Bernie's club

Bernie's Wellesley fan club

At Hillary Clinton's alma mater, a small band of Sanders supporters is up against a well-organized machine.

By Annie Karni

It’s hard not to be aware of Hillary Clinton’s presence on the rolling lakeside campus of Wellesley College, even 46 years after the college's most famous alum graduated. Her portrait hangs here in the political science department, alongside letters she sent to her former professors. At the campus archives, librarians are happy to cart out a stack of yellowed newspaper clippings and worn-out yearbooks documenting Clinton’s four active years on campus. The bookstore sells a Hillary Clinton action figure.

If the students who currently attend didn’t expressly choose Wellesley because of its Clinton connection, they’re keenly aware of the school’s strong tie to the Democratic frontrunner seeking to make history as the first woman president – the buzz among students is that a Clinton White House will greatly increase the prestige of a Wellesley degree. The love is requited – Clinton has credited her alma mater as the “all-women’s college [that] prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.” It was at Wellesley, after all, that Clinton first became a star, using her 1969 commencement speech to challenge the speaker invited by the administration, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke, for being out of touch with her generation. The bold move landed her on the cover of Time Magazine, making her famous before she even arrived at Yale Law School.

For politically active Wellesley women, it doesn’t feel like a duty to vote Clinton, but it can feel like bucking the trend not to. But on a chilly Monday afternoon before Thanksgiving break, a loosely organized group of about half-a-dozen students gathered in the empty basement of the campus student center to discuss their against-the-grain support for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

They didn’t all know each other socially – the women quietly found each other through the Wellesley Students for Bernie Facebook page, which now has 275 members and counting (compared to 815 in the pro-Clinton student Facebook group). Many said their support for Sanders put them in the minority in their social circles, but they did not feel moved by the former secretary of state, despite living in the dormitories she once resided in and studying in the classrooms where she learned.

“My dad thinks my support for Bernie is totally misguided because I go to Wellesley,” admitted sophomore Claire Devlin. “He keeps saying it’s bad for the brand not to vote for Hillary, which I just think is the most absurd thing.”

Devlin said most of her close friends on campus are Clinton supporters. But for her, “Hillary is just too tied to big money, and has too many people in politics who she maybe owes favors to. Maybe Bernie won’t be able to institute all the policies he wants, but his ideas are there and that’s what matters to me.”

The Bernie backers said support for Clinton can feel more personal to students because of the alumni connection (Clinton attended her 45th college reunion here last year). “A lot of people have said, ‘I’m going to vote for Hillary because it will increase the value of my degree,'” said Anne Conron, the sophomore who launched the Wellesley for Bernie Facebook group.

Conron, who also co-founded the campus Student Labor Action Project, said vocalizing support for Sanders was important “to let people know they can explore other options.”For others in the group, their education at Wellesley has actually shifted them away from blindly supporting a woman for the sake of supporting a woman. “I used to be a Hillary supporter,” said sophomore Emily Boyke, who said she backed Clinton on gender grounds. “What changed is I began to understand there’s a difference between representation and actual change.”

Aside from advertising a small debate watch party, and spreading the word about a trip to meet the Vermont senator in person at a rally earlier this fall, however, the Bernie contingent at Wellesley is still deciding how active they plan to be on the campus where Clinton spoke eight years ago during her first presidential campaign, and who will run the show. “We’re chugging along, but we’re super informal,” said Conron. The group has no upcoming events on the schedule, and plans to pick up its activity after final exams, if and when anyone decides to take the lead.

But if they are going to start a political revolution for Sanders on their campus, they are up against a well-organized machine – a challenge Sanders himself can identify with. Hours before their informal basement meeting, a group of 18 overworked Wellesley students supporting Clinton gathered amid oriental rugs and plush couches, in the campus’ most coveted dorm, for a working lunch.

