After a poll this week showed the
previously unthinkable — the 73-year-old Independent senator from Vermont
surging past Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire — there’s a feeling that the
Bernie Sanders operation is maturing from a quixotic pursuit for the White
House into the real deal.
Sanders’ campaign is calling the Franklin Pierce University and the
Boston Herald poll, which found
Sanders beating Clinton 44 percent to 37 percent in the Granite State, an “astonishing”
feat. It gives even more fuel to a momentum that the Sanders team is riding to
significantly expand its ground game, especially in New Hampshire.
The campaign has already outgrown
its modest office on Manchester Road in Concord, and will be moving the state
headquarters to Manchester in the coming days. The campaign currently has 10
staffers, with six or seven more staffers to begin Monday. A week after that,
another new crew is starting. Aides also will be scouting out more real estate
to add to the two field offices.
Barnes estimated the campaign had
received over 500 resumes in recent weeks, and spoke animatedly about the
aggressive expansion in the coming weeks.
Barnes didn’t want to call the poll
findings a game changer, saying it’s not going to cause an operational shift.
But she said the numbers help cultivate enthusiasm for the campaign’s
volunteers. She said “for the network of people supporting Bernie, it’s
astonishing.”
The picture is a far cry from
Sanders’ soft announcement of his presidential bid in late April, shifted to
the Senate Swamp near the Capitol, after questions arose about the ethics of
staging it in the Senate Radio/TV gallery. While he made headlines for busting
records for drawing 10,000 supporters to a rally in Wisconsin in July, last
weekend he managed to attract 28,000 people to a sports arena in Portland.
After spending Saturday at the Iowa
State Fair, and hosting a fundraiser in Chicago on Monday, Sanders heads to the
University of Nevada on Tuesday for another rally.
While the New Hampshire poll this
week was just one set of numbers, and Clinton still enjoys a comfortable lead,
the Democratic front-runner’s campaign was concerned enough to reach out to
supporters.
As Clinton’s aides were beating back
fresh headlines about the scandal over her use of private email server while
secretary of state, the campaign sent out a “friends and allies” memo, offering
talking points to minimize the poll, according to the New York Times.
Surdukowski also delivered a
takedown of both Sanders and Clinton, saying the Vermont senator’s currently
popularity is also about distaste with Clinton.
“I think that the Bernie crowds and
him at least in this one poll rocketing ahead is it’s both about Bernie. But I
also think it’s about Secretary Clinton in some ways. I think there are large
swaths of folks who are seeing a trust gap with Clinton. At the end of the day
there is a character and a trust issue. There’s a lot of deja vu in the
Nineties,” Surdukowski said. “I am as surprised as anybody at these remarkable
crowds.”
“I think the panic that folks are
trying to assign to it is off the mark. I would need to see more,” Sean Downey,
a Democratic operative working for Hilltop Public Solutions’ New England office
said. Downey is a Clinton supporter. “When you look at what the Clinton
campaign is doing is they’re organizing at the neighborhood level at a pretty
impressive rate, and her crowds aren’t exactly small.”
The Clinton campaign’s presence in the state is tangible, too. Harrell
Kirstein, the communications director for the Clinton campaign in the state,
noted that there are already six offices for Clinton throughout the state and a
seventh to be opened in Lebanon soon.
“New Hampshire has always been a
competitive race and that is something that we prepared for from the
beginning,” Kirstein said. He also noted that Clinton “said from the outset
that she’s going to take nothing for granted.”
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