SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS – As far as Super Tuesday states go, Massachusetts is not the crown jewel. California, with its 415 delegates, contains the largest possible haul for the presidential hopefuls; Texas, with 228 delegates, will be hotly contested as well. In North Carolina (110 delegates) and Virginia (99), polls show a tightly packed field that might break for any of Sanders, Biden, or Bloomberg.
Yet Bernie Sanders hosted rallies in Massachusetts on both Friday and Saturday: first in Springfield, an industrial city in the state’s west, and then in Boston. Both events turned out sizable and enthusiastic crowds, as Sanders’s rallies tend to do, despite being announced just a few days prior: 4,750 people in Springfield, another 13,500 in freezing temperatures at Boston Common.
With polls showing Sanders with leads in California and Texas, working to lock down other delegate-rich Super Tuesday states makes sense. But his campaign’s push to secure Massachusetts, and maximize his share of its 91 delegates, has surprised some observers, as Sanders makes a play to sweep fellow presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s home state. Indeed, when Sanders took the stage in Springfield on Friday night, Warren was still in South Carolina, where she finished fifth. On Saturday, as Sanders spoke to a raucous crowd in Boston, Warren was in Texas. The energy being spent on winning the state is not insignificant: According to Massachusetts field director Dan Moraff, in the ten days since the Nevada caucus, more Sanders volunteers have knocked on doors in Massachusetts than any other Super Tuesday state outside of California.
That effort in Massachusetts picked up urgency in the past 48 hours, as both Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar exited the race, and numerous establishment Democrats (from Terry McAuliffe to Harry Reid) have dashed to endorse Biden. Bloomberg and Warren remain the only holdouts still running, and the Sanders campaign’s efforts to win Warren’s home state seem like a way to cut off her rapidly shrinking case to stay in past Super Tuesday.
ACCORDING TO ORGANIZERS, the Sanders campaign’s program in Massachusetts has mirrored their winning strategy in states like Nevada. They’re making a push to secure young voters and working-class voters of color across the Commonwealth. The state operation, which only began in earnest just over three weeks ago, seems to be paying early dividends. A poll from the radio station WBUR released Friday showed Sanders opening up a lead, with 25 percent to Warren’s 17 percent, though polling in Massachusetts has been limited to date.
This approach to Massachusetts breaks meaningfully with the dominant thinking that has long been sacred in the Democratic Party, which has cast its lot with Boston’s innovation economy and the area’s elite universities. Famously, the WikiLeaks dump of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 showed Martha’s Vineyard, the gilt-edged Massachusetts vacation enclave, to be one of the most commonly appearing place names. And the Democratic presidential field evinces this very same fixation with a certain Massachusetts minting. Pete Buttigieg was a Harvard graduate. Julián Castro went to Harvard Law School. Mike Bloomberg, a Massachusetts native, got an MBA from Harvard. Deval Patrick went there for undergrad and for a law degree. Elizabeth Warren was a Harvard professor.
But the rest of the state of Massachusetts looks a lot less like Boston and more like the Rust Belt, a place where deindustrialization has hollowed out a huge percentage of good-paying jobs and poverty remains vexingly high. It’s part of the reason why Massachusetts remains a purpler state than one would expect. Even in 2018, the state re-elected Republican governor Charlie Baker with two-thirds of the vote.
Massachusetts remains a purpler state than one would expect.
Outside of the gleaming towers of Cambridge, there are significant black and Latino communities that have been underserved by the state’s Democratic party politics. “There are those who say that Massachusetts is the epicenter of a comfortable Democratic consensus,” said Moraff. “But that’s not what we’re seeing. From Lowell to Holyoke to Worcester to Boston, where we put our four field offices, the multiracial working class is responding to our message. They are rejecting the failed politics of the political establishment.”
That the Sanders camp would set up field offices in those particular locations indicates the belief that they can build a winning coalition out of communities of color and old factory towns. Even their Boston outpost is in Roxbury, a low-income black neighborhood in the city’s south, far from the city’s tech campuses and elite universities (a decision that initially caused controversy internally). In Springfield, where Sanders rallied Friday, the poverty rate is 28.7 percent. Its population is 44 percent Hispanic or Latino, and almost 20 percent black.
