HARRISBURG, Pa. — Throughout the era of politics dominated by President Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has offered the same advice to the Democratic Party over and over again: Simply trying to stop what Trump is doing isn’t enough.
This time, though, there’s a chance the party might actually listen. As Sanders campaigns across the country, attracting tens of thousands of people at rallies in GOP-held congressional districts, the party is seeing its approval ratings slip to record lows. Combined with the mutual embrace between Trump and some of the world’s richest people, the stage is set for the 83-year-old Sanders to shape the party’s direction in an unprecedented way.
“The American people, I think, not only want resistance to Trump, but I think they want what the Democratic Party in the last many years has not given them, and that is an agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class, because it’s not good enough,” Sanders told HuffPost in an exclusive sit-down interview with HuffPost following his rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Friday.
“‘Oh, well, you know, Trump is a terrible guy,’” he continued, mimicking other critics of the president. “Fine. You know, the majority of American people understand that. What’s your alternative? Why did Trump get elected? What do you have to say to a worker today who’s making 14 bucks an hour, who can’t afford health care? Tell me what you have to say. What do you have to say to kids who would like to go to college, who can’t afford to go to college?”
Sanders’ rising influence does not mean the entire party is going to embrace his call for “Medicare for All” or free college. But it may mean even moderates take a closer look at his anti-establishment style and relentless focus on economic policy as a way to combat swing voters’ belief Democrats are too close to feckless institutions and too obsessed with culture war issues.
“We viewed people like Bernie as an outlier threat to the institutional Democratic Party, when in fact what he was talking about and is still talking about is the crossover message. And it pulls Trump voters back into the Democratic coalition,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in an interview last month.
Sanders spoke Friday to a packed hall of about 4,000 people, his 12th stop on a tour that began in March alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who appears poised to inherit the mantle of his grassroots movement. Their focus has been on marshaling anti-Trump energy and directing it at Republican-held congressional districts whose incumbents have shied away from engaging with angry constituents at public town halls, critical battlegrounds Democrats are hoping to flip in next year’s midterm elections.
But the tour, while mainly a response to Trump, is also a reaction to anger on the left toward a perceived vacuum of Democratic leadership at the national level. Congressional Democrats, hampered by minorities in both legislative chambers, were shell-shocked by the breakneck pace of Trump’s policies and initially slow-footed organizing against them. They’ve woken up in recent weeks, with Democratic governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois and Andy Beshear of Kentucky speaking out on the national stage, and Cory Booker of New Jersey and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland making their influence felt in the Senate and abroad.
Attendees who spoke with HuffPost at Sanders’ rally in Harrisburg have noticed, mentioning the names of Pritzker, Booker and Ocasio-Cortez as Democrats who they feel are adequately stepping up. But others still don’t believe the opposition party is meeting the moment, yearning for more aggressive pushback even if Democrats have little power in Washington right now.
“Some of them aren’t doing jack,” said Cameron Cluelow, a steelworker from York. “Democrats that are also taking corporate money are just as bad as Republicans. You can’t be resisting Trump if you’re going to do the same thing that he’s doing.”
Victoria Slobodian, a social worker from Camp Hill, said Democrats’ inaction is “allowing it to happen.”
“I am seeing more people speaking out now, but had they done that in the beginning, and had a strong stance, I really feel like it wouldn’t be as bad as it is now,” she added, expressing fears about GOP attacks against Medicaid and other public services designed to support the vulnerable.
Other prominent figures within the Democratic Party like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who are both potential 2028 presidential contenders, are taking a different approach to Trump: engaging him and his administration when the moment calls for it or when it stands to benefit their constituents. Whitmer, in particular, has raised eyebrows by appearing with the president in the Oval Office, even sharing a hug with him, moves that yielded a win for her state, including a new fighter jet mission at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base.
“I’ve gotta put the people in Michigan first over my self-interest, over maybe what people assume are gonna be my political interests,” Whitmer explained last week in an interview with the popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America.”
Sanders’ approach hasn’t escaped critiques, either. A pair of Democratic senators from battleground states — Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania — suggested their fellow Senate colleague and other Trump critics ought to stop using the term “oligarchy” in relation to Trump’s billionaire Cabinet because it doesn’t resonate with voters outside of coastal areas.
That dig was met with a brusque dismissal from Sanders.
“Well, jeez. We had 36,000 people out in Los Angeles, 34,000 people in Colorado. We had 30,000 people in Folsom, California, which is kind of a rural area. I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are,” Sanders said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month.
Faiz Shakir, a top adviser to Sanders, also responded to Fetterman on Sunday, saying he ought to be put “in the category of Democrats who wants to talk down to people [and who] think they’re just too dumb to understand the general notions of powerful elites running this country.”
Outside Friday’s rally in Harrisburg, vendors hawked anti-Trump resistance merchandise for sale that included images of Sanders, as well as hats with the letters “AOC 2028” emblazoned on them, advocating for a future presidential run by the 35-year-old congresswoman from New York. Ukrainian blue and yellow flags flew atop parked cars while attendees who wore “Gulf of Mexico” shirts in defiance of Trump’s name change for the basin posed for photos from the media.
Attendees, many of whom had never been to a political rally before, said they came out to hear from Sanders out of anger and anxiety, and as a way to make a stand themselves.
“I’m worried for myself and for my other friends who look like me, because people are getting deported who aren’t even criminals or anything at all. They just go, ‘Oh that’s what you look like? Put you in the gulag.’ It’s awful, it’s terrible,” Jozlynn Ayers, a retail worker in Harrisburg, told HuffPost.
“I can’t watch the news anymore,” added Nancy Michaelian, a nurse from Harrisburg. “It’s unreal to me that the Congress has laid down and given up all responsibility. It’s mind-blowing.”