Wild Ride

Inside Bernie’s Wild Ride

How Sanders went from socialist also-ran to nearly overthrowing the Democratic Party.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti

The biggest argument was over running as a Democrat. Over and over, Bernie Sanders said he didn’t want to. He’d spent his whole life purposefully outside the Democratic Party. He treasured his status as the longest-serving independent in Congress. Running as a Democrat wasn’t who he was. He didn’t want to do it that way.

His longtime consultant Tad Devine and the rest of the group came down hard: this is never going to have a chance of working unless you get over it. Suck it up, they told him.

They were sitting around two years ago on couches and armchairs in liberal radio host Bill Press’s rowhouse near Eastern Market in Washington, picking at dinner. Sanders, his wife Jane, and all of his top people were there, except for campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who wouldn’t be hired for a year.

Sanders had asked Press to pull in a few others, too, including then-American Bridge president Brad Woodhouse, former Harry Reid chief of staff Susan McCue, Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). They spitballed and listened as the Vermont senator laid out what he wanted to do, talked about what a race would really entail, how tough running against Hillary Clinton would be. Jane Sanders gave off the distinct impression she was collecting information she hoped to use to talk him out of it.

Devine spoke toward the end. Reading notes off a yellow legal pad that he’d brought, he went deep in the mechanics—the pointlessness of running as a message candidate, the calendar, the states they’d need to win, the $40-50 million they figured they’d need to raise by Iowa—a number that sounded high at the time.

“Tad was super f--king organized,” said one person who attended. “There had been a ton of thought that had gone into this.”

The Sanders campaign is unquestionably a movement: even the smartest planners couldn't have come up with a plan to pull 10,000 or 20,000 people at a time to show up for Sanders’ grumpy grandpa socialist revival. But to write it all off as a fluke or a couple of media-fueled strokes of good luck misses the deliberation, drama and dysfunction that's defined the campaign since its earliest days. From those very first meetings, according to the accounts of two dozen people in and close to the campaign, Sanders and his staff have been more organized than the unfettered image they convey. But they've also been more haphazard and accidental than a presidential campaign should be. It’s a campaign where aides are grateful for the Secret Service protection that kicked in after Iowa, because that’s the only thing that forced Sanders to agree to travel plans more than two days in advance.

“Particularly for a long-shot candidate, it’s important that you have a real plan,” Devine said. “However: you need to be opportunistic, you need to deal with changing circumstances, and you need to realize that much of the ground that you cover is new ground. You have to do things that no one’s done before.”

The mission required it: they were trying to convince Democrats to toss aside a revered candidate and heavy frontrunner after Sanders himself had spent his career rejecting the Democratic Party. It may have been a ceiling they could never breach—after a landslide defeat in South Carolina, Sanders is making what looks like his final stand on Super Tuesday.

After that first meeting at Press’ house came another there in November, when Sanders himself invited Alyssa Mastromonaco, President Barack Obama’s former deputy chief of staff and one of his old college interns.

She cautioned them about how hard a race would be, noting that Obama already had a fundraising email list of 20,000 people for his leadership PAC when they were still working off folding tables in Chicago. The Sanders staffers proudly point out their email list was already 400,000—though that’s a list owned by his government office that he uses to send weekly newsletters that have a huge following, but which couldn’t be used for fundraising.

Sanders went around the room at the end, asking for gut checks.

In a story that’s become legend on the campaign, Devine’s business partner Mark Longabaugh, who ran New Hampshire for Dick Gephardt in 1988 and Bill Bradley in 2000 went last.

“I think you’re going to win New Hampshire,” Longabaugh said.

They thought he was crazy. He was counting on Sanders doing well with independents and an electorate changed by people moving in and out of the state. What he wasn’t counting on--what nobody was imagining at the time—was that Sanders would become a hipster icon.

“They’re killing me!” Sanders would complain to his staffers in the final crunch weeks before Iowa, as the Clinton campaign turned up the temperature.

Sanders was angry at Bill Clinton. Months of reporters digging through his past writing and personal life had gotten under his skin—“is this legitimate?” he’d ask, pushing back on responding—and what he felt were personal attacks from the former president were pushing him over the edge. He wanted his staff hitting back harder.

