Sydney Ember

As nearly two dozen other presidential candidates and their supporters were heading to an Iowa Democratic Party dinner, the first major event of the 2020 election cycle, Sanders was on his way to march with striking fast-food workers. While such populist gestures have defined Sanders’ life in politics, he was taking a risk in favoring grassroots organizing over the party politicking usually essential to winning the Iowa caucuses, as he acknowledged in a car ride to the protest.

“This is going to be hard,” he said, according to an aide who was present. “But,” he said, using a profanity for emphasis, “this is the only way we’re going to do it.”

Every top Democratic candidate has been making calculations to try to win Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus, and, lately, many have been staking their candidacies to a big result on Feb. 3. But Sanders stands out in several ways: He nearly won Iowa in 2016 against Hillary Clinton and, some allies said, he cannot afford to be anything less than a close runner-up again.

He is returning to the state this week after suffering a heart attack that stirred questions about his campaign’s viability. He has the most money in the race but also faces tough competition for liberal voters from a leading Iowa candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

And, as his solidarity with fast-food workers showed, he is trying to strengthen his base of voters by dedicating time and resources to wooing workers, young people, Latinos and others in Iowa, rather than focusing on winning over more party leaders. It is something of a shift from 2016, when Sanders and his allies were a greater presence at Democratic Party dinners and events to try to compete with Clinton.

Increasingly, Sanders and his allies are making it clear that he is determined to win Iowa, even as he faces an uphill battle with about 100 days to go before the caucuses.

“I’m here this evening to ask for your help,” he said at a town hall-style event in Marshalltown on Thursday. “I don’t have to tell anybody in this room that Iowa plays a very disproportionately large role in the political process.”

Sanders continues to lag behind Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden in polls. As candidates like Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, nip at his heels, his campaign has zeroed in on Iowa, viewing it as critical to his chances of winning the Democratic nomination, according to several people familiar with his strategy. Some advisers said a strong showing in Iowa — especially if he finishes ahead of Warren — would be enough to catapult him through New Hampshire and into Nevada and Super Tuesday.

“Iowa has to be a top priority for the campaign — we need to do very well in the state,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, one of Sanders’s national campaign co-chairs.

“I hope he can go there every week,” Khanna said. “He needs to be in Iowa as much as possible.”

To that end, his campaign has recently reallocated resources to the state, including spending $1.3 million to air its first television ad this month. It has built out its Iowa team, naming a key communications aide as its deputy state director. The campaign has also expanded its ground operation, with 13 field offices and more than 110 paid staffers.

Sanders returned Thursday for a two-day, five-event swing and plans to be back next week to lead a “march to end corporate greed.” According to aides, his campaign is also discussing a trip to the state with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently endorsed him.

Sanders, however, has competition: Nearly all of the top-tier candidates have also signaled that Iowa is a top priority.

Biden’s campaign has publicly sought to lower expectations, but he has been to the state three times this month and is planning another four-day swing there next week. Warren, whose campaign was among the first to establish a presence in the state, has 19 field offices. Buttigieg recently completed an Iowa bus tour. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has made 21 trips to the state, including her own post-debate bus tour, and has visited 55 of the state’s 99 counties. Sen. Kamala Harris vowed to visit the state every week in October.

The sudden flurry of attention represents a change from earlier this year, when White House hopefuls appeared to be embracing a more national campaign strategy that took them beyond Iowa and other early nominating states. The growth of social media, the changes to the electoral calendar and the increasing diversity of the Democratic electorate combined to make it seem like Iowa, a predominantly white state, might lose its sway in the primary process.

“Usually there’s a ramp-up period in past presidential cycles,” said Sean Bagniewski, the Democratic chair in Polk County, about the focus on Iowa. “This year, it was like a thunderclap.”

The stakes in Iowa for Sanders have personal and psychological dimensions. After his surprising performance in the caucuses in 2016, some aides said the state has taken on an almost mystical quality. A weak result could also indicate that he does not have the same influence with progressive voters as he used to.

Despite a series of disappointing polls in the state — a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released this week showed him in fourth place — allies are confident he is still in a position to do well.

Like it did in 2016, the Sanders campaign is betting on an extensive ground game that relies heavily on a vast network of volunteers that they hope will motivate other supporters to turn out on caucus night — including people who do not typically participate in the political process.

His aides believe that the technique, known as distributed organizing, will help motivate unlikely or first-time caucusgoers, especially those who were too young to participate in the last presidential caucuses; Latino voters, whose turnout rate in the caucuses is typically low; and working-class voters. The campaign sees high potential for victory particularly in and around college towns, like Ames and Iowa City, and in rural areas.

To solidify his base of support, he has spent hours rallying on college campuses in an effort to capture the support of young voters. He has courted labor support, particularly in counties along the Mississippi River. And he has held multiple “Unidos con Bernie” events with Latino voters.

