Jess Aloe

Burlington Free Press

BURLINGTON, Vt. — The “Grassroots for Sanders” campaign organized around an online message board has raised over $1 million for Bernie Sanders.

The board, with over 150,000 subscribers, is a subsection of the online discussion site Reddit, which allows users to organize around topics. A Montpelier-based former grape picker, Aidan King, started the Sanders for President board in 2013, alongside David Fredrick. King now works with the campaign as a digital organizer.

Over $50,000 of the million came in during the 48-hour period surrounding Sanders' appearance on CNN's Democratic town hall forum, which aired Monday night. It took the board six months to raise its first half-million, but only about a month to raise the second.

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Beyond the money, Sanders’ digital warriors have made over 50,000 calls to voters in New Hampshire, Iowa and other states. The subreddit has hosted the site’s signature “Ask Me Anything” posts with other candidates that embody Sanders’ “political revolution,” including a law professor from Florida who is challenging Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Online, Reddit users have posted creative calls to motivate the community to donate. After Sanders released an ad set to Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” community members urged each other to donate $17.76. Other users offered to match donations.

“A lot of people are looking forward to seeing us bust the top off” the million dollar goal, said Alex Stigler, one of the lead organizers of the Grassroots for Sanders effort.

The Reddit group set up a special portal on Sanders’ fundraising site to track their efforts. All the funds go directly to the Sanders campaign.

Elijah Browning, a massage therapist from northern Michigan, is one of the main organizers behind the community’s phone-banking efforts. He got his start in grassroots politics during the 2006 midterm elections, and was heavily involved in President Obama’s 2008 campaign. He has set up a Slack channel, an online chat group, to provide support for callers.

The group started out as just Reddit users, but they’ve gotten support and direction from the official Sanders campaign. Now, the campaign sends volunteers interested in making calls over to Browning’s group.

In addition to Slack, they’re also using technology to make the calls.

“The Bernie Dialer is really pretty revolutionary,” Browning said.

Instead of a volunteer dialing numbers on a phone, the caller logs into the website. Meanwhile, other “clickers” go down a list of numbers. Once someone picks up, the two are connected. Instead of a volunteer’s personal number showing up, the Caller ID shows the local Bernie campaign office’s number.

“Traditional phone banking can be demoralizing,” Browning said. With the “Bernie Dialer,” a volunteer can speak to 50 people in a two hour shift.

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He has also come up with a way to “gamify” the process. Online, callers join teams and track how many calls they make. The current team winner is Team Kittens, with over 11,000 calls.

Browning spends more time helping out other callers than making calls himself. When he does make a call, he said it’s most effective to tell voters why he’s spending so much of his free time working to get Sanders elected. Some people are mostly just turned off by the process itself, he said, but he can sometimes persuade them to give Sanders a look.

“Bernie sells himself,” he said.

Stigler, a 24 year-old from Columbus, Ohio, has been a Bernie supporter for years, ever since he heard the senator make a comment about money in elections in a C-Span video.

He said that while the community is focused on Sanders and the early primary states, it’s also looking beyond the his candidacy and how to get more people who share the Vermonter’s values into office.

He wants “people to know that there are people to help them if they support Bernie,” Stigler said. Another board on Reddit focused on other candidates is in the works. Already, progressive candidates have introduced themselves to the board.

“Bernie is the lynchpin that has brought everything together,” Stigler said.

Follow Jess Aloe on Twitter: @jess_aloe