Devine, who urged Sanders not to fire back against people so popular in the Democratic Party, had worried how he’d handle this kind of stress. The second weekend in April 2015, Devine flew to Burlington for the final check-in. Over lunch and dinner with Bernie and Jane Sanders, he laid out what would be the case against running: the process was exhausting and invasive, he wouldn’t be home or with his grandchildren, doing well would mean learning to live with Secret Service protection. And yeah, they were going to attack him.

The campaign had not started smoothly. Sanders’ "yes" had leaked out before they were ready. The plan to do a launch web video fell apart. The website that they’d revamped in preparation for a run needed to be rebuilt again in a rush of through-the-night coding.

He raised $1.5 million off of a quickly scrambled press conference that looked like he’d stumbled into it on his way out of the Senate to get a sandwich. They were originally going to do it in the Senate, before someone realized that would be illegal.

He’d been traveling around the country for a year. Coming out of the Press dinners, his Senate chief of staff Michaeleen Crowell—who would later serve as Clinton stand-in during debate prep—pushed him to South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. His Senate staff moonlighted doing logistics and local press outreach, while outgoing Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen set them up in union halls or filling the rooms with CWA members. They were shocked back then when 300 people showed, bowled over by 600.

“Now I would say it was about running,” said Cohen, who’s since retired from CWA and become a senior adviser for the campaign. “But I wouldn’t have said that then.”

It took until October 2014 for Sanders to call New Hampshire Democratic chair Raymond Buckley to ask how he could get involved in the final few weeks of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s tight re-election race. Buckley suggested going to college campuses. Sanders did—still not planning for the kind of response he’s been generating among students and young voters since.

If there was a turning point in Sanders' transformation, it came in Madison, Wis., just before Independence Day last year. Short on advance staff, Sanders’ digital team was doing double duty booking venues, then rebooking bigger ones after the RSVPs poured in. Michael Whitney, his digital fundraising manager, googled “big venue Madison.”

When Sanders heard they were headed to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, he panicked. On the phone with digital director Kenneth Pennington, he insisted they downsize, worried that a big crowd of a few thousand would be undercut by shots of empty seats.

He walked out to 10,000 people, screaming.

Sanders is a micromanager. For most of the campaign, there wasn’t an email, mailer or anything bigger than a tweet that went out without his sign-off. He writes his own speeches, rarely paying much attention to what aides give him as suggestions. With his wife and his communications director, he approved all the jokes for his February “Saturday Night Live” cameo. (Sanders, a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fan for years, didn’t change much of Larry David’s script.)

Coming out of Madison, he pushed the staff to get him in front of more people—first, they came up with a house party simulcast at the end of July that drew 105,000 people in one night—then more, on a Seattle-Portland-Los Angeles swing in early August that ended with 27,500 people cheering for him at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena.

They’re up to 1.5 million donors and a half-million registered volunteers, according to a member of the campaign. And that initial $40-50 million campaign? They're closer to $100 million -- and on Monday night, the campaign announced it had hit $40 million for February alone.

The biggest transformation for the campaign started out as a kind of nightmare. Everything changed when staffers woke up the Friday before Christmas to stories about the Democratic National Committee shutting them out of the party voter file after a Sanders staffer had used an opening in the system to swipe piles of Clinton campaign information.

The 8 A.M. campaign call started confused and frightened, but Devine and Longabaugh cut everyone off. What they should do, they said, was fight. They wanted to sue. In a smaller follow-up call—Devine and Longabaugh sitting next to each other on a plane about to leave Reagan National for Burlington, Weaver in the campaign office, Sanders and his wife at their home—they agreed.

While Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and press secretary Brian Fallon were agitating about their claims of deeply damaging high crimes out of Vermont in a call with reporters, with Sanders’ state staffers nervously listening in, the lawyers from the campaigns and the DNC were on the phone with the judge. The judge left Sanders’ team with the distinct impression that she was going to rule for them, and within hours, the Clinton campaign sent a turnaround statement urging the DNC to back down. The DNC reversed itself and let the Sanders campaign back into the database late that night.

