“He’s the progressive leader now,” Wirch said. “More and more people want to know where we’ll go from here, and he’s the leader that will push us forward. We have to go back to basics.”

Kenoshan Susan Suchy, 44, braved the cold just to see Sanders.

“It’s exciting to see Bernie and get some positivity after everything that happened during the election,” Suchy said.

Q&A with Chris HayesChris Hayes, host of “All in with Chris Hayes,” on MSNBC spoke with local reporters after the event Monday’s event featuring Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Q. Why did you pick Wisconsin and Kenosha specifically?

A. We were looking across the states of the industrial Midwest, particularly Michigan and Wisconsin.

We started looking at counties that flipped through a map, and Kenosha was a fascinating one because it flipped by 237 votes and hasn’t flipped for a Republican since 1972. It’s a bulwark of UAW; you’ve got a fascinating symbolic idea of AMC and Chrysler going away and the Amazon fulfillment warehouse being here, which is like a perfect metaphor for the old and new economy. There just seemed like a lot going on here.

Q. Trump supporters were willing to participate.