Before Jackie Sheeler leaves her Harlem apartment, she makes sure to put on her Bernie T-shirt and stuff the Bernie pamphlets that she made herself into her bag. She’s still waiting for her Bernie stickers to arrive in the mail (they’re on backorder), but she’s hoping they’ll come by the time she plans to set up a table near her neighborhood subway stop to flyer for Bernie this week.

“Too many people in New York don’t know who the hell he is—we need boots on the ground, flyers into people’s hands,” said Sheeler, who's recruiting fellow Bernie Sanders supporters in New York City. She's proud that her local dry-cleaner now has a stack of her pamphlets at the counter. But she acknowledges that the early organizing efforts behind Sanders are still scattershot. “It’s especially fragmented in New York—their limited resources must be focused on early primary states,” she said. “The organizers are trying to get organized.”

The grassroots enthusiasm behind Sanders's campaign is the single biggest advantage that he has over the Hillary Clinton juggernaut. His recent speech in Wisconsin drew the biggest crowd of any 2016 candidate so far, and small donors helped him raise $15 million in just two months. But Clinton's $45 million haul has helped her establish a far bigger organizing infrastructure. Her campaign has paid organizers in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., while the Sanders campaign has paid staffers only in Iowa and New Hampshire, the earliest primary states where he has the best shot of winning, given the high percentage of white, liberal voters. Nationally, he still trails Hillary by 40 points in the polls on average, and only 2 percent of Democrats think he is the candidate with the best chance of beating a Republican, according to a June 30 CNN poll.

If Sanders has any chance at all, it depends on his ability to spread the popular enthusiasm he generates and then direct that energy into organizing. Sanders's most enthusiastic supporters are trying to step up and fill the organizing gap. But out of principle and necessity, they've embraced a DIY approach—in sharp contrast to get-out-the-vote operations of more mainstream candidates like Hillary Clinton, which are part of the traditional campaign apparatus and take their cues from the top.

One of the biggest organizing hubs, People for Bernie, proudly embraces a decentralized model that encourages self-expression and autonomy in the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. As with Occupy, it's an organizing ethos that's in line with the populist spirit of Sanders himself. But the campaign now faces the challenge of turning popular enthusiasm into electoral wins, and personal authenticity into political pragmatism.