That was the moment the political world received its biggest introduction to Weaver, the combative former Sanders aide who’d come back from semi-retirement running a Falls Church, Va., comic book store to be his campaign manager. Devine and Longabaugh wrote his prepared statement. Standing outside the Capitol Hill headquarters, in front of dozens of reporters and cameras, Weaver teed off for the next 10 minutes, going to war with the DNC, and showing off the temper and dismissiveness that people inside the campaign have come to know too well.

They liked the feeling of fighting with the Clinton campaign. They liked the feeling of fighting the Democratic establishment head-on, not just battling them over ideas. The Thursday before the Iowa caucuses, Devine was eating lunch by himself at his hotel. He got a call that the Clinton campaign had just added $89,000 on TV for the final weekend, the third additional buy of the week. He and Weaver decided to triple their buy. They were aiming for intimidation.

“If they wanted to play this game with us: ante up, ante up, then we were going to show them that this was going to be a costly endeavor,” Devine said.

Their final internal Iowa poll was spot on, showing them in an unexpected dead heat if the turnout was at 171,000 (the turnout was 170,000) but at the time even top aides weren't sure if they could believe it. Most of the staffers were left frantically checking their phones for updates or guidance about to say or do about the results before, during and after their middle-of-the night flight to Manchester after the caucuses.

Sanders lay on the bed in his hotel suite in Des Moines that evening, trying to figure out what to say. Call it a tie, said his long time consultant and original architect of the campaign Tad Devine, pacing around on the side of the room. Sanders wrote that on his yellow legal pad.

He added "virtual."

Sanders staffers are convinced that he really did win Iowa, if not for some coin tosses and Iowa Democratic shenanigans. And just wait, they say, until the county conventions March 12, when they think they'll pull ahead of Hillary Clinton in state delegates.

Within days of Iowa, Sanders staffers were betting each other bottles of wine over whether the margin in New Hampshire was going to be under or over 20 points.

Sanders watched the networks call it for him as soon as the polls closed. He looked, according to people in the room, like he was starting to believe this was happening.

That hadn’t always been so clear. Sanders refused Secret Service protection when the first threats against him started to come in, as he rose in the polls. His wife was worried, but he said he wasn’t. Some top aides think he was just determined not to give up his routine going to the supermarket, or walking to the dry cleaners. Some saw a candidate who wasn’t ready to treat his campaign like it was for real, like he was actually mounting a serious run to be president of the United States. (Eventually, Sanders agreed to the Secret Service after threats started coming in to a former address of his where some of his grandchildren now live—but only after he asked the campaign to see if the Capitol Police could handle it instead.)

Sanders himself never got to the point of thinking he was actually going to beat Clinton, according to people in his inner circle. But he was getting closer to thinking it after New Hampshire, more of a blowout than he or any of his aides were prepared for. Even then, though, they couldn’t bring themselves to say he’d win—they’d fudge with lines like, “we’re winning the argument.”

He was still getting used to the idea that his cell phone would ring on the Amtrak to New York and it would be Larry David on the other end, checking in after doing his Sanders impression in the cold open on “Saturday Night Live” the weekend before. Off-the-charts fundraising was another measure of his unexpected success. Pennington, the digital director, stopped Sanders on his way out to give his New Hampshire victory speech. Don’t just tell them to go to the website. Tell them to donate, he said.

Pennington stood in the back while Sanders was speaking, with communications director Michael Briggs, rapid response director Mike Casca, New Hampshire director Julia Barnes and state communications director Karthik Ganapathy gathered around his phone, shocked: 51,000 people were on the website all at once. 750,000 were on over the course of the night. They raised $6 million in 24 hours, and attribute $9 million total to that win.

They walked away convinced that New Hampshire wouldn’t be the high point in the campaign.

In Iowa, the internal goal was to outperform the final famed Des Moines Register poll by 1 point. But they knew that to make winning the nomination more than a long shot, they needed to beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa, win big in New Hampshire, come close in Nevada and have the momentum of a ‘she's losing’ narrative—plus what they figured would be some scrambling Clinton staff shakeups--to come into March as strong as they wanted.

Before he was running, Sanders would turn down frequent flier upgrades, consciously refuse to sit toward the front on unassigned seating Southwest flights because he thought that felt like first class. These days, his campaign staffers are fighting over who gets the special Secret Service all-access pins, complaining about no wi-fi on their Eastern Airlines charter plane. Now Sanders sits all the way up front. Sometimes, he'll catch the eye of one of the aides who's been with him for years, flash a “can you believe this?” look.

