren. Ear-splitting screams filled the room for three minutes, at which point Sanders flapped his hands, like, All right, all right. “Let me take this opportunity to thank the people of New Hampshire for a great victory tonight!” he said. His message was brief and grateful: to his volunteers, to his fellow-candidates. “This victory here is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump!” he yelled. He also—as Cynthia Nixon had Monday night, when she stopped some anti-Clinton booing—discouraged intra-left divisiveness. “What I can tell you with absolute certainty, and I know I speak for every one of the Democratic candidates, is that no matter who wins, and we certainly hope it’s going to be us, we’re going to unite together and defeat the most dangerous President in the modern history of this country,” he said. Behind him, in the middle of the rows of rafters, a young man in a red shirt waved a small American flag. On to Nevada and South Carolina.

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