What is Bernie Sanders Building This Time?
The two-time presidential candidate is rallying thousands, but what kind of organization is getting created? Plus, how to understand the attack on ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising powerhouse.
Two days ago, on the heels of an eight-week barnstorm totaling 17 events across eleven Midwest and Western states, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued a statement titled “On Moderation.” “Sisters and Brothers,” it began, “In unprecedented times, we have to act in unprecedented ways. And, with your support, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. Our grassroots political revolution is aggressively taking on Trump and the Oligarchy -- and we’re making real progress.”
He went on to recount his travels to Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, California, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, holding rallies attended by more 250,000 people mostly in districts held by Republican Members of Congress. About a third of the attendees, according to the Sanders team, were either Republicans or independents. (This Thursday, Sanders will pick up this “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with three stops across Pennsylvania.)
Sanders says he’s building something more than a political rock tour:
“We’re not just parachuting into communities for great rallies. We’re doing something more. We are working hard to build a sustainable, progressive grassroots infrastructure -- focusing on marginal congressional districts that have Republican Members of Congress. We’ve already hired local organizers in Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan, with more to come. These organizers are building grassroots coalitions with great success. They are already putting together well-attended town meetings where community members come together to discuss local concerns. Over 500 folks were out in Michigan last week and 350 attended a meeting in Wisconsin. They are also organizing door-to-door canvassing, setting up phone-banks and engaging in social media activities. We’re not going to let the Republican Representatives, who prefer to hide from their constituents, escape their responsibilities.”
He also says his team is using the Fighting Oligarchy tour to recruit progressive candidates to run for office, and so far more than 5,000 people have expressed an interest.
The rest of his “On Moderation” statement reads like standard Sanders boilerplate attacking the “Democratic Establishment” for a mix of left-bashing and complacency. If you are a fan of Sanders’ critique of the concentration of power and wealth in America, this will all sound familiar. Perhaps it resonates more now, when billionaires are running the US government and shredding the social safety net. Or perhaps you think Sanders is too much of an open socialist to reach middle-of-the-road Americans who have been taught to fear that word. That’s not what concerns me right now.
The question is, what is Bernie building? Friday, I talked with Jeremy Slevin, a top Sanders staffer who is overseeing the organizing work. He shared more details of what they’ve done so far and offered some insight on where they are going. In addition to all the rallies, Slevin said, “We've also been holding organizing calls in all of these states. I think the first one in Iowa had over 700 people. He's joined those in Wisconsin, Nebraska and two in Iowa now, and all of them are doing multiple events.” All of these efforts, he said, are being conducted under the operational flag of “Friends of Bernie Sanders,” his political campaign arm. “Some, like the town halls this [past] week, we partner on. Some of the events we are leading ourselves. Like all these organizing calls were just us leading it….Some, something's already going on so we amplify it.”
He also said they are doing a lot with the “fresh new list” of people they’ve collected from these rallies. “We are regularly hitting them with texts and emails and actions,” he said. In Utah, for example, they urged supporters to sign onto a ballot initiative seeking to protect collective bargaining rights for public sector unions. The measure seems likely to qualify with far more signatures than organizers had originally sought, an indication that Sanders’ campaign was a big help. In California, he said, “we are sending follow ups to ask them to call their members of Congress and put pressure on them on reconciliation and or to host and organize these town halls.” They’re also partnering with groups like Run for Something and Emerge to work through the thousands of people who have expressed interest in running for office.
I think it’s clear all this work is pretty experimental for the Sanders team, because it’s not tied to a specific election campaign and because it’s basically something they’ve found their way into more or less spontaneously. Other than targeting more pivotal swing districts, it is not yet clear if Fighting Oligarchy is slated to expand to a national scale. And while Sanders raised $11.5 million in the first quarter of 2025—a solid donor vote of confidence in his leadership—so far he’s spent a pittance of that on hiring full-time local organizers. Slevin put that in this perspective:
“I think it's a start. I think, from our perspective, there is, and you probably agree with this, there is a massive organizing vacuum. I don't think the Democratic Party is sufficiently doing this work. The campaign committees don't really do this work. And there is a lot of energy, obviously, as exemplified by the rallies and all the actions in the states. So, I think it's been incredibly valuable. Is it the be all, end all? We work for a single senator, and these, these organizing efforts are having tremendous success, but we also recognize that we can't alone, be the organizing hub across the country.”
I think there are two ways to respond to what Sanders is doing now, one that takes the view of someone whose house is burning down and is glad to see some volunteers show up with buckets and hoses to help put out the fire, and the other that takes the view of someone who has seen this fireman before and wonders where he went four years ago and eight years ago when it turned out his fire brigade got muscled out by a more popular one (OK, this analogy isn’t ideal!).
