In 2016, the New Hampshire primary transformed Bernie Sanders from a beloved Senator and well-known regional curmudgeon into a national presidential contender. He trounced Hillary Clinton, capturing both the largest percentage of the vote and the largest margin of victory in the state primary since 1960, when John F. Kennedy beat businessman Paul Fisher, inventor of the Space Pen.

Now Sanders stands poised to win the New Hampshire primary once more, according to the final pre-primary Monmouth poll, which shows him with 24% support, followed by Pete Buttigieg at 20%, former vice president Joe Biden at 17%, and Elizabeth Warren with 13%.

In 2016, it wasn’t just that New Hampshirites liked Sanders, who has represented the state of Vermont since 1991 — they also couldn’t stand Clinton. “He was the only other viable candidate in the race,” explained Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire and Granite State political observer.

Four years later, Sanders is no longer the only establishment alternative. Warren is running on a similar progressive platform, and even Buttigieg, who effectively tied with Sanders for first in the Iowa caucuses, has made a habit of highlighting his outsider status. Yet Sanders continues to hold a healthy lead over the competition — a fact that speaks to the value of having done this whole thing once before and the power of his unchanging message in an independent-spirited state that cast its votes for Donald Trump in the 2016 GOP primary.

“There’s a lot of small towns and working-class folks in New Hampshire who feel like the Democratic Party and the Republican Party don’t represent them,” said Scott Siebel, the outreach director at electoral advocacy group FairVote and Sanders’ 2016 field director in New Hampshire. “I think Bernie was speaking directly to them, and that’s why he resonated with those types of folks.”

Campaign buttons in the Nashua field office.

And while Sanders will certainly lose some progressives to Warren and other anti-establishment voters to Buttigieg, he also appears to have avoided losing too much working-class support to the former vice president’s campaign, which was once viewed as a huge threat. “He’s making inroads, at the cost of Joe Biden, with white working-class voters without a college degree,” Scala said. “I suspect that he’s speaking to their economic insecurity in a way that others are not.”

Renny Cushing, a progressive Democrat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives and one of Sanders’ surrogates in the state, observed that while other Democrats might have adopted more progressive politics over the years, Sanders has been advocating those policies for decades. And people in New Hampshire know it because they have seen him in action for decades. “Bernie’s been a constant in any pickle. He was a perennial speaker at the New Hampshire AFL–CIO breakfast,” said Cushing. “He was kind of an auxiliary voice — a way to access a progressive voice — in Washington, D.C., from the region.”

“The strongest aspect of Sen. Sanders is his authenticity,” added Andru Volinsky, another Sanders surrogate and member of the state’s executive council. “There are people who might agree or disagree with him on a particular issue—but they trust him.”

In 2016, the New Hampshire primary transformed Bernie Sanders from a beloved Senator and well-known regional curmudgeon into a national presidential contender.

Others in the Sanders orbit seemed to agree. “He has a very long and consistent track record,” said Adrian George, a 65-year-old engineer I met at a Bernie-sponsored climate event hosted in the basement of Nashua’s public library. “Bernie’s been an advocate for this for a long time.”

“Sanders seems to be someone the people can trust,” said Christian Stack, 25, a mechanic’s assistant who also lives in the Nashua region. “He’s an honest, hard-working American.”

That sense of authenticity is something Sanders’ backers like to dwell on. They recount the story of his participation in the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights; his decades-long history of lobbying for single-payer health care; and his push as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s to keep the city’s waterfront open for public use. Cushing gushed over this last point: “Thirty years ago he was taking on the greedy speculators who were going to wall the waterfront off for the city of Burlington,” he said. “Bernie’s focus has been on the issues that he cares about.”