“Bernie is the only one who I feel is honest,” said Erik Olson, wearing a Mondale/Ferraro shirt, even though he admitted he was too young to have cast a ballot for that ticket. “He’s one of the few senators who is not a millionaire. Why else would he be doing this if he didn’t believe it?”

As a measure of his commitment, Olson had left a four-day-old son at home with his wife and driven an hour to attend the rally. (“I owe her big time.”) The child’s birth reinforced his enthusiasm for Sanders’s commitment to universal pre-K: Already paying thousands for an older son’s daycare, Olson would soon see his bill double.

Most notably, the crowd was filled with students, who’d come in large groups from universities around the state. Rachel Cole, 18, had traveled with a clique from her freshman hall at Elon University.* “I like that he’s so grassroots,” she said. “Some people have been saying he’s the voice of our generation.” A Wake Forest freshman, Zachary Bynum, told me he viewed Sanders as most on touch with “Millennial values" on health, education, and social issues. If it’s hard to believe that the oldest candidate in the race—Sanders is 74—would energize youth the most, the crowd seemed to prove his point. He has argued that he would galvanize young voters in a way President Obama did but Clinton cannot, a view that Ben Roberts, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, affirmed. “I would be way less excited if Hillary was the person,” he said, but conceded that from his perspective, “she’s way better than the alternative.”

This groundswell of rabid fans and youth support has propelled Sanders thus far, but as his aides acknowledged to The Washington Post last week, they will have to expand his support geographically and demographically to win. This made his appearance in North Carolina particularly interesting. Since a Republican takeover of the governorship and legislature, the state has passed a huge slate of very conservative legislation, which has opened massive rifts and a series of weekly protests in Raleigh. GOP leaders have cut budgets, slashed education funding, and erected perhaps the strictest voting restrictions in the nation.

Though Sanders made little reference to local woes in his stump speech, several of his proposals resonate strongly with the current situation North Carolina. He demands better funding for schools and free education, and his criticism of free-trade agreements plays well in a state where manufacturing jobs suffered after NAFTA. That holds true even for Old North Staters who don’t ordinarily vote Democrat. Barry Nesbitt, a retired Teamster, showed up wearing a “Keep Pension Promises” t-shirt. Nesbitt told me he’d been a registered Republican until very recently, when he got fed up with Representative Virginia Foxx for her stance on looming pension cuts. Sanders, on the other hand, had backed unions in the dispute, so now Nesbitt was registered as unaffiliated and waiting in line. “I’m here to support Bernie Sanders because he supports us,” he said.