In late April, when he announced that he would enter the pres­i­den­tial race, Bernie Sanders was the rel­a­tive­ly unknown junior U.S. Sen­a­tor from Ver­mont. Now he’s everywhere.

"Bernie is a no-nonsense guy who says what he believes and has legislation to back up what he believes."

Though the ​“Sanders surge” seemed to come from nowhere, it was long in the mak­ing. Sanders’ rapid rise in the polls, and his increas­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty over the past few weeks, are in part the result of behind-the-scenes work by orga­ni­za­tions like Pro­gres­sive Democ­rats of Amer­i­ca (PDA).

PDA was found­ed in 2004 by pro­gres­sives at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion who were dis­ap­point­ed with the party’s pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee, John Ker­ry, but were unwill­ing to give up on elec­toral pol­i­tics. One evening, at the convention’s con­clu­sion, about 200 peo­ple met to chart a path forward.

“PDA was found­ed that night with an inside-out­side strat­e­gy — to bring out­side ener­gy inside the par­ty,” said Conor Boy­lan, who began work­ing for PDA in 2009 and has been its co-direc­tor since 2014. ​“It was almost an insur­gency: We’ll be mem­bers of the par­ty, but we’ll also form our own chap­ters and hold the par­ty accountable.”

PDA now has about 90,000 peo­ple on its email list. Of those, about 35,000 mem­bers active­ly sup­port and par­tic­i­pate in its work. It is fund­ed by dona­tions from its membership.

In ear­ly 2014, PDA began a peti­tion dri­ve to per­suade Sanders to run for the pres­i­den­cy. When Sanders attend­ed its tenth anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion in May of that year, PDA pre­sent­ed him with the peti­tion. That event marked the begin­ning a strong push by the orga­ni­za­tion to encour­age him to run for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nomination.

The effort paid off this spring when Sanders announced his can­di­da­cy. ​“We’ve just caught fire since then,” Boy­lan said. ​“So it has grown from this small idea — that we have to get Bernie to run — to him actu­al­ly announc­ing. And I’m start­ing to think now that he could actu­al­ly win this thing. It’s been amaz­ing the way it’s gone the past 15 or 16 months. And where’s it going to end?”

Along with its sis­ter orga­ni­za­tion, Peo­ple Demand­ing Action (which focus­es on advanc­ing a pol­i­cy agen­da rather than elec­toral pol­i­tics), PDA’s pri­or­i­ties are health­care reform, cam­paign finance reform and envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nom­ic justice.

House par­ties are cen­tral to PDA’s work. Its web­site allows peo­ple inter­est­ed in vol­un­teer­ing for the Sanders cam­paign to sign up to orga­nize a par­ty or find one that’s sched­uled near them. PDA sends orga­niz­ers a kit with infor­ma­tion on the basics of host­ing a par­ty and assign­ing peo­ple to dif­fer­ent tasks, like hand­ing out fly­ers and main­tain­ing a social media presence.

PDA’S ear­ly and ener­getic sup­port­er of Sanders gives it a unique rela­tion­ship with the cam­paign, Boy­lan said. ​“We were the first group to lead this effort. We stuck to our guns from the very begin­ning, when a lot of oth­er peo­ple were focused on Eliz­a­beth Warren.”

In These Times recent­ly dis­cussed Sanders’s prospects — and PDA’s work — in an inter­view with Boylan.

Sanders is start­ing to get quite a bit of media atten­tion. What’s behind the so-called ​“Sanders surge” — the fact that he’s get­ting more peo­ple at his ral­lies and a lot more media attention?

A cou­ple of things. Before he even ran, his social media pres­ence was unbe­liev­able. He was a known quan­ti­ty in social-media cir­cles. So the cam­paign has kind of branched off of that and done a real­ly, real­ly good job on social media. And he’s had some good inter­views along the way — the Bill Maher inter­view in June on his HBO show real­ly brought Bernie to a new audience.

