Economics

Bernie Sanders's Political Revolution Enters Phase Two

If phase one was convincing people he can be competitive, phase two is showing people he can win.

Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, greets attendees after speaking during a Meskwaki Nation Town Meeting at the Meskwaki Tribal Center in Tama, Iowa, U.S., on Friday, Sept. 4, 2015. Sanders said yesterday he doesn't have a foreign policy section on his website's issues page because one of his campaign's problems is that "our support is growing faster than our political infrastructure."

Photographer: Bloomberg
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Ever since the crowds started showing up, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made a point of saying that the media has no idea why Americans wanted to join the political revolution.

He brought it up again last Thursday, during a town hall in Grinnell, Iowa, a college town with a population of about 9,000. It was his first town hall in the state after a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed him trailing Hillary Clinton by just seven points (a new Quinnipiac poll out Thursday shows him in a statistical dead heat with Clinton in the state). Like many Sanders events in recent months, the campaign had moved the venue to accommodate the larger-than-expected crowd, which meant that the event was taking place outside in a park despite the heat. Not that it fazed the crowd of hundreds, most of them white college students, or Sanders himself, who grew increasingly sweaty as the event progressed.