With $33.7 million cash on hand at the beginning of October, he will likely have plenty of money to spend in the state going forward on staffing and advertising. (On Friday, his campaign plans to go on air with an upbeat new television ad, about climate and green jobs in Iowa.)

Aides are sensitive to any comparison of the Sanders campaign of 2020 to the Sanders campaign of 2016: Unlike then, when voters only had to choose between him and Clinton, they now have a wealth of options. To win in Iowa this cycle, he need only secure a larger percentage of the vote than his opponents.

But he has struggled to expand his support in the state, and there are some signs it may be diminishing: According to a poll last month from The Des Moines Register and CNN, only 25% of those who said they caucused for Sanders in 2016 said they would do so again, while 32% said they would support Warren and 12% said they would support Buttigieg.

In recent months, Sanders has begun holding smaller town hall-style events that give audience members the opportunity to share their own deeply personal stories. Advisers hope the events will inspire voters to work together to change what Sanders views as a broken system. (The campaign recently cut a television ad from one of these town halls in Iowa that featured a woman telling a horrific story about medical debt.)

Sanders is staking his success on supporters like Morgan Baethke, 58, of Indianola, Iowa, who was one of about 100 people who came to hear him speak in Marshalltown, the first stop on a two-day “end corporate greed” tour.

Baethke, who works in retail, said he tries to convince other voters to caucus for Sanders by knocking on doors and participating in parades and festivals.

But he also revealed a fundamental tension endemic to the Sanders campaign’s organizing strategy: He said that he prefers to speak to voters in a neighboring county rather than his own.

“I don’t feel comfortable in my home county looking at customers who I deal with during the day, going to their house in the evening, knocking on their door and saying, ‘Would you support Bernie Sanders?’” he said.

This article originally appeared in

Bernie Sanders Almost Won Iowa in 2016. He Knows He Can't Slip Now.

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — On a trip to Iowa in June, Sen. Bernie Sanders confided in aides about a central gamble of his second bid for the White House.

Sanders made his mark, but it did not occur onstage: His presidential campaign confirmed that he had secured the endorsements of two of the most prominent left-wing women of color in Congress, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Sanders appeared alongside Ocasio-Cortez Saturday at Queensbridge Park in New York at his first rally since his heart attack. She announced her support and hailed the Democratic primary field.

“No one wanted to question the system, and in 2016, he fundamentally changed politics in America,” she told an enthusiastic and diverse crowd. “We right now have one of the best Democratic presidential primary fields in a generation and much of that is thanks to the work that Bernie Sanders has done in his entire life.”

Sanders hailed Ocasio-Cortez as “an inspiration to millions of young people not just here in New York but across this country who now understand the importance of political participation and standing up for justice.” He said: “I am so delighted that Alexandria is part of our campaign, and I look forward to traveling with her all over this country.”

Sanders briefly, and somewhat indirectly, addressed his health. “I am happy to report to you that I am more than ready, more ready than ever, to carry on with you the epic struggle that we face today,” he said. “I am more than ready to assume the office of president of the United States.”

He added: “To put it bluntly, I am back.”

It was a theme that dominated the afternoon, as progressive activists and leaders paraded onto the stage to offer words of support. There was his wife, Jane Sanders, who declared him “healthy” and “more than ready to continue his lifelong struggle to fight for the working people of America.”

There was Michael Moore, the filmmaker, who said he was “glad” Sanders was 78. “We will benefit from his wisdom.”

And there was Tiffany Cabán, who nearly won the Queens district attorney race earlier this year; Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan; and Nina Turner, a vocal supporter at his rallies on the campaign trail.

Beyond serving as a show of strength, their message aligned with one his campaign is aggressively trying to project: That he is building a multiracial, working-class coalition of voters and that his campaign speaks to men and women, to white voters and minorities.

It is a message he needs now more than ever.

The endorsements jolted the primary race, signaling that Sanders, 78, was still a formidable contender just as it had increasingly seemed like a contest between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden. They also shifted the conversation away from his health issues and his age, infusing his campaign with a renewed sense of vitality.

“There’s been some degree of criticism overall — Bernie Sanders can’t win because his movement is tapped out,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, said. “This discounted that.”

But if the endorsements were an obvious indication that Sanders was not ready to surrender the party’s left flank to Warren, it is not clear how much they will ultimately change the race — in part because there are signs that voters are not taking their cues from endorsements. Warren, for instance, has attracted huge crowds, posted some of the biggest fundraising numbers, and surged to the top of national and early-state polls despite lacking endorsements from a single governor, big-city mayor or senator outside her home state. At the same time, Sen. Kamala Harris of California is struggling to gain momentum even though she has the backing of politicians across the country, including her state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

Sanders’ endorsements could inject fresh energy into a campaign that in some respects needed it badly. Consistently trailing Biden and Warren in recent polls and struggling to expand his base, he spent the last two weeks facing a barrage of questions about his health. His campaign made a show of financial strength this month when it reported it had collected $25.3 million between July and September — the most of any candidate in that period — but the announcement was quickly eclipsed by news of his heart attack.