On the one hand, we’re in a national democratic emergency and everyone who stands up to fight back from whatever perch is welcome. But on the other hand, consider this searing critique from a longtime organizer who put a huge amount of effort into Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. This person asks important questions:
"Why is his campaign account doing the work that Our Revolution (OR) was ostensibly created for? If OR can't or won't, why doesn't he snap the reins and put people who can back inside? How do you square a full-throated defense of big D 'democracy' while operating exclusively through structures that are 100% controlled by himself and consultants, like Faiz [Shakir]? Where is the small d 'democracy' of people powered movements, and how exactly does his praxis reflect a concern with that?
I read your American Prospect piece and I know you asked pointed questions. But there's a certain kind of feeling you get when someone you want to trust is quite obviously dancing around the whole point. And the point is, Bernie, you are old and won't be around long. Why aren't you doing anything that builds durable institutions that reflect your politics, and instead merely channel people into the containers held loosely by those you pay and control?
Bernie is reflecting a long-lasting permanent feature of his public record: a distaste for people with demands of HIM. He reminds me of the classic trope of the leader who craves a direct connection with 'the people' while doing nothing to build up or support the kinds of organizations that people can join, participate in, influence, and in some cases lead. The more success he has turning out crowds, the more this ongoing weak spot stands out as a hallmark of his entire career, including both presidential campaigns and whatever OR turned out to be. He has no problem publicly anointing Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's head with his oil; how strange that there is no oil left for the kinds of organizations that made AOC possible, such as Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats, and DSA. At some point you have to think, since he isn't stupid he must be doing this on purpose, and we don't know why. I want him to have to answer the 'why' in front of someone who won't let him weasel out of an honest answer.
I was following very closely when Bernie went back on his word to NOT put Jeff Weaver [his 2016 presidential campaign manager] in charge of OR, resulting in the exodus of most of the original staff. It was a decision made pretty early on to reject the leadership of whatever might pass as Bernie grassroots leadership in favor of 'friends of Larry Cohen [former president of the Communications Workers of America who is chairman of OR] and Jeff Weaver.' This kind of decision making has been a real hallmark, and it was very obvious that in 2020 his campaign was actively trying to suppress any kind of initiative from below in favor of working with and through experienced (and compromised) Democratic operatives.
One reason I'm not happy with all of this, is that IF Bernie had cultivated one or many real organizations under his umbrella, maybe DSA wouldn't be run by sectarians today? Maybe a membership org with hundreds of thousands of members would in this very moment be implementing some kind of thoughtful strategy implemented by thousands of experienced and networked Democratic Socialists? But that's not what's happening right now and that's a shame."
This person has receipts. Sanders’ consistent choice to run personalized organizations rather than democratically-run ones has allowed him to build up a strong brand and a big following, which in our fragmented age is no small thing. But personalized leadership comes with costs too. As this organizer continued:
“People active in 2016 would gather, anticipating that avenues would be open to participation and leadership closer to what they experienced in the past. They were thinking, 'well this time we're way more organized so my experience will be even better and we'll be stronger!' But the reality was that top campaign staff had made the decision to sideline anyone who wasn't connected to this or that consultant. I was reminded of the old Chicago saw: a young man went to the office of a political ward boss and asked to volunteer. The boss said 'Who sent you?' ‘No one,’ replied the young man. The boss: ‘I don't want nobody that nobody sent.’
Meanwhile we saw repeated hires of people that weren't vetted or managed properly, ranging from Briahna Joy Gray (who turned out to be a loose cannon and was sidelined without getting fired) to Darius Khalil Gordon, who was fired for 'antisemitic tweets' made when he as 19. In contrast to BJG, Darius was a very good guy whose career was fucked over because the main office wasn't bothering to vet people seriously, and after he was attacked no one was willing to stand up for him. Shameful coming in, shameful coming out. We saw that under Faiz, Weaver, Chuck Rocha [Sanders’ Latino politics advisor], and Larry Cohen (all men, this matters). The campaign saw its bench as coming from loosely connected careerists and consultants in state capitals, staff of friendly electeds, and unions, invariably connected to one of those men.
Bernie might still have won [in 2020] were it not for [Rep. Jim] Clyburn [D-SC] and the field uniting behind Biden. But even then, it would have been the victory of a new variant of machine politics and NOT reflective of the explosion of energy that Bernie helped generate in 2016. He resisted working with outsiders in 2015, got rid of them in 2019, abandoned OR as a vehicle for anything at all but Larry Cohen's retirement sinecure, and did a national tour that acted as if everything was starting from zero - ignoring most if not all of the people-power verticals on the ground.
