The biggest political rallies anywhere in America right now are being headlined by an 83-year-old senator in the twilight of his career and his 35-year-old protégée.
Roughly 36,000 people in Los Angeles. More than 34,000 attendees in Denver. And another 30,000 on Tuesday night near Sacramento.
Those monster crowds — more than 200,000 people in all, according to organizers — have turned out to cheer on a fiery anti-Trump, anti-billionaire message from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York during their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour of Western states. Mr. Sanders even surprised attendees at the Coachella music festival near Los Angeles last week, popping onstage to introduce the singer Clairo and make an appeal to young people.
As Democrats search for a spark after being routed in November, the two progressives are providing the kindling, offering the party’s beaten-down base the fighting spirit it has been missing ever since President Trump returned to office.
Even as some top Democrats tack to the center or try to find common ground with the emboldened Republican president, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez dismiss the notion of any concessions. Instead, they have stuck to the simple argument that won over millions during Mr. Sanders’s two runs for president and endeared him to the types of working-class voters who abandoned Democrats in November: The system is broken, with the wealthy enriching themselves while others scrape by.
“All over this country, people are struggling, every single day, just to survive,” Mr. Sanders told the crowd on Tuesday in Folsom, Calif. “Brothers and sisters, in the richest country in the history of the world, we can do a hell of a lot better than that!”
Fine-tuning that old message for an era in which the world’s richest person is wielding a powerful position in the federal government to benefit his businesses, Mr. Sanders is finding that Democrats are all ears.
“Mad respect for him at this point,” said Tammy Burgess, 52, a Democrat who attended the rally in Folsom even though she has long been skeptical of Mr. Sanders’s support for democratic socialism. “I like that they’re fighting against this oligarchy and the administration,” she added, because a lot of Democrats “are too scared” to do so.
The day before their Folsom rally, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez drew 12,500 people at a stop in Nampa, Idaho, according to a Sanders spokeswoman, who said it was the largest political event in the deep-red state since Barack Obama visited in 2008. His staff said the crowd of 36,000 in Los Angeles last week was the biggest of Mr. Sanders’s career.
The enormous turnout has surprised even Mr. Sanders’s staff members, who have had to switch to larger venues to accommodate the crowds. In Folsom, attendees waited in a line three miles long to get in, the Sanders spokeswoman said, with thousands peering through fences and watching from nearby hills.
What remains to be seen is whether the two leading progressives can sustain this momentum and channel it into victories for their movement in next year’s midterm elections, or in 2028, when Mr. Sanders is unlikely to run again for president.
Rebecca Katz, a veteran Democratic strategist, said Mr. Sanders’s decades-long crusade against corporate power and inequality felt newly relevant to Democrats at a time when the income gap is growing.
“A lot of people were ready for this years ago, but it kept getting swept under the rug,” she said. “More people are listening now than ever before.”
Ms. Katz said she thought Mr. Sanders’s progressive pugilism would resonate widely, even if it needed tailoring for a diverse and fractured electorate, especially in wealthier areas. His spirit of opposition, she said, could be applied universally.
“This is not about left versus center — this is about, are you willing to fight or not?” she said. “That’s it.”
In an interview before taking the stage on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders expressed confidence that the wave of anti-establishment anger could turn into something substantive for the left. His short-term goal is to highlight vulnerable Republican House members and hammer them on issues like potential cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In Folsom, at the edge of the conservative foothills stretching between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, any mention of the area’s Republican congressman, Kevin Kiley, was met with boos from the crowd.
But Mr. Sanders said he also wanted to hire organizers to help build a broader movement that would challenge the establishment in both parties — an aim he has long pursued, with limited success.
“The goal is to build a grass-roots movement who will not only take on Republican incumbents but also will demand that whoever represents districts in this country stands for the working class,” he said. “If you have incumbent Democrats who are not prepared to do that, they’re going to be challenged.”
Whether voters will ultimately trust proudly left-wing leaders to run the country is an open question.
Mr. Sanders, a longtime independent who suggested recently that more progressive candidates should run as independents, offered Dan Osborn, the independent who mounted a serious but unsuccessful challenge last year to Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, as an example of how to run on a working-class platform outside the Democratic Party apparatus. Mr. Osborn, a union leader, ran on strengthening labor protections, raising wages and enhancing railway safety.
Asked whether he had talked recently with former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. or former Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Sanders said he had spoken with Mr. Biden shortly after the election, though he would not say what they discussed. He also seemed skeptical of the two Democrats’ role in the movement he envisions.
“I think that the future of the Democratic Party is not going to rest with the kind of leadership that we’ve had,” he said.
Other signs point to a growing appetite for the kind of message Mr. Sanders and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez are offering. Both raised staggering sums of money in the first three months of the year, according to new financial filings: Mr. Sanders raised $11.5 million, and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez brought in $9.6 million. Other, more moderate Democrats with an unflinching anti-Trump message, like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, also posted impressive hauls.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who is often seen as Mr. Sanders’s heir, has trended upward in very early — and highly speculative — 2028 Democratic presidential primary polls. But her intentions remain unclear, with some Democrats hoping that she will instead mount a primary challenge to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who leads the Senate Democratic caucus and is up for re-election in 2028.
On Tuesday, she blasted Mr. Trump, demanding that he free pro-Palestinian activists whom he has sought to deport and that he order the return of a migrant whom his administration erroneously deported to El Salvador. And she pointed to the billionaire Elon Musk’s prominent role in Mr. Trump’s administration as evidence that the wealthy have corroded America’s political system.
Recounting how a plane had flown over the rally trailing a sign proclaiming, “Folsom is Trump Country,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez pointed to the skies and declared, to laughter and applause, “It sure don’t look like it today.” She added, “I don’t think this is Trump country — I think this is our country.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez also assailed the president in deeply personal terms, suggesting that if he “wants to find the rapists and criminals in this country, he needs to look in a mirror, today.”
Republicans should be wary of Mr. Sanders’s ability to appeal to voters in an authentic way that is not dissimilar to how Mr. Trump captured their attention, said Landon Wall, a conservative strategist whose firm, GrayHouse, conducts polls for Republican senators. He noted the Coachella appearance as an example.
But Mr. Wall suggested that by criticizing other Democrats, progressives could simply end up fracturing the party.
“It’s a clear sign that a Tea Party-style insurgency is building inside the Democratic Party,” he said. “Explicitly targeting incumbents will open the door to costly, divisive primary battles.”
Mr. Sanders’s rallies have also drawn independents and even some disaffected Republicans who, the senator suggested, were having a “a little bit of buyer’s remorse” after watching Mr. Trump slash the federal work force.
Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Mr. Sanders, said 21 percent of those who signed up to attend Mr. Sanders’s events reported that they were independents, and 8 percent said they were Republicans.
At the Folsom rally, some Democrats who in the past had backed other candidates said they were coming around to Mr. Sanders’s way of thinking.
Fred Hultin, 84, a self-described political independent, said he had no particular affection for Mr. Sanders. But he showed up, he said, because he was worried about the country’s direction and wasn’t seeing anyone else on the left taking charge.
“There’s got to be somebody buried in there who has some brains,” Mr. Hultin said. “But I’m not seeing the Democrats really coming through.”
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
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