"For better and worse," Daniela Perdomo believes that "social media really might drown out corporate media in this election cycle." But then, she has a vested interest.

Perdomo is the founder of FeeltheBern.org—an online resource launched last month to support Senator Bernie Sanders in his presidential bid. The website illuminates where Sanders stands on issues like economic inequality and racial justice. It tells visitors how to register to vote. It touts an extensive flyer kit, which invites volunteers to download handouts to circulate in both English and Spanish. Above all, it is painless to navigate and nice to look at.

While Sanders may be in his mid-seventies, he and his team understand how the Web can reach and rouse people. Together with activist Claire Sandberg, who was hired in August to lead Sanders' digital organization efforts, Perdomo and thousands of other volunteers have made it very obvious.

Having amassed more than a million views on FeeltheBern.org in under two weeks, Perdomo now communicates with top staffers at Sanders HQ to fine-tune the site. And because she is not an official member of the Sanders team, Perdomo is able to volunteer her time and expertise—for free. Since Sandberg was hired, she has strengthened volunteer initiatives all over the States, translating what could have been no more than an enthusiastic hashtag into record event attendance and dedicated volunteers. By now, every candidate knows to harness email, text messaging, and Facebook to reach voters. But Sanders has recruited Twitter and Reddit to work for him as well.

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These organizing efforts we've seen sprouting across the country are nothing short of extraordinary. #FeelTheBern https://t.co/58dB5xVx2T — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 22, 2015

And so while digital grassroots politics is nothing new, Perdomo and Sandberg claim to have leveraged digital outreach in an unprecedented way. Earlier this summer, Sanders organizers held what they called "the largest campaign event of 2016 so far"—a speech delivered in Washington, D.C. More than 100,000 people declared they would attend the blockbuster on Facebook. There is no way to know the precise "attendance," because the event did not take place in a massive venue. It was splintered across thousands of screens in thousands of locations in every state. Using social media, staffers coordinated more than 3,000 watch parties in coffee shops and bars and living rooms nationwide to live-stream Sanders' speech. WIRED.com deemed it "the future of grassroots politics." Josh Cook, who organized for Obama in 2012, told WIRED that the tactic was shrewd: By soliciting phone numbers at the end of the live-stream, Sanders can "turn passive supporters into active volunteers" in an instant.

But the question remains: What will all this accomplish? "Sanders has raised money from 100,000 more people than Barack Obama had in this point in his campaign in 2007," Perdomo says. "Sanders is running closer behind Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama was at this point in 2007. Back then, Obama was also painted as this candidate that was never going to be able to compete against 'Hillary, Inc.'" The bottom line, Perdomo insists, is that "corporate media really likes to tell this establishment story instead of telling the more exciting story...which is that Sanders is having bigger rallies than Obama ever had and that he has a real shot."

While it's true that Sanders is drawing more massive crowds than Obama did at this point in his own first presidential bid, Sanders meets a more formidable opponent in Hillary Clinton than Obama faced. According to Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight, Clinton now commands a greater share of Democratic votes in early polls than she did in her last run. She has scored more endorsements from Democratic politicians, too, and has yet to lose any to Sanders. She is in every way better positioned to take the nomination in 2016 than she was in 2008.

"I think you really empower people with information—not opinions. And that goes for men and women."

Still, such numbers have not swayed the Sanders operation. They believe in the mightiness of his platform. For her part, Sandberg has been tasked to create a structure to sharpen volunteer efforts in early primary states. It's her job "to harness the tremendous energy and enthusiasm that's out there and turn the huge crowds into votes and into an organization that actually can win and create the political revolution that Bernie keeps talking about." Sandberg speaks of the power of "digital tools that allow us to throw out some of the old playbook. There is, for instance, this idea that you can't give volunteers a lot of leadership in the beginning or that you can't ask people to do big things." Sandberg says that their method allows them to "identify the people who want to work on this campaign in a very big way."

Both women exude an intense confidence in the power of the Internet. The Web, Perdomo explains, cuts through the tremendous costs usually associated with campaigns, which is a distinct advantage to a candidate like Sanders, who refuses to court the flush funders that have bankrolled super PACs in recent years. Sanders "has for a very long time supported policies and voted for policies that were politically unpopular," Perdomo says. "If you go through his FEC filings for the three decades he's been in political office, his biggest donors are unions. What does that mean? Regular people support him."

For Sandberg and Perdomo, those positions overshadow any desire to see a woman in the White House. While Perdomo allows that Clinton is an "accomplished human being," she has never been tempted to vote for her. "Personally, I don't know anybody who wants to vote for Hillary Clinton just because she's a woman. As a woman, that's not how I choose to vote."

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"Bernie is there on all of the issues that are incredibly important to me," Sandberg says. "From economic justice to climate change to education and student debt reform to women's rights and equality and reproductive freedom, he's there. I want to support a candidate for president who is going to take on corporate power in our society and fight to make our society more equal in every way. He's the one to do it."

"I think you really empower people with information—not opinions," Perdomo says. "And that goes for men and women."

Mattie Kahn Mattie Kahn is a writer who lives in New York.

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