Recent events have shifted the focus of the political landscape, but Sanders has maintained a rabid single-mindedness about his war on the 1% that has carried his insurgent campaign this far: ‘These guys have got to be confronted’

Bernie Sanders is waging war on millionaires and billionaires, one gymnasium at a time.

Deep into his fourth campaign stop of the day, the would-be Democratic presidential candidate is seducing another packed sports hall in Iowa with talk of a new American revolution.

“I am not the slickest guy in the world,” acknowledges the 74-year-old lecturing on stage. “Yeah you are,” shouts back a young voice from the crowd, one of many who believe a lost generation has finally found its champion.

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The idea of a Sanders White House is so implausible to many in Washington that this leftwing firebrand from Brooklyn has all but vanished from what he derisively calls the “corporate” media. Despite consistently attracting more nationwide support in the polls than Donald Trump, a recent study showed him receiving 0.4% of the television air time afforded to the motormouth Republican.

Instead, Sanders is taking his message of polite class warfare to the streets. “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” chant the young audience beneath the golf championship pennants at Waterloo West high school, as he vows to smash the “oligarchy”. Two hours earlier, he was on the banks of the Mississippi in Dubuque before an older crowd waving placards declaring “No BS in Bernie Sanders”. Ninety minutes before that he was 60 miles away in Clinton, where a certain Democratic frontrunner by the same name who passed through days earlier attracted only a fraction of his audience.

Compared to the big city stadiums Sanders was filling during an initial surge last summer, these are small venues. But, with another 46 days before the Iowa caucus, the mileage adds up to a key progressive swathe in the east of the first state to declare its 2016 intentions.

By the time the senator reaches the college town of Mount Vernon the next day, he has clocked up a personal encounter with 28,125 Iowans since his campaign began. By way of comparison, 239,000 Democratic voters turned out in total during the Iowa caucus that helped propel Barack Obama to win the party’s nomination in 2008.

When I talk about a political revolution, I’m talking about challenging and ending that political oligarchy

“If you are talking to 10%, 15% of the voters, that’s a lot,” says Sanders in an interview with the Guardian. “They have uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and so forth ... right now, as we speak, we have people in Iowa and New Hampshire on the telephone, knocking on doors, talking to people. I think that is the most effective way to change minds, to bring people into the movement with direct, one-to-one discussion.”

Few dispute there is a mountain still to climb, especially now Hillary Clinton has regained her poise as the party establishment’s chosen candidate. Privately, even some of his own staff admit there is probably only a 30% chance of Sanders winning Iowa, where he is roughly nine points behind the former secretary of state in polling.



A win in the other early state of New Hampshire seems more likely for the senator from neighbouring Vermont. But there is an obvious risk that by the time the Democratic race reaches the south on Super Tuesday in early March, his attempt to derail the White House ambitions of Hillary Clinton will have lost momentum.

And yet there is an increasing feeling around him that something profound has already changed in American politics. Where once the presumption was that voters were mostly impervious to what critics used to call the politics of envy, Sanders has successfully awoken a generation to a breathtaking surge in inequality and the near collapse of the American dream.

“I think there is a real hunger our there for people to understand, to try to think about why this country is where it is today,” he said, during an extensive interview in New Hampshire this week.

“Who talks about it? Technology is exploding, right? Worker productivity is up. [So] why are people working longer hours for lower wages? Why is the middle class in America for the last 40 years disappearing? Why do we have a massive level of wealth and income inequality? Think NBC is going to report it? CBS? Fox News? I don’t think so.”

The blizzard of statistics that make up his stump speech is as hard to believe the 15th time you hear it as the first, but nonetheless undeniable. More than half of all the new income in America goes to the top 1% of wage earners. The top 0.1% own as much wealth as the bottom 90%. One family – the Waltons of Walmart fame – are worth as much as 40% of Americans combined.

Where once it was assumed that only the very rich, or, more commonly, good friends to the very rich, could afford to run for president, Sanders has broken all records by securing 2m small contributions to propel his campaign.

Whether he wins more than a handful of primary states, his creed of democratic socialism is no longer met with sniggers in a country most observers assumed was an impregnable temple to capitalism.

Clinton has an apparently impregnable 55%-31% national lead over Sanders. Yet among voters aged under 30 Sanders’ idealism puts him ahead, while a New York Times/CBS News poll found the cut-off age under which more voters preferred Sanders to Clinton is 45.

