How the Bernie Sanders campaign became a force to be reckoned with

If the revolution rolls on much longer, Bernie Sanders will no longer need to finish his speeches at all. He may simply be able to rely on the audience to supply the punchlines.

“Who is the biggest welfare recipient in America?” he asked a rally in Rindge on Saturday. “Walmart,” they booed in unison, eagerly anticipating his now familiar critique of the retailer’s low pay.

“What happened to the banks?” he mused in Manchester two days later. “They stole the country, the assholes,” shouted a voice from the crowd, with only minor embellishment of the intended homily on Wall Street greed.

Though the content has changed little since he first challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic party nomination in May last year, what began as a set of lectures full of rhetorical questions has evolved into call-and-response pantomime.

But despite the angry message at these trademark rallies, young crowds and an anarchic music soundtrack have brought a carnival atmosphere to the campaign trail unlike that of any other candidate in 2016.

The theatrics appear to be working. More than 50,000 people came to see Sanders in Iowa in the months leading up to his narrow defeat there to a once unassailable-looking Clinton.

Some 40,000 people have now been to see the stage show in New Hampshire too, where voters are notorious for making up their minds at the last minute but go into Tuesday’s primary favouring him by a double-digit margin in the polls.

“I am on the fence right now,” said sales manager Patrick Aicholtz in Rindge, as John Lennon’s Power to the People served as warm-up music. “There is a lot of what Bernie says that makes a lot of sense to me. I would like to hear today about how things are going to get accomplished.”

The senator’s answer – a political revolution in which people power forces Congress to abandon its dependency on campaign contributions and embrace sweeping societal change – sounds more like the lyrics to Lennon’s Imagine, but in the surreal atmosphere of the 2016 election nothing seems impossible.

“If you had asked me five years ago, I would have said ‘no way’,” concluded the very down-to-earth looking Aicholtz. “But a world in which Donald Trump is leading the Republican race is a world in which anything can happen.”

The aim of the Sanders campaign therefore is not simply to win New Hampshire’s small number of delegates for the party nomination but to convince voters elsewhere in the country that something historic is going on, and pave the way to more important victories in Nevada and the mostly southern Super Tuesday states.

Looking back over the last nine months of the campaign however it is hard to escape the feeling that whatever happens in New Hampshire, the aim of startling America may have been met.

This first primary may or may not mark the highwater point of the revolution, but the tide has come up far further than anyone expected already.

One sign of how far the campaign has come is the explosion in media interest in recent days. Where once the press pack following Sanders could fit comfortably in a large family car, the traveling reporters have begun to outgrow the coach that the campaign eventually hired to ferry them from speech to speech.

At the outset, even several of those who were covering Sanders made it clear they would rather be on the other bus: the one carrying former secretary of state Clinton to the White House and therefore theoretically containing better career prospects too.

But since her narrow escape in Iowa, the eye-rolling on the Bernie bus has slowly been replaced by those looking to understand how a 74-year-old “democratic socialist” could possibly be drawing level in some national polling with his supposedly anointed rival for the nomination.

As small donations pour in from supporters eager to take on the big money behind other candidates, there is no shortage of funds to pay for an increasingly professional campaign infrastructure.

There is still a playfulness to the logistics machine behind Sanders. On the night of the Iowa caucuses, a staff member attracted scowls from airport security as he danced through the pat downs and wanding.

Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager who had been tempted back into politics after semi-retirement running a comic book store outside Washington, presided over a plane full of advisers and reporters that flew to New Hampshire in the early hours with the pomp of Air Force One but the mischievous of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.

But fame has also brought increased security concerns, and last week the campaign received secret service protection for the first time, forcing Sanders off his own branded tour bus and into the standard motorcade of Cadillac Escalades and Chevrolet Suburbans that ferry most big-name American politicians.

Even compared to the much larger White House motorcade, the first few days have been tense affairs. Unlike Clinton, whose apparently impromptu stops at coffee shops tend to be planned long in advance, Sanders makes the security jittery because his movements are unpredictable, often making sudden detours to greet supporters by the side of the road.

The unusually interactive audiences also pose a challenge for the stern but efficient agents now standing between the senator and supporters who are often keen to make to their own way on stage.

Where walking the rope line was often a long drawn out affair, the senator is now whisked out of venues with a military punctiliousness somewhat at odds with is free-wheeling reputation.

The grandfather preaching revolution can also make for an unlikely looking rock star at times.

Standing next to his son Levi, and his three adopted children at the rally in Manchester, the senator appeared to struggle while trying to discreetly open a water bottle under his lectern.

“He was parched, but he can’t just give it to his son to open,” explained an aide later. “Somebody would write a story about how he can’t open a water bottle because he’s old and weak.”

But the appeal of this 1960s revolutionary to his young audiences is undeniable. Many are too young to remember the conservative backlash of the 1980s or the compromises of the political left in the 1990s and are drawn to what they see as a hopeful message.

“I just got married and it’s really hard with crippling student debt to have the life that your parents had, going out and buying a house, purchasing a car and having the life that you really want and dream of,” explains New Hampshire graduate student Dan Boches at a rally in Portsmouth on Sunday. “I think it’s really hard for our generation and inspiring to hear someone say those things.”

Sanders, for his part, appears to relish the criticism his campaign is getting from Clinton and others that his promises of universal healthcare and free public college tuition are unrealistic.

“I have been criticised for saying this, so let me say it again,” he often says now. “I believe that healthcare is a right for all people, not a privilege.”

As he is equally fond of reminding audiences now, the campaign has come a long way in nine months.

Barely registering in the opinion polls back then, the campaign may have felt more amateurish and chaotic, but it was also largely ignored by the other candidates and the media.

If he wins on Tuesday night with anything like the margin predicted by the polls, then the recent few weeks of attacks by Clinton and the Republicans may begin to look like a tea party compared with the storm that is about to hit.

But those around him are hopeful that voters in 2016 are different – less susceptible to attack ads an spin, and more willing to make their own minds up.

“I think with the internet people are starting scrutinise candidates more,” suggested Henry, a young volunteer from Brooklyn who has travelled up to help knock on doors in New Hampshire. “They are starting to look more into their past, see what they’ve done, see who supports them and I think under that kind of scrutiny, Bernie still stands up.”