It's not your everyday Americans at Bernie Sanders' kickoff rally The long-shot presidential contender launches campaign from the People’s Republic of Burlington.

BURLINGTON, Vt. — These weren’t your everyday Americans who came out to support Bernie Sanders on Tuesday.

The self-described democratic socialist kicked off his long-shot run for the White House in his adopted hometown of Burlington, a lakeside city full of characters who might not have passed the pre-selection process for Hillary Clinton’s tour of round tables.


And while Sanders, the state’s independent U.S. senator, may be way behind in national presidential polls, in Burlington, he’s a local hero.

In the afternoon, a “people’s assembly” of hundreds of Sanders supporters gathered in City Hall Park, where dreadlocked guitarists played in the morning and patrons browsed at the nearby Hempest, which advertises itself as the largest organic hemp product store in the world.

The People for Bernie rally was organized by several former Occupy Wall Street activists, including Ready for Warren co-founder Charles Lenchner. Activists wearing shirts denouncing fast-track trade authority, fracking and George W. Bush held hands in a circle and used the “people’s mic,” a call-and-response tactic used in the Occupy protests to help amplify people’s voices in the circle.

“Everyone who’s afraid of the word socialism, take a step in!” Lenchner said, drawing laughter and applause from the crowd when no one did.

“There is nothing mainstream about our movement,” said People for Bernie co-founder Winnie Wong.

The liberal bastion is an enthusiastic base of support for the senator, who is looking to harness disaffected liberal voters in a primary fight with Clinton, the heavy front-runner. But it’s also a risky backdrop that can play into what Sanders advisers readily admit are counterproductive stereotypes that Sanders is an extremist who isn’t a legitimately electable alternative to Clinton.

“We don’t have any illusions about how people view Sen. Sanders,” said someone close to Sanders, when asked about the Burlington community.

“The Occupy folks and progressives, they are the ones that are going to fuel the energy,” the person added. “There’s a lot of oomph to that when it comes to knocking on doors, to making calls. You can only buy that to some degree.”

Thousands attended Sanders’ rally Tuesday, with attendees spilling out along the park as the venue filled to capacity on a sunny and hot early evening.

Sanders stuck to a familiar populist script — outlining his vision for a political revolution, chiefly in moral terms.

He decried the influence of money on politics and the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, vowed to take major action on climate change and infrastructure, voiced his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal and called income inequality “the great moral issue of our time.” He echoed his support for raising the minimum wage and called on corporations to pay more taxes.

“There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans,” Sanders said at Burlington’s Waterfront Park, before the stunning backdrop of Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains. “This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable. This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about. This has got to change and, as your president, together we will change it.”

Sanders, who personally wrote the speech, spoke for about a half-hour and seemed overwhelmed when he came out with his wife, Jane, after being introduced as Vermont’s “adopted son.” “This is an emotional day for me,” a beaming Sanders began, breaking from his prepared remarks.

Toward the end of the speech, he spoke of his time as Burlington mayor, specifically his successful fight to restore Waterfront Park, the site of Tuesday’s launch, where developers planned to build condominiums. (The event is less than a five-minute walk from the Leahy Center aquarium, named for Patrick Leahy, Sanders’ fellow Vermont senator, who has already endorsed Clinton.)

“As mayor, I worked with the people of Burlington to help turn this waterfront into the beautiful people-oriented public space it is today,” he said. “To those who say we cannot restore the dream, I say just look where we are standing.”

Through and through, the rally was a Vermont affair — environmentalist Bill McKibben, who hails from the state, appeared at the event, as well as Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, whose famous ice cream was served for free in the park. The crowd also heard from Vermont labor and affordable housing activists, a progressive lot that quoted Woody Guthrie and Tracy Chapman in their introductory remarks. Sanders exited to Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

It is Burlington where Sanders, the Brooklyn-born son of a Polish immigrant father, began his political career, winning the 1981 mayoral election by 10 votes as an independent despite the ongoing Reagan revolution. He won four straight terms, presiding over a city now commonly referred to as the People’s Republic of Burlington.

Sanders went on to serve in the House and now the Senate, becoming the longest-serving independent in congressional history.

He formally announced his presidential campaign on April 30 with a low-key launch — an email message to supporters and a 15-minute news conference outside the Capitol. Since then, with the exception of a one-day trip to New Hampshire, Sanders has been in Washington, using his Senate perch to put pressure on Clinton from the left.

Sanders, along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), emerged as a high-profile and vociferous critic of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and fast-track authority, which Clinton has yet to come down on.

He introduced two pieces of legislation — a bill to break up Too Big to Fail banks and another for tuition-free college at public universities — that offered an implicit challenge to Clinton.

The policy proposals, people close to Sanders say, are a way to stay specific on policy, which will either drag Clinton to the left or draw major contrasts between the candidates — while not attacking the front-runner outright, which Sanders doesn’t want to do.

Meanwhile, the campaign has prioritized social media and online fundraising, important for a candidate who rails against the influence of billionaires in politics and won’t have an affiliated super PAC. He’ll be in New Hampshire and Iowa later this week and in Minneapolis on Sunday.

Sanders so far has raised more than $4 million in less than a month, a sizable haul advisers hope is a good first step on the way to a $50 million campaign, although he acknowledges he cannot compete, money-wise, with Clinton. Advisers say he’ll likely make some fundraising visits to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles but will continue to focus on online and direct mail, highlighting Warren’s 2012 Senate race as an inspiration.

He’s also begun to creep up in the polls, separating himself from likely Democratic candidates former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee.

Despite insisting it won’t run against O’Malley, who will almost certainly announce his bid on Saturday, the campaign highlighted a Washington state poll last week showing Sanders well ahead of other Democratic challengers to Clinton, italicizing a part in the poll’s release that said he’s “far separated” himself in the race for second place.

While his campaign team isn’t completely set, Sanders recently hired coordinators in Iowa and New Hampshire and a longtime staffer for his campaign manager.

On Tuesday, the campaign tapped New Hampshire labor organizer and former Run Warren Run state director Kurt Ehrenberg to run his operation there. The Sanders campaign has already been aggressively courting organized labor, a crucial area of support for him, and will be going after supporters of Warren, the liberal icon who is all but assured not to run for president.

As Sanders pushes forward on the national stage, he remains a local celebrity in Burlington.

“He’s got totally committed support,” said Mike Castro, whose grayish long hair fell over his T-shirt with Sanders’ stenciled face on it. Castro, who co-chaired the New Mexico Green Party years ago, said Sanders’ insurgent campaign reminds him of Jerry Brown in 1992, whose campaign he volunteered for.

Throughout the downtown area, small fliers for Sanders’ event were taped and stapled on bulletin boards, smaller than ones advertising visiting orchestras and local mindfulness workshops. “Join Bernie,” the signs read, never bothering to use his last name or the word “senator.” On a side street downtown, a mural depicts Sanders as part of a vast Burlington parade that features, among others, Phish frontman Trey Anastasio and Ben and Jerry.

Tod Gross, manager of Phoenix Books in Burlington, said Sanders stops by the store every once in awhile. The place still sells Sanders’ folk album, which he recorded as mayor in 1987, titled, “We Shall Overcome.”

“He’s pretty bad,” Gross said, noting that Sanders mostly talk-sings on the album. “The musicians around him are really good.”

Gross said the Burlington community will be closely watching Sanders’ national campaign tour.

“People are interested to see how he’ll be treated out there,” he said.