“I think we have shifted the debate,” says Sanders. “It’s very hard for any campaign to look around and see hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic people coming to our meetings, who are the future ... and people have got to look out there and say, my God, if we are worried about the future of the Democratic party we had better start listening and paying attention to what Sanders’ supporters want.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sanders waves to the crowd as he takes the stage at a campaign rally at Cornell college in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Photograph: Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters

With hindsight the appeal is increasingly obvious, but few would have guessed that this ageing lawmaker and former mayor of small town Burlington, up near the Canadian border, would become a voice of the millennial generation.



“If we had been sitting here six months ago, I would never have predicted that would happen,” he admits. “This generation, the younger generation, are supposed to be apathetic, they are supposed to be not interested in politics and yet they are flocking out there to our meetings.



“Why that’s so, I can’t tell you, but I think there is a hunger out there on the part of an entire generation that understands that something is profoundly wrong in the country today and we have got to move in a very, very different direction.”



At the rallies, one common explanation is that supporters crave authenticity, an antidote to the groomed and the stage-managed alternatives.



Bernie, as he is known by all, is certainly that. Staff fondly admit to fighting a losing battle with dandruff on his baggy blue suits. Asked by a video producer to accept some make-up powder to hide the shine from studio lights, he tolerates “only a little”.

Up close in a New Hampshire hotel room, Brooklyn’s firebrand is a good deal less grumpy than he appears from a distance. On stage, his angry outdoor voice has become so strained that he almost lost it during a period of loud summer rallies. Inside, the growl becomes more avuncular, pausing only to bark out our producer when he attempts to pause the interview during some drilling next door.

A gravelly accent born of a modest upbringing by Jewish Polish immigrants in a Brooklyn tenement building is an easy target for comic Larry David, whose impersonation is already legendary. Huge becomes ‘yuge’; the worn catchphrase “millionaires and billionaires” almost a nervous tic.

He doesn’t speak with emotions, he comes at it with facts and I think that’s something millennials respond to the most Allegra Murphy

Yet still, millions of young people on college campuses across America are undoubtedly “feeling the Bern”. In particular, the longer and more dense the speeches are – some stretch for 90 minutes – the more it seems to fire up a generation fed up with being patronised by politicians who deal in platitudes.



“He doesn’t try to speak with emotions, he comes at it with facts and I think that’s something that millennials respond to the most,” says Allegra Murphy, a 21-year-old student at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa. “He doesn’t talk down to people and I feel that’s all that Hillary does; she tries to relate to millennials through internet culture – there was an event where she had the hot guy from Scandal, or that one with Katy Perry – but people see through that.”

Selena Piña, another local student helping organise caucus attendance on campus, puts it more bluntly: “I think she’s fake. It’s obvious to see.”

While veteran political journalists privately sneer at the “amateurishness” of the Sanders operation compared with the Clinton machine, the Vermont senator revels in breaking all the rules of campaign stump speeches.

“I understand what a normal political speech is. You get up there, tell a few jokes, you have the flags behind you, and you speak for 10 or 15 minutes in broad generalities,” he says.

“You have heard me speak, sometimes for an hour and 15 minutes. When I really get going, it is sometimes for an hour and a half. Nobody does that. Then why do I do it? Because this country and this planet faces enormous problems. I don’t know how to say all of that in a six-second soundbite, or even a 15-minute speech. So they come in, and you know what blows me away? You’ve been there. They listen! People are paying attention.”

For the oldest candidate in the race, temporarily taken off the trail this month to have surgery for a hernia, the relentless pace of public appearances requires some fuel too. “It physiologically changes me,” he adds, sounding like Bill Clinton. “I feed off the energy of the people that we talk with.”

Whether it all actually adds up is another matter. The standard Sanders stump speech, which he sticks to religiously, can contain up to 15 separate spending proposals, many of which it is hard to imagine passing individually through Congress, let alone collectively under one president.

These range from expanding Medicare to create a single-payer healthcare system to rival Britain’s National Health Service, through to spending a trillion dollars on infrastructure projects, making all public colleges and universities tuition free, and expanding social security.

These four alone would require massive fiscal changes, only partly explained by his plans to tax Wall Street speculation, close loopholes for multinationals and increase taxes on the rich.

“They may seem to be a long list of separate issues,” he says, “but they are all tied together in one important way. And that way is that today in America, we are living in a country that is moving quite rapidly toward an economic oligarchy and a political oligarchy. When I talk about a political revolution, I’m talking about challenging and ending that political oligarchy, and once you do that then other things fall in place.”

