Hillary Clinton’s campaign knows voters want an economic populist candidate. During her recent trips to Iowa and New Hampshire (in a van nicknamed Scooby) her rhetoric has focused on how little millionaires and hedge fund managers pay in taxes and how “the deck is stacked” in favor of the wealthy. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine, who has covered his fair share of presidential politics, called it “fake populism,” and he’s right: Clinton is campaigning on the same focus-group-tested promises to repeal unjust tax loopholes that she and Barack Obama ran on in 2008. Those loopholes are still there and will likely remain if Clinton’s Wall Street donors get her into the White House. There is one candidate, though, who has always championed populist causes and is a hit with supporters who are hip to the difference between a politician stumping for votes and a true advocate for working people. That candidate is Bernie Sanders. The junior U.S. senator from Vermont, Sanders will officially announce his candidacy on Thursday. He draws large crowds for each visit to New Hampshire, the nation’s first and arguably the most influential of the presidential primaries. Last weekend in Hanover, New Hampshire, he was applauded for his promises to push for a $15 hourly minimum wage and introduce legislation that would make public colleges and universities tuition-free and for his bill to invest $1 trillion for infrastructure improvements across the U.S. — which he estimates would create 13 million jobs. Sanders has spoken of breaking up the biggest Wall Street banks, six of which control almost $10 trillion in assets and hold almost half the mortgages and credit card debt in the nation. Sanders’ policies make him a much stronger advocate for working people than Clinton. That said, even Sanders’ most ardent supporters don’t have much hope for his success. Darrell Hotchkiss, who hosted a house party for Sanders in Hanover, told CNN, “He isn’t going to get the nomination … We all know that.” A Sanders candidacy, even if it’s a long shot, may draw enough support, particularly in New Hampshire, to scare Hillary Clinton into adopting some of his platform as her own and set the tone for the rest of the Democratic primary.

‘Psychiatric issues’

Sanders’ platform of correcting the imbalance between the ultrarich and ordinary people is impressive, and not just when it’s compared with those of Clinton and other servants of Wall Street. Recently, he called it “unacceptable” that in an era of unprecedented new technology, Americans are working longer hours for lower wages while multinational corporations and the wealthiest families “are doing phenomenally well.” He pointed out that from 2013 to 2015, the 14 richest Americans increased their wealth by $157 billion and that the Waltons of the Walmart fortune own more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans. He called the greed of the wealthiest families in America “a psychiatric issue” and compared their desire to accumulate more wealth to drug and alcohol addicts who “always want more.” (And since we’re on the subject of crippling wealth addiction, if anyone from the Clinton family wants my help organizing an intervention for Bill and Hillary, my phone is always on.) Hillary Clinton’s populism, by contrast, pushed her to give two speeches to financial giant Goldman Sachs in 2013, which paid her $200,000 per gig. In one of the speeches, which were closed to the press, Clinton allegedly called bipartisan criticism of Wall Street “unproductive” and “foolish.” Clinton’s donors on Wall Street recently expressed a quiet understanding that her populist campaign rhetoric was just politics and that she’s just saying what voters want to hear.

If Bernie Sanders were to defy the odds and win the nomination, it would be a historic victory for working people across America.