Up until a cou­ple of weeks ago, not that many peo­ple knew who he was. And now I’m get­ting peo­ple who are com­ing to me, friends who aren’t polit­i­cal, and say­ing, this Bernie Sanders guy looks great. So they’ve done a good job — his out­reach team is doing a good job of get­ting his name out there.

Because he got into the race at a real­ly good time, when there wasn’t a full field, he’s seen as a dif­fer­ence mak­er. He made his posi­tion real­ly clear on the Trans-Pacif­ic Part­ner­ship (TPP), for exam­ple. So they’re mak­ing all the right steps in terms of get­ting out there, into the field, and hav­ing a real­ly crisp, strong mes­sage that res­onates across the board.

There are so many peo­ple in this coun­try to get your mes­sage out to, but the peo­ple who are pay­ing atten­tion are grasp­ing it. Bernie is a no-non­sense guy who says what he believes and has leg­is­la­tion to back up what he believes. But also, he’s been doing it for 30 years. He has the record. But he’s got work to do, since he’ll nev­er have the name recog­ni­tion that Hillary has.

He’s 73. Will his age be an issue?

He’s an old­er man — that’s just the real­i­ty. But if he keeps doing what he’s doing and say­ing the right things, I don’t see it as a prob­lem. I mean, some peo­ple will wor­ry about age, but I’m wor­ried more about where he stands on TPP, on income equality.

What about his iden­ti­fi­ca­tion as a social­ist — how do you see that play­ing out?

He talks a lot about the Scan­di­na­vian mod­el. Peo­ple hear about what’s [the strong social wel­fare state] in Scan­di­navia and it makes sense. There’s some­thing to be said for that mod­el. And he’s been very explic­it in talk­ing about that, and say­ing that it’s where this coun­try needs to go.

When he talks about fam­i­ly val­ues — what are fam­i­ly val­ues? If a moth­er has a child, she’s back to work two weeks lat­er. And those should be the best moments of a family’s life, when a child is born. In oth­er coun­tries, there are six or eight months, or a year, of mater­nal leave.

So that’s the beau­ty of Bernie. He can go after some of these Repub­li­cans when they talk about fam­i­ly val­ues. They believe they own that.

The stan­dard ques­tion when it comes to an out­sider can­di­date like Bernie Sanders is: Do you think he can actu­al­ly win? But it doesn’t sound like you have much doubt about that.

Two months ago, I would have said he can give it a good run and he [prob­a­bly won’t win]. Now, because of his momen­tum — I don’t want to get too car­ried away, but the polls are clos­ing. I’m not say­ing it will be easy, and he’s still a long shot. But if he con­tin­ues to spread the word in Iowa, and gets more peo­ple inter­est­ed — let’s face it, Hillary fin­ished third in 2008 in Iowa. So she’s not that pop­u­lar there. I’m start­ing to think that there’s a chance.

If he wins Iowa and wins New Hamp­shire — you just don’t know, because you can catch fire. And Hillary’s a known brand, but there are some ques­tions. She’s going to have to cam­paign pret­ty hard. If it’s a two-horse race, he’s got a chance.

But just to be clear, you’re not in this just to push Hillary Clin­ton to the left.

Def­i­nite­ly not. We’re in it to win this for Bernie. To be hon­est, maybe when we got in this race it was more about hold­ing Hillary account­able. But now it’s like, this is crazy. Maybe we can pull this off.

What hap­pens if Bernie is not the can­di­date? What does PDA’s role become?

We’re not going to endorse Hillary — that’s the real­i­ty. We took a poll of our mem­ber­ship, and there just isn’t the ener­gy there to endorse her. So we’ll switch gears, and the issues that Bernie has pushed, we want to con­tin­ue to move those issues and build a move­ment, con­tin­ue to build a movement.

The work will con­tin­ue. We’ll make sure we har­ness the ener­gy and move on to what­ev­er the next step is. So we’ve got a lot of work to do over the next year, to get more peo­ple involved in pol­i­tics and show them that there’s a bit of hope out there.