At this point you no longer have to ask how Bernie understands political power; he has proved it again and again. He thinks it flows from himself to those below, not the other way around.
This is a very old pattern in American politics: Charismatic national leaders who stand out as “voices” for change but can’t or won’t convert their gigantic followings into local and state organizations capable of acting on their own. The bottom line is control. The very combination of skill, ambition, stamina, empathy, vision and luck that enables someone to win elected office and then rise to national prominence requires top-down control. Enabling your followers to organize themselves means they will inevitably make demands you can’t fulfill, let alone manage.
And so, the much harder but necessary move is for people themselves to stop being followers, to remember that “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss” is a more than a line in a song, and to insist at every stage of the process that power-building has to be a two-way street.
Singing the ActBlue Blues…
Thursday, Trump ordered his inJustice Department to investigate ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising powerhouse, for a bunch of bullshit reasons pertaining to allegations about “illegal ‘straw donor[s]’ and foreign contributions in American elections,” and to report back to him within 180 days. As if the guy who has opened his entire office to foreign influences should be listened to when it comes to keeping foreign powers and interests from impacting American elections.
This news generated a lot of reactions, not all of them all that carefully parsed. Heather Cox Richardson wrote that this “targeting of Democratic infrastructure would hobble the Democrats.” Jessica Craven said it was “deeply alarming,” not just because it was an abuse of power but because it was “weaponizing the DOJ to attack the infrastructure of the opposing party.” And Lauren Egan of The Bulwark, who has the opposition as her beat, wrote a story that was breathlessly headlined, “Inside the Democrats’ Attempts to Stave Off Financial Death.”
And my friend Dave Karpf devoted a whole issue of his excellent Substack to the move, arguing that by singling out ActBlue, Trump was aiming to insure that Democrats would not be able to compete fairly in the 2026 elections. Noticeably, the GOP isn’t also ordering up an investigation of WinRed, the main Republican fundraising platform, even though as Karpf notes there are far more consumer complaints filed about its practices than ActBlue. Karpf goes on to describe how the Orange Pinhead will be soon hosting a private dinner for the top holders of his personal crypto token, some of whom are likely not based in the US. Trump is not interested in stopping the flow of foreign money into American politics, Karpf writes, “his interest is in reducing the flow of any money toward his opponents.”
Yes, what the Orange Cheeto is trying to do here is bad. These are all valid concerns. But these responses are overstating the problem. ActBlue is not a monopoly nor is it irreplaceable “Democratic infrastructure.” Hobbling its operations or even just forcing its management to devote time and resources to defending itself in court may nick Democratic fundraising a tad. The even harder truth is that in most cases, a few more dollars doesn’t affect the outcome of an election. Also, you can have more money than your opponent and still lose (just ask Hillary Clinton ‘16 and Kamala Harris ‘24 about this).
But the bottom line is this: If Democrats have an advantage over Republicans in the campaign donation ecosystem because of ActBlue, it’s not because ActBlue has some kind of magic software. Yes, if you sign up for an account and give it your credit card information, ActBlue makes it super-fast to donate. But millions of us make donations via other platforms as well. The Democratic small donor advantage is not do much in the software platform as it is in the learned behavior of millions of givers. If, hypothetically, the Justice Department were able to shut down ActBlue, that learned behavior wouldn’t disappear. If anything, trying to suppress some behavior often makes people hungrier to do it. Personally, I’m far more worried about signs that big donors are holding back from giving to social justice groups (as Jessica Washington reports for The Intercept), or that some foundations aren’t recognizing the urgency of the moment and opening their spigots (as David Callahan reports for InsidePhilanthropy.com).
First, ActBlue isn’t about to shut down, despite the outrageous claims of scammers, spammers and not a few regular Democratic candidates and committees sending out shrill emails and texts trying to raise money off that alarm. (The flood of these has been so bad that ActBlue itself sent out an email to its friends and partners reminding everyone that under its our Account Use Policy, “It’s vital that donors are NOT misled about the security, strength, and viability of our platform. Implying that ActBlue may no longer be a viable platform erodes the trust the donors have in our platform – and damages all of us. [Emphasis in the original.]