Sanders isn't doing as well as he is because he's such a dynamic presence on the stump, or because he does anything to tailor his 90-minute rant to any crowd, or any moment. For all the mockery Sen. Marco Rubio has gotten for repeating the same lines over and over, watch Sanders just a few times and you'll almost be able to recite it yourself. The big crowds often do, turning their favorite parts into sing-a-longs. “Let me tell you a story,” he’ll often say, though usually what follows is less a story than a transition to yet another statistic he cites at every stop.

One of the few things the staff has actually been able to train him on is remembering to look at the people asking him questions in TV town halls, remember to say their names.

Driving around Minneapolis and St. Paul the Friday after New Hampshire, he told the staff that he needed to stop for a sandwich.

“Is he going to interact with people?” asked one reporter, worried about missing a good moment with a voter.

“Does he ever interact with people?” Briggs asked.

Sanders doesn’t nurture relationships with reporters either—there are no off the record meals or drinks with the senator on the campaign, no visits to the back of the plane during the hours flying around the country. (“Here’s the scoop: it’s tuna fish, lettuce and tomato, on rye,” he told reporters at the diner in a statement that was half mocking joke, half leave me alone with my wife to eat).

Briggs, a former newspaper reporter and John Edwards aide who shifted over from the Senate payroll, oversees the press operation. He’s the staffer who’s physically with Sanders more than anyone other than his wife and one of the few people who can write words that Sanders will sign off on as his own.

He’s also the one other top staffers grumble about most. He’s often out of sync with the rapid demands of the news cycle and trapped in the day-to-day messaging rather than long-term planning, they say, jealously guarding his closeness to Sanders, perpetually overwhelmed but refusing to delegate. The press shop has come together slowly, and not quite up-to-date with a 2016 campaign: the political staffers still get just one daily news round-up, by subscribing to the Senate clips service out of Sanders’ office.

After over a week’s worth of attempts to contact him via phone, email and text, Briggs declined comment late Monday.

Among the junior staff, there’s now a Briggs axis and a Weaver axis. They only talk when they need to. Senior staffers, meanwhile, are angling for credit, dismissing each other as inexperienced and oblivious, making dumb and ego driven mistakes, grabbing for attention – like any establishment campaign.

More than a few grumble about Devine trying to box them into decisions that he wants to happen—a speech on socialism (which happened), speeches on foreign and economic policy in January (which never did), Sanders doing retail stops in Iowa and New Hampshire (which Sanders refused)—by talking to reporters and saying the decisions are already made. The New Hampshire staff was furious when he told a reporter the day before they had to win by more than 10, though the polls were showing that to be easy. The line they’d all been sticking to was “win by one vote.”

Nevada really threw them.

They were hoping to lose by 2, 2.5 points. Top aides blame Clinton beating him by 5 on bumbled expectations messaging out of headquarters and an overconfident operation on the ground.

But from the moment the Sanders campaign got serious, March 15 has been the reality check date—after Super Tuesday, after the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses, after labor-heavy Michigan. Sitting around a table in the Capitol Hill row house campaign headquarters last April, a year after the first dinner at Press’s house, planning his first trip to Iowa, Longabaugh pushed for a stop in Minnesota, another caucus state with a similar population and history of progressivism.

More than 3,000 people showed.

Now, “It’ll be an uphill fight” is as optimistic as they get.

If Sanders doesn’t win the nomination, that’ll be it. That’s what they decided at Bill Press’s house two years ago, and they’re sticking to it.

“My first question was, 'Is he running as a Democrat?'” said Ben Tulchin, the pollster that Sanders resisted hiring until Devine forced a meeting on him last fall, when Sanders was traveling through San Francisco.

“Tad said, 'Absolutely. We're not going to be Nader.’”

They’re already prepping the fallback plan: 10 areas, including killing Obama’s trade deals and changing the super-delegate process that they’re going to organize around and try forcing into the Democratic platform.

“Worst case, we’re going to Philadelphia with 1,500 delegates. Best case, we’re going to win,” Cohen said. “Either way, we’re going to change things.”