“It used to be when you went to college, a summer job would pay for your tuition,” John Zimmerman, 72, a Vietnam veteran from Port Washington, New York, told me. “We’re going in the wrong direction.” The universal programs and socialist-leaning policies that Sanders has promised to implement—like tuition-free college, Medicare for All, and a federal jobs guarantee—theoretically provide a course correction. The people in line on Saturday talked about wanting to be able to afford an education, to buy homes, and health care, health care, health care. A few hours later, at a podium in the middle of the snow-sodden crowd, Sanders called the movement behind him “the strongest grassroots coalition in the history of American politics.”

Just what that coalition looks like is still a topic of debate among the pundit class and voters on the left. It’s now a familiar refrain, carried over from the last time we all headed to the polls to choose a Democratic nominee, when Sanders took on Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost. Despite his progressive agenda, there’s doubt around who Sanders, to use campaign slogan speak, is really for. Critics say Sanders has had trouble reaching black voters; he has hesitated to call Trump supporters racist, preferring to say they were motivated by “economic anxiety”; and he has not done enough to condemn misogyny in his ranks, from a legion of “Bernie Bros” (known for harassing female reporters online during the 2016 election) or harassment within his own campaign.

The Brooklyn rally presented the first real-time, IRL answer to this question of who exactly wants Bernie Sanders to be president in 2020, in the New York metropolitan area at least. There were families, groups of friends, siblings, couples. There were certainly those that fit a certain archetype of who you might expect to meet at a Sanders rally: Zimmerman, the Vietnam vet, used the phrase “back in my day” several times when we talked. He was the second Jill Stein voter I met. I spoke to a New York University student named Halsey Hazzard who told me, regarding the trolling from Bernie Bros, “Men be like that.” People smoked from their vapes in the cold morning air. A white guy named Jacob, wearing Lil Peep merch, complained about the white singers of the reggae band who entertained the crowd for the first hour.