“In this frantic run-up to Super Tuesday, the most important day of the Democratic primary process, that Senator Sanders would make time to spend Friday evening in Springfield speaks volumes to his understanding of the importance of the different regions of our state,” said Massachusetts state representative and Sanders Massachusetts co-chair Mike Connolly, who spoke at Saturday’s rally in Boston. “Here in Massachusetts, at the higher end of the economic spectrum we’re a state that’s fabulously wealthy with many people that enjoy tremendous opportunity. Underneath that, people are living on the margins: Family homelessness has doubled in the Commonwealth in the last ten years, ten years of allegedly strong economic growth.”
Elise Amendola/AP Photo
A vacant mill building in Gardner, Massachusetts. The rest of the state of Massachusetts looks a lot less like Boston and more like the Rust Belt.
This past weekend, out of their field office in Worcester, the campaign launched a multiday event called Berniepalooza, a canvassing push run from their central Massachusetts headquarters, a spartan commercial space that shares an entrance with a head shop. During the day, volunteers streamed in to be briefed and given turf for door-knocking, and then set out into the community, handing out campaign literature that was being printed off by four overworked printers in the Roxbury office and driven over. At night, to round out the experience, a handful of volunteer-organized musical performances were put on at venues around the city, with some high-profile endorsers in attendance, including H. Jon Benjamin of the Fox cartoon series Bob’s Burgers.
With a smattering of community and polytechnic colleges, as well as significant black and Latino populations and a median household income of just over $45,000, Worcester is exactly the sort of place that has become the backbone of the Sanders electorate. “The multiracial working class across Massachusetts has been battered by insane housing costs, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and skyrocketing inequality. These votes have not consolidated behind the Democrats or the Republicans; they have been mostly neglected by politicians of all stripes,” said Moraff. According to the campaign, 24.3 percent of the state operation’s canvassers blanketed Worcester and its surrounding neighborhoods this weekend.
AFTER SATURDAY morning’s Boston rally, Sanders’s storied legion of volunteers likewise descended on the city, knocking doors for the candidate in what might otherwise be thought of as Warren territory. I tagged along with two canvassers as they went door-to-door in a large, mixed-income housing development in Boston’s North End, to get a sense of what Sanders’s unrivaled ground game actually looks like.
It’s impossible to get a representative sample beyond mere anecdote going door-to-door, but in four hours, roughly half of the respondents canvassed were hard Sanders commits, or people who, if they voted, would only vote Sanders. Consistently they attested that no other campaign had contacted them. One woman who had recently moved from Arizona didn’t realize she was registered to vote, but when canvassers assured her that according to their records she was, she pledged to support Sanders. Another man of Haitian descent in his thirties said he and his whole family were Sanders supporters; they had no interest in any other candidates. Bloomberg’s appeal to the black community put him off, he said, and he hated the Clintons for their role in the 1994 Haitian coup and the deposition of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It took nearly the entire four-hour shift to encounter a supporter of any other candidate, including hometown Senator Warren. Only one person even mentioned Joe Biden by name.
On Sunday in Worcester, it was a similar story. In the West Tatnuck neighborhood, Sanders had roughly majority support from those who answered the door during a two-hour canvass. James, a 60-year-old Greek immigrant, said he wasn’t intending to vote because politicians “are all scoundrels,” but after hearing about Sanders’s student debt cancellation proposal, he reluctantly agreed to cast a ballot on Tuesday. He, like some others, mentioned he had been previously contacted by Sanders volunteers, and no other campaign.
After the final shift ended Sunday night, canvassers retired to a downtown Worcester bar and hookah lounge called Electric Haze for another volunteer-organized show. Supporters milled about as a three-person bar band played bluesy rock songs. Among a crowd that numbered barely more than a dozen volunteers and enthusiasts was high-profile supporter and surrogate Susan Sarandon, who had addressed volunteers at multiple Massachusetts outposts earlier in the day. She chatted with canvassers and signed a few autographs before heading out. On Monday, she departed for another Northeast state with very little polling that looks to be leaning toward Sanders: Maine.
