It's about 7:30 pm on a sweaty Wednesday night in Brooklyn, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a consummate son of Brooklyn, has just accomplished the seemingly insurmountable task of quieting an 8,000-square-foot beer hall full of New Yorkers. Save for the whir of an industrial-sized fan overhead and intermittent rounds of applause and whoops of "That's right!" ringing out from the crowd, Sanders' is the only voice you hear.
Tonight, the Democratic presidential candidate is talking, as he always does, about building a revolution to fight wealth inequality. He's talking about how the "millionaires and billionaires" are getting richer, while the United States continues to have the highest rate of children living in poverty of any industrialized nation. "Enough is enough," the rumpled elder statesman repeats.
Sanders is on his soapbox, and to use his campaign vernacular, his nearly 200 followers in the bar are most definitely "feeling the Bern." Then, all at once, a spinning wheel pops up, obscuring Sanders' face.
Bernie is buffering.
A few seconds—and at least one joke from the woman sitting behind me about Hillary Clinton hacking the live-stream—Sanders is back on the massive projector screen at the back of the bar, and he hasn't missed a beat. Sanders is actually hundreds of miles away in D.C., but his speech is being broadcast to more than 3,000 watch parties across the country. In three more hours, he'll do it all over again for the West Coast.
Welcome to the age of live-streamed politics. YouTube has factored prominently in politics for years, and candidates have been dabbling with mobile broadcasting products like Periscope. But on Wednesday night, the Sanders campaign amplified the impact of the live-stream by organizing thousands of so-called "online house parties," to create what Sanders staffers are calling the largest campaign event of 2016 so far. These house parties, run by volunteers, not staffers, took place in coffee shops, bars, and living rooms in every state across the country and received more than 100,000 RSVPs online, though it's hard to say how many people actually showed up.
"Live-streams are not a new phenomenon, but I think what we’ve done is very unique," says Kenneth Pennington, Sanders' digital director. "We’re really excited about being able to maximize the size of room. By adding to those rooms we’ll have 100,000 people gathering together to listen."
It's an approach that President Obama used toward the end of his 2008 campaign, but the fact that the Sanders campaign is doing it so early, and at such scale, reflects the maturity of the model. The goal is to get people not just tuning in, but taking action. It combines the best of old-school organizing with the best of new school technology, and in doing so, it turns the often solitary activity of watching a live-stream on your laptop into a national, communal, campaign event.
"Live-stream house parties are a smart way to get a lot of supporters in one place without having campaign staff on the ground in that area," says Josh Cook, who served as Pennsylvania Digital Director for the 2012 Obama campaign. "The Sanders campaign can use this livestream to turn passive supporters into active volunteers as soon as the livestream ends."
Indeed, toward the end of the broadcast, Sanders urged supporters to text a number to instantly become part of his organizing team. And after it was over, several speakers took over the microphone at the back of the bar, urging supporters to sign up to volunteer, organize a house party, register people to vote, and of course, to donate by stuffing dollars into a reused cardboard box that was making its way around the room. "We're going to pass the hat," announced one representative from a union group called Labor for Bernie. "We don't need a lot, but a few bucks would be nice!"
Actually, the Sanders campaign does need a lot of money. It's raised just $15 million compared to Hillary Clinton's $45 million, meaning Sanders is still very much a long shot for the Democratic nomination. And yet, what's unique about that $15 million is how Sanders cobbled it together. In the second quarter of this year, more than 76 percent of his donations were less than $200, and according to the campaign, the average donation size hovers around $35 dollars.
That's why low-cost, high-impact events like this one not only suit the Sanders campaign, they enable it, allowing the staff to capture the excitement from small, individual donors by banding them together early, and beaming Sanders directly to them. "It's like inviting him to the party," says Charles Carr, one of the organizers of the Brooklyn event.
The fact is, not matter how much technology can accomplish, in politics, there's no substitute for the feel and buzz of the crowd. The group gathered in Brooklyn last night was a melting pot of races, genders, and ages, where older radical liberals sat alongside young kids just finding their political footing. For 18-year-old Alex Concepcion and 19-year-old Nikita Nekrasov, who sat side by side sipping water throughout the event, this will be their first time voting in a presidential election. Nekrasov said he was drawn to the event because he'd been reading up on Sanders "for a couple months now," following the conversation on Reddit and YouTubing old debate clips of the Senator.
Meanwhile, just a table away, Kristin Koepsel, who declined to give her age except to say she's younger than Bernie, describes herself as "one of those [Ralph] Nader people back in the day." In using technology to band so many people together, instead of allowing it to keep them apart, Sanders is giving these supporters the opportunity to feel part of something bigger.
"The Sanders campaign is smart to organize this way, it allows them to tap into support around the country without paying for a campaign staff in all 50 states," Cook says. "Using digital to reach more people for less money and get real on the ground volunteers out of it is smart, scrappy campaigning 101."
