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SAN FRANCISCO — Sen. Bernie Sanders brought his presidential message to the Bay Area Sunday afternoon, painting himself as a trailblazer on liberal issues who was ready to take his surprisingly strong 2016 performance all the way to the White House next year.

“Now is the time to complete what we began, now is the time to turn our vision and our progressive agenda into reality,” he told thousands of cheering fans gathered at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

Sanders’ speech was full of applause lines on progressive policies and swipes at President Trump, as well as a few more lines than his past campaign speeches about his personal biography. The Vermont senator’s crowd — estimated by his team as 16,000 people — waved blue-and-white campaign signs and chanted his name on the sunny afternoon.

It was a more upbeat vibe than Sanders’ last campaign rally in San Francisco, when he spoke two miles away at Crissy Field in June 2016, just hours after the Associated Press had declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Now, Sanders is one of the frontrunners for the 2020 Democratic nomination, joining potential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden at the top of most of the party’s polls.

“I saw a lot more hope in people this time,” said Joel Sanchez, a San Francisco resident and longtime Sanders fan who brought his Maltese pups Madeline and Ebony to Sunday’s rally. “I’m sticking with him because he hasn’t changed his issues at all.”

The appearance in San Francisco — with a postcard-perfect backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge behind Sanders — wrapped up the senator’s tour through California, which included similar big outdoor rallies in San Diego and Los Angeles this weekend. The Golden State’s primary is expected to be especially important next year because of its earlier position on the calendar.

The senator took the stage just minutes after the U.S. Justice Department released its analysis of the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which found no evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government but made no determination on whether the president obstructed justice.

Sanders noted that he hadn’t had a chance to read the summary yet, but joined other 2020 Democratic candidates in calling for the entire document to be released publicly.

“I don’t want a summary of the report, I want the whole damn report,” he declared to cheers.

Sanders worked to draw a strong contrast with Trump not just on his beliefs but his life story. Unlike the former real estate mogul, he noted, “my family did not give me a $200,000 allowance every year from the age of 3.

“In fact, my family gave me a 25 cents a week allowance,” he said. “I am proud of where I came from, I know where I came from.”

In an issue-packed speech that ranged from a call to arms against climate change to Sanders’ trademark denunciations of Wall Street banks, he poked fun at the perception of his plans as being on the far-left fringe.

“Want to hear some radical ideas?” he asked the crowd. “Are you prepared? I don’t want you fainting in shock.”

Sanders marveled at how many of his policies — from Medicare for All to free public college to legalizing marijuana — have gone mainstream among Democrats and been adopted by the party’s candidates running for seats “from school board to president.”

Still, that trend has also made it harder for Sanders to paint himself as the unequivocal standard-bearer of the left, which he more clearly was in the 2016 race. Some attendees from around the Bay Area and beyond said that while they had voted for Sanders in the primary three years ago, they were still deciding between him and some of his other liberal rivals, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

But there were plenty of diehard fans who wouldn’t consider backing another Democrat in the primary.

“Bernie’s the real deal because he’s been saying the same things for 40 years,” said Toni Grimm, a retiree from Alameda who came to the rally in a tie-dye shirt with Sanders’ face on it. The other candidates, she said, were just “trying to jump on the bandwagon.”

Others said they were just happy to see the 2020 field sounding more like Sanders.

“It’s exciting to see the transformation from Bernie being thought of as a radical to having his policies being adopted by all the mainstream Democrats,” said Chelsea Chan, an 18-year-old senior at Castro Valley High School attending her first political rally. “I never thought of Bernie as a radical. I thought of him as reasonable.”