After a poll this week showed the previously unthinkable — the 73-year-old Independent senator from Vermont surging past Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire — there’s a feeling that the Bernie Sanders operation is maturing from a quixotic pursuit for the White House into the real deal.

Sanders’ campaign is calling the Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald poll, which found Sanders beating Clinton 44 percent to 37 percent in the Granite State, an “astonishing” feat. It gives even more fuel to a momentum that the Sanders team is riding to significantly expand its ground game, especially in New Hampshire.


The campaign has already outgrown its modest office on Manchester Road in Concord, and will be moving the state headquarters to Manchester in the coming days. The campaign currently has 10 staffers, with six or seven more staffers to begin Monday. A week after that, another new crew is starting. Aides also will be scouting out more real estate to add to the two field offices.

“And then in the next month, our staff size is going to really bloom,” said Julia Barnes, Sanders’ New Hampshire state director, in an interview with POLITICO on Friday at her desk in front of a stack of resumes.

Barnes, who was a regional field director for Joe Biden in 2006 and worked on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, is at the core of Sanders’ New Hampshire operation, currently housed in a dimly-lit, sparsely furnished set of rooms in a strip mall off the highway. The building is sandwiched in between car dealerships, and the office, marked by a loose-hanging Bernie Sanders banner and an American flag, is not visible from the street.

But things won’t look so humble for long. Barnes estimated the campaign had received over 500 resumes in recent weeks, and spoke animatedly about the aggressive expansion in the coming weeks.

Barnes didn’t want to call the poll findings a game changer, saying it’s not going to cause an operational shift. But she said the numbers help cultivate enthusiasm for the campaign’s volunteers. She said “for the network of people supporting Bernie, it’s astonishing.”

The picture is a far cry from Sanders’ soft announcement of his presidential bid in late April, shifted to the Senate Swamp near the Capitol, after questions arose about the ethics of staging it in the Senate Radio/TV gallery. While he made headlines for busting records for drawing 10,000 supporters to a rally in Wisconsin in July, last weekend he managed to attract 28,000 people to a sports arena in Portland.

After spending Saturday at the Iowa State Fair, and hosting a fundraiser in Chicago on Monday, Sanders heads to the University of Nevada on Tuesday for another rally.

While the New Hampshire poll this week was just one set of numbers, and Clinton still enjoys a comfortable lead, the Democratic front-runner’s campaign was concerned enough to reach out to supporters.

As Clinton’s aides were beating back fresh headlines about the scandal over her use of private email server while secretary of state, the campaign sent out a “friends and allies” memo, offering talking points to minimize the poll, according to the New York Times.

Clinton supporters in New Hampshire echoed the sentiments, pointing out that it’s just one poll and that it came in the middle of the summer, with plenty of time left in the election cycle.

“It’s clearly an outlier,” Terry Shumaker, a longtime Clinton supporter involved in the campaign in New Hampshire, said. “The Herald poll interestingly shows two-thirds of the voters told the pollster that they believe Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. I think that is important especially since they are very close on the issues. In the end, I believe many of them will vote for Hillary.”

Supporters of other candidates in the state also stressed caution that the poll was some kind of harbinger of a Sanders wave.

“What this says to me is there’s a lot of fluidity in the race. And it’s going to be a long haul,” Jay Surdukowski, who has served as legal counsel for New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan and is giving legal advice to former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley as he runs for president.

Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders reach to shake his hand at a rally in Portland. | AP Photo

Surdukowski noted that Ohio Gov. John Kasich has managed to work his way up in recent polls in the Republican primary. That, Surdukowski said, showed an important fact about New Hampshire voters: polls will likely fluctuate a few times this cycle in the state and candidates who had been trailing may have a few moments up at the front of the pack.

Surdukowski also delivered a takedown of both Sanders and Clinton, saying the Vermont senator’s currently popularity is also about distaste with Clinton.

“I think that the Bernie crowds and him at least in this one poll rocketing ahead is it’s both about Bernie. But I also think it’s about Secretary Clinton in some ways. I think there are large swaths of folks who are seeing a trust gap with Clinton. At the end of the day there is a character and a trust issue. There’s a lot of deja vu in the Nineties,” Surdukowski said. “I am as surprised as anybody at these remarkable crowds.”

Clinton campaign supporters here are quick to shoot back that the front-runner is no slouch when it comes to attracting crowds and that the Franklin Piece/Boston Herald poll just doesn’t reflect what’s going on.

“I think the panic that folks are trying to assign to it is off the mark. I would need to see more,” Sean Downey, a Democratic operative working for Hilltop Public Solutions’ New England office said. Downey is a Clinton supporter. “When you look at what the Clinton campaign is doing is they’re organizing at the neighborhood level at a pretty impressive rate, and her crowds aren’t exactly small.”

The Clinton campaign’s presence in the state is tangible, too. Harrell Kirstein, the communications director for the Clinton campaign in the state, noted that there are already six offices for Clinton throughout the state and a seventh to be opened in Lebanon soon.

“New Hampshire has always been a competitive race and that is something that we prepared for from the beginning,” Kirstein said. He also noted that Clinton “said from the outset that she’s going to take nothing for granted.”

Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that the Sanders campaign had ten field offices set up, with another six or seven to open on Monday.

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