On an icy Friday morning in New Hampshire, hundreds of cars—including a Mini Cooper entirely covered in pro-Bernie vinyl décor—filled parking lots and neighborhoods surrounding the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College, in Goffstown, for a Bernie Sanders edition of its venerable breakfast series, Politics & Eggs. Outside, a few gray-haired hopefuls, turned away at the door, asked to wait for “just a handshake with the senator.” “Please leave the premises!” an event worker yelled. Inside, past a lobby full of breakfast offerings, in a small auditorium filled with local businesspeople, students, citizen Bernie devotees, and priests, Sanders hunched over a table, Sharpie in hand, furiously signing commemorative wooden eggs. (A vitrine of notable signed wooden eggs is on display in the lobby.) One introductory speaker thanked the sponsoring attendees “for being such a great corporate citizen”; another thanked the journalists present. “It’s a profession that does not get its due,” he said. Sanders, who often uses “corporate” as shorthand for “up to no good”—as in the term “corporate media”—took the stage, in a tidy suit and tie, hair combed, like Bart Simpson at church. He, too, addressed the journalists. “Isn’t it nice to go to an event where you’re not considered to be an enemy of the people?” he said. “It’s nice to see the respect. But I don’t want to overdo it!” His tone ratcheted between praise and something like disgust.

The night before, the slow dribble of results from the Iowa caucuses seemed to have concluded; Pete Buttigieg had beaten Sanders by one-tenth of a percentage point. (Buttigieg, either sensing triumph or choosing to will it into being, had given an exultant speech before the results had been totalled.) For Sanders, New Hampshire is a chance to claim a more secure victory, one unimpeded by malfunctioning apps, in a place not so far from his home in Vermont. In 2016, he won around sixty per cent of New Hampshire’s primary vote, and recent polls had him as a slight favorite over Buttigieg. Onstage, Sanders read a stream of headlines—“pete buttigieg tops billionaire donor lists,” and so on—that aligned his competitor with financial élites. “I like Pete Buttigieg. Nice guy,” he said. “But we are in a moment where billionaires control not only our economy” but our politics. We have to choose, he said: “Which side are you on?” The phrase came up at every event I attended.

Bernie’s stump speech, delivered with ornery passion to an appreciative but quiet room, invoked wages that were “not one nickel more . . . than forty-five years ago,” once adjusted for inflation; hundreds of millions of dollars being paid to baseball players but very little to teachers; and a litany of problems including homelessness, death, bankruptcy, obscenity, cancer, financial ruin, climate change, fossil-fuel subsidies and tax breaks, the opioid epidemic, corruption, and greed. The crowd listened politely, eating their eggs. As Sanders spoke, he leaned forward, his expression intense, waving his hands and occasionally pointing a finger. His list of horrors almost concluded, he turned to the audience for a brief Q. & A.

Admirably, Sanders took questions live, allowing for possible human awkwardness. (When I observed Amy Klobuchar, at her Iowa events, she took questions written on cards.) One man asked for a specific example of how campaigning, and listening to citizens, had made Sanders adjust a position. This was a clever, somewhat challenging question—Sanders is famously beloved for his consistency. Sanders answered smoothly: he said that, until he campaigned around the country, he hadn’t fully realized how corrupt and racist the criminal-justice system was, and how flawed the immigration system is. He’s adjusted his priorities accordingly. To another questioner, he promised to legalize marijuana in all fifty states on Day One. (Klobuchar’s Day One includes “Fire Betsy DeVos.”) Like Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren, Sanders had interrupted his campaign schedule for the impeachment hearings, and he was packing in events on weekends. He raced off while others hung around the lobby, admiring the wooden eggs and framed posters for Edmund Muskie, Ronald Reagan, Eugene McCarthy, and Jimmy Carter, represented by an illustration of a smiling peanut.

I talked to some attendees—visiting students from journalism programs, curious locals, barrel-chested non-Bernie businesspeople. A woman named Dianne Soto, who wore a red hoodie over a floor-length American-flag print dress (“I’m a corny patriot,” she said), liked Bernie for his “passion”: “He believes what he’s saying.” Soto is an insurance agent, and though insurance “is designed to help people,” she said, she thought that Bernie was right about the greed and corruption of insurance companies. “There’s too much power and money in the hands of the few,” she said. “It needs to be fixed. I hope he gets a chance to do it.”

That night, St. Anselm hosted the debate, and Sanders’s campaign hosted a watching party in Manchester, in a warehouse-like, Astroturfed facility called the Ultimate Sports Academy. The venue, home to a Little League team called the New Hampshire Bobcats, is decorated with trophies, American flags, team photos, and reproductions of Bobcats articles from the New Hampshire Union Leader. Two ten-year-old boys in baseball uniforms suggested that I buy refreshments that would support a planned trip to Cooperstown, New York. I asked them about the arena. Anything besides baseball and Bernie happen here? “Softball,” one said. “And they got Zumba.”

Campaign volunteers handed out debate bingo cards, with boxes like “Coronavirus,” “Candidate says swear word,” “Klobuchar: ‘I won a red state’ or equivalent,” and, in the middle, “Bernie Gesturing (Free).” The crowd was mostly white, except for several volunteers and journalists of color, but diverse in age and aesthetic: a young woman in a wheelchair with pink and aqua hair, girls in “TWEENS FOR BERNIE” shirts, a slightly Michael Moore-looking man who FaceTimed his wife into the room, Michael Moore himself. I talked to people who had come from New Orleans, N.Y.U., and Australia.

A family of four had come from New Hampshire’s seacoast region—Brian and Kara Dillard and their daughters, who sat quietly reading books. A few years ago, when they lived in California, Brian said, they’d seen “Obama drive by in a limo,” but in New Hampshire they could get up close to all the candidates, and did. They were enthusiastic Bernie supporters, for many reasons; Medicare for All was their key issue. “We have a successful national business, and we still can’t afford health insurance,” Brian said. Arthur Washington, a retired corporate lawyer, who had travelled from New York for primary week, said, “I think Bernie is special in the sense of the love he inspires.” Bernie was “too progressive” for Washington, but he liked him. As a lawyer, Washington had dealt with corporations and liability insurance. “I think it’s too easy to vilify corporations,” he said. When Sanders denounces “corporations,” Washington went on, “people think of Fortune 500 companies,” but most are smaller—regular companies run by regular citizens, and not guilty of Amazonian malfeasance. Rick Maynard, a retired electrical worker in a union hat and a reflective vest, who also has a public-access TV show about energy issues, said, “I saw Nina was gonna be here”—Nina Turner, Sanders’s campaign co-chair. “I love Nina.” He went on, “Bernie will represent every citizen of the United States—everyone’s well-being and welfare.” Everybody I talked to, almost all without being asked, said that they’d vote for any Democrat who got the nomination.