The Meticulously Engineered Grassroots Network Behind the Bernie Sanders Revolution

In late 2003, Zack Exley would mount his bicycle in Washington one night each month and lead himself on a tour of the capital’s six gatherings that fellow supporters of Howard Dean had organized on the networking site Meetup. There were more than 800 such gatherings nationwide, many of them in bars and cafés, the first time in American political life that online activism had systematically reproduced itself in the real world. Throughout the fall, the meetups had been symbols of Dean’s success, and were in many ways a forerunner to another Vermont politician who is today challenging the Democratic establishment from the left. But even as Dean’s Internet-catalyzed popularity grew, Exley saw trouble ahead, signs of an inexorable turn towards entropy. “It’s what I call the tyranny of the annoying,” said Exley, now a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders. “The worst people with the most time on their hands take over.”

At the time, Exley knew as much as anyone in the world did about the possibilities and limits of Internet activism. For the past few years, he'd been the de facto leader of the online opposition to George W. Bush. In 1999, he had purchased the domain gwbush.com and built what is often called the first political parody site, complete with doctored pictures showing the Republican front-runner at the time as a cocaine user. (Asked about it at a press conference, Bush called Exley a “garbage man” and mused that “there ought to be limits to freedom.”) As organizing director at MoveOn.org a few years later, Exley helped to direct the group’s response to the Iraq war, driving supporters to sign Web-based petitions it could deliver to Congress. After MoveOn’s member base voted in an online primary to endorse Dean, Exley was detailed to his Burlington headquarters to share expertise and some of MoveOn’s tools with a campaign leadership that had grown fascinated by potential uses of the Internet to cultivate supporters.