Bernie Sanders will not be skydiving into a California rally, as was briefly, but widely speculated on Friday.

Yet remarkably, it does seem that the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign team explored the idea of parachuting the 74-year-old candidate into the event.

The unlikely rumor was widely shared on social media after a story in the Press Democrat, a local paper in northern California, suggested the Vermont senator might skydive at an evening rally hosted by a skydiving company at the Cloverdale Municipal airport, about 90 miles north of San Francisco.

The campaign was swift to shoot down the rumor. “Ha I wouldn’t count on it,” Sanders spokeswoman Sarah Ford texted the Guardian when asked for confirmation.

However, Jimmy Halliday, owner of NorCal Skydiving, whose remarks to the local paper kickstarted the speculation, insisted that the Sanders campaign team approached him directly about the idea of having the presidential candidate skydive in front of a crowd.

“A lot of members of his team have said this would definitely be something he’s interested in,” he told the Guardian in a phone interview. “We’re ready. I would love to jump with Bernie.”



On Thursday, Halliday, whose business is renting out airport space to the campaign, even did a trial jump with a member of the Sanders team. “They tested me out ... I kind of showed them what Bernie might expect.”

It appears that the staffer who jumped with Halliday was a (possibly overzealous) member of the campaign’s “advance team”, which scouts locations and prepares for rallies. It is unclear if queries about the senator jumping out of an aircraft were sanctioned by his campaign headquarters.

Symone Sanders, another campaign spokeswoman, reiterated that the rumors were false: “He’s not parachuting. He’s not skydiving.” But when she was asked if the candidate had seriously explored the idea, she replied: “I can’t deny for sure.”

The spokeswoman said she didn’t think the senator has ever skydived before – and didn’t rule out the possibility that he may parachute into a future event.



“Now it’s on radar. He read about it ... The senator is a long-distance runner. He likes basketball. He likes baseball,” she said. “I don’t know if skydiving is the next big thing for him.”

If Sanders and his security team had agreed to the plan for Friday’s rally, the candidate could have taken a roughly 20-minute plane ride “above one of most beautiful places in the state” and then jumped out in tandem with Halliday at an altitude of about 12,000 feet, the owner said.

The parachutes typically deploy at an altitude of roughly 5,000 feet, Halliday said. The two would have drifted for about five minutes before landing somewhere near the stage.

Sanders has been aggressively campaigning across California in advance of the high-stakes 7 June primary. Supporters of his opponent Hillary Clinton have been urging the Vermont senator to drop out, arguing that it is mathematically impossible for him to secure the nomination at this stage in the race.

But polls have shown that Sanders and Clinton are in a very tight race in California, and Sanders has held nearly 30 rallies in the state since 9 May with events that continue to draw huge crowds.