There is also a relatively thin explanation of the core Sanders message on inequality. His diagnosis of the problem is refreshing enough: “The middle class of this country is disappearing. What does that mean? It means you have people with two or three jobs, worried to death about their children, worried about their own retirement.

“A lot of people out there today are hurting, they are struggling, and no one is talking about it. And that further isolates them,” he adds.

Yet the prescription to fix it relies heavily on curbing the “greed” of the rich and redrawing free trade deals to minimise the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas – measures that look designed more to turn the clock back rather than adapt to technological shifts that many blame for rising inequality.

For Sanders, the answer lies partly in better education, and partly in simply restoring pride and security to a middle class.

“Look, there is no magical solution,” he acknowledges. “But the ideas that I am presenting will go a long long way to expand the middle class of this country, raise wages and bring more income and wealth equality.

“We can create many hundreds of thousands of jobs improving education, mentoring our young people so they are not dropping out of school. Making sure they get good jobs. That’s the simple stuff,” he adds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders: mad as hell, and not gonna take it anymore. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

A better-known candidate might have evolved some of these policy positions by now into something more varied, but aides say Sanders is determined to hammer the same message until he has the necessary national recognition.

His relentless focus on domestic economic issues has also brought criticism that Sanders is ignoring the international and national security threats that are increasingly dominating the presidential race.

After a disastrous debate appearance in November, when he seemed ill-prepared for the way the Paris terrorist attacks would overshadow everything, Sanders now devotes a substantial portion of his campaign speeches to a foreign policy that can best be described as Obamaesque. The relative hawkishness of Clinton, the former secretary of state, is increasingly a target, as is her record on Iraq and Syria.

Sanders is happy to cast doubt on the folly of western interventionism, but far less willing to rock the boat than British leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn – a figure he is often compared to – perhaps unwilling to let his domestic agenda be overshadowed by questions of his patriotism, which have dogged the UK Labour leader.

If Sanders has another obvious weakness, critics note that his campaign rests on a precariously narrow base of white voters and he has not adjusted to the mood of anger at recent policing and criminal justice scandals which galvanised the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Once again, Sanders has responded aggressively to fill the policy vacuum and now talks extensively of his criminal justice initiatives, often with support from radical African American academic Cornel West and well-known rappers such as Killer Mike and Scarface.

Only on guns has Sanders largely stood his ground in the face of criticism from the left that he is not doing enough to push for tougher controls.

Clinton has successfully outflanked him to look like the most ardent reformer on guns, but Sanders insists the differences between them are overblown and that he too wants an assault weapons ban and expanded background checks. He is usually aggressively direct, but on guns he argues that a more cautious approach is likeliest to win support from Republicans in Congress.

“There is a broad consensus. That is what I believe, what I have voted for. It is not very different from what Hillary Clinton or anybody else believes. But politics being what it is, they saw that as a vulnerability of mine because I come from a state that doesn’t have any gun control but I think we’re handling it fine now.”

Nonetheless, the issue remains notably absent from his speeches at a time of heightened awareness of the issue following the San Bernardino shooting in California.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bernie Sanders and Dr Cornel West share a hug following Sanders’ speech at the historic black Benedict college in Columbia, South Carolina. Photograph: Richard Ellis/Zuma Press/Corbis

If the national mood remains focused on national security, race and guns throughout 2016, Sanders may struggle to land more than symbolic blows on Clinton. But his hope is that the debate will swing back decisively toward the economic issues upon which he has built his campaign.

Here he is less worried about what Congress might stomach and more intent to build a lasting political movement that can drive through change – an instinct he claims is far more mainstream than the pundits realise.

“The greed of corporate America and Wall Street is destroying the economy of the United States. These guys have got to be confronted. We need changes in the power structure of America, politically and economically, and that’s what we are doing,” he concludes.

“I know I have been considered to be very, very radical [but] on almost every issue that I’m talking about – and this is what the media does not appreciate – there is a vast amount of support among people.”

Nowhere is that support more evident than among the debt-soaked millennial generation, and nowhere are the expectations more daunting, especially with this movement so dependent on such an unlikely candidate.

“The fear about letting down [young] people is something that worries me very much,” acknowledges Sanders. “But we are going to do our best to keep the faith and to fight to create a world that they will be part of and they will be proud of.”