Josh Nelson of Civic Shout did a dive into the background of one of the scammers sending these messages, something called the Democratic Strategy Institute, which is joined at the hip with another scammer, the National Democratic Training Committee, that itself spent more than $10 million in the last cycle on three related firms, Message Digital, Sapphire Strategies and Mothership Strategies. The latter is indeed the mothership for scammy and spammy Democratic fundraising. If, like me, you’re sick and tired of these groups preying on gullible small donors, the thing to do is to call on Democratic leaders like Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) whose AmeriPac leadership committee is a top client of Mothership, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) whose Medicare for All PAC is another top client and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), the head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, another top client of Mothership, to stop using its services.
So, while it is great that the heads of the main Democratic fundraising committees have all issued a statement condemning Orangeman for trying to “undermine democratic participation” expressing their solidarity with ActBlue, they could actually do a lot to strengthen democratic participation by cleaning up their own house at the same time.
Second, ActBlue has a lot of money squirreled away and can afford to mount its own defense, though there’s little harm in sending it a donation out of solidarity right now. And if it were about to be shut down, say, by the Treasury Department suspending its banking privileges, well, then we’d be living in a much worse situation than just not having fair elections next year!
Third, let’s get more honest about ActBlue’s role in the Democratic and progressive fundraising ecosystem. It is indeed central, but it is not the only way for anyone to donate to Democratic candidates or progressive groups. Campaigns and organizations can add buttons on their websites from a variety of alternatives, including NGP, Numero, GoodChange, Action Network, Every.org, and Oath. Trump is going after ActBlue because it’s well-known and even the whiff of investigative questions can chill some donor behavior (though the opposite seems to be the case at the moment). If anything, getting more organizations and donors to use other platforms might be a very good thing, especially when you consider how much money gets wasted in politics by people’s “rage-giving” instead of putting their money where it can have the greatest impact.
In that last department, there’s good news to report. Oath, which was launched in 2022 to help center-left donors spend their campaign contributions more effectively, is growing like gangbusters. Brian Derrick, its co-founder and CEO, tells me that in the 2024 cycle, $40 million in contributions were made via its platform, compared to just $2 million in 2022. Right now about 600 candidates are listed on it, but he expects that to quadruple or quintuple in the next few months. And Oath is also starting to give donors guidance on what organizations they should support if they are focused on a cause rather than an election outcome.
Instead of over-emphasizing the partisan impact of a Trumped-up investigation of ActBlue or claiming Democrats might face “financial death” if it somehow went away, it might make more sense to build the defense of ActBlue from a broader standpoint: No president should be allowed to use the Justice Department to target his political opponents. Ideally, in the same way that universities have banded together to defend their independence from political interference, the whole political-industrial complex ought to be speaking up against the targeting of ActBlue.
Back in the early days of digital politics, such a cross-partisan coalition was no fantasy. When the Federal Elections Commission started talking about regulating political bloggers, the founders of DailyKos and RedState jointly urged the government to steer widely around the blogosphere. In that respect, it’s quite something to note the dismal silence of many so-called conservatives and libertarians who posture as defenders of free speech.
P.S.: If you really want to worry about Democratic infrastructure, ask Democratic party leaders what they’re doing about NGP VAN, which manages most campaigns’ access to voter file data, and which nearly crashed last fall.
Duly Noted
—The one thing to read on the first 100 days of Trump II: James Fallows on The People Who Have Put These Days to Good Use, starting with Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde who spoke out first.
—Speaking on last week’s “What’s the Plan” call, Indivisible National co-founder Ezra Levin reported that it had registered its 2000th local group, doubling in size from last year. He also said more local groups are signing up at a current rate of ten new ones a day. (Sign up here to attend these town-hall style calls with Levin and co-founder Leah Greenberg, which happen every Thursday at 3pm ET.)
—Here’s a great mini-case study by Adam Klasfeld of All Rise News explaining how an initially small group of Georgetown Law students crowdsourced a spreadsheet called “Legal Industry Responses to Fascist Attacks Tracker” that was intended to help them make informed decisions about potential future employers, but is now causing law firms to try to improve their ratings.
—Fifteen Democratic Senators, included champion floor-talker Cory Booker, just voted to confirm MAGA-man’s Ambassador to China. Why? (h/t Murshed Zaheed)
—Thursday is May Day, and there are now more than 1000 protest events taking place around the country, making it likely to be as big as the April 5 Hands Off and April 19 Earth Day protests. Find a rally near you!
Thank you for this information. Only someone who is a true journalist would observe and report the many facts that the average person doesn’t have access to.
"The bottom line is control." - that's a valid criticism. I vaguely recall Obama had a grassroots organization after his 1st campaign that he let 'die on the vine'. But this takes nothing away from the fact that - Sanders is the leader of the moment and AOC is his heir apparent. Let's hope AOC learns from Sanders's shortcomings and mistakes.