There, Hannah Lindow, president of Wellesley Students for Hillary, reviewed the group’s upcoming schedule as if she were Clinton’s real-life campaign manager. With a laptop in front of her, she efficiently ticked off plans for canvassing trips to New Hampshire; an inter-collegial Hillary trivia night in Boston; upcoming guest speakers and phone banking events to raise money for the campaign. They discussed the most recent debate watch party and a sweatshirt sale that raised money for their transportation costs to canvassing stops. Most importantly, the group discussed the upcoming launch of a campus-wide campaign to embrace the word “progressive” for their candidate and wrestle it away from Sanders and his supporters.

“Progressive is a word we’re trying to own on campus,” said Ahilya Chawla, chairman of Wellesley Students for Hillary. “In terms of your personal networks, really think about the friends of yours who say things like, ‘Hillary doesn’t represent my interests, Bernie represents feminist issues better.’ These are things that are said on campus. This is an opportunity to come and talk about that to someone who is really well-educated.”

While the Bernie backers are planning to regroup and refocus after winter break, the Hillary group is making sure they don’t lose momentum over the holidays. Chawla, a senior who is currently applying for a job doing field organizing with the official Clinton campaign, reminded the group that for the third Democratic debate in December, “we’ll all be home on break, but I’d like us still to do a lot of Tweeting.”

The Sanders group knows they bear little resemblance to the Hillary group, which has a five-person executive leadership committee, finance and organizing teams, a communications staff larger than most presidential campaigns – and even a student historian, currently mining Clinton’s college thesis on Saul Alinsky for new ways to show off her progressive bona fides.But that’s the way they like it.

“The Hillary group on campus is a job – they have positions, it’s legit,” admitted Conron, who takes Biology with Lindow. “I like the idea of not a lot of authority, not a huge hierarchy, just letting people organize what they want. It gives more power to the people.”

Indeed, eight months into the campaign and the semester, the two student groups at Wellesley have begun to mirror the campaigns they support – the ambitious young women supporting Hillary are backed by an outside infrastructure of powerful allies and alumni, and feel a personal connection to the candidate. They even met her last September in New Hampshire, where she told them she used to skip class to canvas for George McGovern in college, and they threw a party at the campus bar to celebrate her birthday. Lindow said she devotes 30 hours a week to running the group, and their ambition for Clinton and for themselves knows no bounds.

“I told the campaign we can get 100 people in a room,” Lindow said of an upcoming event on campus. “I want to exceed expectations here and really pack it.”

One first-year student in the group, Riann Tang, bashfully admitted she didn’t support Clinton in 2008 because she wanted to make history someday as the first woman president. “I don’t want to be president anymore, and now I want Hillary to win,” she laughed, citing Clinton's depth of her foreign policy experience.

The Bernie team, in contrast, is less organized – but they represent an anti-establishment group that is bucking expectations and pressure from family members and peers by supporting the underdog who is challenging their most famous alum. For them, it's about believing in a cause over an individual, even if that person is one of their own.

“Hillary Clinton is a mainstream Democrat with a lot of Wall Street donors,” shrugged Claire Salerno, a sophomore who runs track.

And they are eager to push back on the same idea the Clinton campaign is putting forward. “I see Hillary as a person who is clouded in this progressive jargon, as a reaction of being pushed to the left,” said Conron. “Hillary Clinton is not progressive.”

The Hillary and Bernie groups both agree the discourse on campus is respectful, even when they disagree – but the debate on campus remains firmly anchored on the Democratic side. “I met one girl who supports Ben Carson,” Devlin offered when asked about Republican organizing on campus. The group said they had heard about a Wellesley students for Rubio group sprouting up, but didn't know anyone who was a member.

For the few academics on campus who remember Clinton as she was at 20, the political debate surrounding the election is similar to one Clinton herself would have enjoyed close to a half-century ago when she was a student.

“I don’t know and I certainly wouldn’t try to make a judgment of where she would stand today,” Clinton’s former thesis adviser, political science professor emeritus Alan Schechter, told POLITICO, when asked if Clinton might be a Bernie supporter herself in today’s environment.

“She was never a liberal ideologue,” said Schecter, who used to bring a group of Wellesley students to Washington annually to meet with her when Clinton served as first lady. “There were ideologues at the time with the views that Bernie has today. The key to her politics as it developed then, when she wrote the senior thesis, she wrote it as a pragmatist.”