Bust the 'Bernie bros' myth: Sanders supporters like me aren't the stereotype you expect Bernie Sanders supporters are people who, according to the norms of American politics, shouldn't have anything in common. Except now we do.

Connor Turque | Opinion columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Iowa caucus: Just how much influence does it have on the primary? The Iowa caucus is sure to be competitive this year. But what makes caucuses different from primaries?

If you were dropped into the middle of a campaign event for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont without any context, it wouldn’t be far off to think you were looking at a group of people who had just been in a plane crash and ended up in a field together. A fervent congregation that would otherwise seldom cross paths, there’s nothing coherent about our ages, races or economic backgrounds.

In the week leading up to the Feb. 3 caucuses, I worked inside one of the cramped and unadorned Iowa field offices that thousands of volunteers filed into. But while mingling, networking or demoralizing ceremonial dancing might have been taking place inside the walls of other candidates' field offices, here there was only the drive to knock on as many doors as possible before caucus night.

There was a small block of time set aside for people to go around the room and say a few words about themselves, but this was about as far as any pleasantries went. There was a UPS driver who lives in Waterloo, Iowa; a middle-age couple decked out in high-end athleisure wear who flew in from Alaska; a young single mother with two very well behaved little kids in tow; a person I vaguely recognized from Twitter; a small group of students from an elite university 5 hundred miles away; and myself, a high school dropout with two fractured stints of college under my belt.

Hard work is a way of life

We all shared a little bit about how we ended up there. These are the mythic "Bernie bros." But to us and to anyone familiar with the reality of this campaign, the weird hodgepodge of Americans represented here was not surprising or even notable.

We’re people who, according to the norms of American politics, shouldn’t have been shuffling into a church basement on a cold winter day to prepare for the caucuses. According to the norms of American politics, Sanders shouldn’t have been there, either, but he was, and so were we.

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What followed more closely resembled a military operation than a pep rally. Everyone just wanted to get to work. We paid attention in 2016 and understand just how stacked the odds are against Sanders making it to the White House.

In order to win, we know the Sanders campaign needs to work twice as hard and be twice as prepared as everyone else. And it is. If there is a guiding ethos for the boots on the ground for Sanders' campaign, it’s this.

For the majority of people Bernie's message resonates with, working twice as hard to get by is a fact of life outside of electoral politics.

For a man who has held public office for almost 40 years, our candidate has shockingly few establishment allies or friends in high places, and that's a big reason why we trust him.

There are no members of the Democratic National Convention's rules committee manning the ship, no $100 million ad buys to push him across the finish line.

There is only us. It’s why we showed up yesterday and today, and it’s why we’ll show up again tomorrow.

Democrats self-immolate in Iowa

You can read the complete institutional collapse that took place on the night of the Iowa caucuses just about any way you want. In the absence of any transparency, accountability or verifiable information as to what Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez’s game plan is, it’s a pick your own adventure.

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You can interpret it as the DNC opting to self-immolate as the world watched, rather than hand Bernie any momentum. You can save yourself the headache, and shrug it off as the same kind of garden-variety incompetence even the most loyal capital "D" Democrats have become accustomed to.

Or you can interpret it, as I did, as a conspiracy to get me to do math.

The size of the shadow it casts over the upcoming primaries is also up to you.

What we know for sure is that Bernie received the most votes in Iowa by a decisive margin. We also know that state delegate equivalents (SDEs), the mysterious metric complicating the Iowa caucus results, is an arguably arbitrary, even flexible number determined by a complicated formula rather than the actual raw voter turnout.

To quote former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, in a town hall last March: “At the risk of sounding a little simplistic, one thing I believe is that in an American presidential election, the person who gets the most votes ought to be the person who wins.”

I think most people would agree with that sentiment, and I’m glad Buttigieg feels this way.

On Tuesday, Bernie will be judged by a popular vote primary in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, my next stop is Nevada, to help Bernie win there, just as he won the raw vote count in Iowa, and just as he’s expected to in New Hampshire. For the first time in my life, the chance for a more compassionate and dignified future is within reach. I’m going to do everything I can to help make that happen.

Connor Turque of Kansas City, Missouri, is a volunteer with Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. Follow him on Twitter: @turkowits