Sanders’ campaign is hoping that endorsements from Ocasio-Cortez and Omar — and possibly Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan— prove that he is building a multiracial, working-class coalition of voters. His aides are also confident that the women will motivate young people, a group that was critical to his success in 2016 and that his allies know he must win over again, both optically and for actual votes.

“I don’t think anyone would question or doubt that they, more than a lot of people, have the ability to inspire young people,” Shakir said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez and Omar. “That in itself is going to be tremendous.”

The endorsements underscore how Sanders is striving to portray himself as the candidate furthest to the left. In recent months, as support for Warren has swelled, Sanders has unveiled policy proposals that have gone beyond hers — including plans to completely eliminate student debt and medical debt, and to impose a wealth tax that would apply to more households and is steeper for rich people than the one Warren has proposed.

Several Democratic officials and strategists said the endorsements of Ocasio-Cortez and Omar could stoke enthusiasm among the far left and perhaps prompt some of Warren’s supporters to take a second look at Sanders.

But some said the endorsements might not do much to grow his existing coalition, pointing out that the two women carry a similar anti-establishment, populist message that already appeals to Sanders’ voter base. Some suggested the endorsements could even help Warren by making her appear more moderate and pragmatic in comparison with Sanders.

Although Ocasio-Cortez and Omar have a big following nationally, and have become preferred targets of President Donald Trump’s, their support may not help woo voters, particularly in critical early states.

Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said the endorsements could give Sanders a fundraising bump and more media attention. But she was skeptical that the new support would sway undecided voters.

“I don’t know that a congresswoman from New York, one from Minnesota, one from Michigan are superinfluential to voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina,” she said.

Sanders’ allies said the visual imagery alone — an older man standing with younger women of color — could be enough of a benefit, especially as he continues to fight the perception that his voter base is skewed white and male.

Cori Bush, who was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez in her unsuccessful bid for Congress last year in St. Louis, said the endorsements from the two women “knocks away that whole Bernie Bro idea.”

She also said their support “wipes away the idea that maybe he’s not the progressive champion anymore,” she said.

Last month, the Working Families Party, an influential liberal group that backed Sanders in 2016, endorsed Warren. The announcement infuriated his supporters. But it also sent a message: It was time for progressives to pick a side and starting organizing.

Maurice Mitchell, the Working Families Party’s national director, dismissed the notion that the dueling endorsements would splinter the left.

“We’ve said from the beginning that progressives need to get involved, and that’s exactly what they did,” he said, referring to Ocasio-Cortez and Omar. “It’s a good thing for our movement that folks choose one of these candidates.”

Mitchell said his group — which endorsed Ocasio-Cortez’s opponent, then-Rep. Joseph Crowley, in the 2018 primary — planned to marshal its network of volunteers across the country to work with voters to nominate Warren.

What is less obvious is the role Ocasio-Cortez and Omar will play for the Sanders campaign. Waleed Shahid, communications director for the progressive group Justice Democrats, which helped propel Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign, said the two women can mobilize their own networks of volunteers and donors. He pointed to Ocasio-Cortez’s influence this year in the Democratic primary for district attorney in Queens, where her support for Tiffany Cabán helped to nearly lift her to victory.

And because the two congresswomen represent the activist base of the party, he said, they could galvanize progressive activists around the country.

But perhaps above all, the endorsements will help dispel questions about Sanders’ viability post-heart attack, he said.

“Some voters do have questions around his age,” Mitchell said. “Voters who have that question in mind are probably thinking twice about that now that they see the youngest leaders of the Democratic Party supporting Bernie.”

Sanders Says He's Back, Revitalized by a Big Endorsement

NEW YORK — Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont needed a big moment at the Democratic debate Tuesday. Absent from the campaign trail after suffering a heart attack two weeks earlier, he and his aides were aware that his performance and his health would be under intense scrutiny.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Endorsing Bernie Sanders. Will That Matter?

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont needed a big moment at the Democratic debate Tuesday. Absent from the campaign trail after suffering a heart attack two weeks earlier, he and his aides were aware that his performance and his health would be under intense scrutiny.

Most presidential candidates use the 10-day Iowa State Fair to showcase their retail campaigning skills, because it is one of the best opportunities to meet a wide cross-section of voters before the caucuses in February. The Vermont senator’s approach to the event Sunday — stride briskly, wave occasionally, converse infrequently — underscored how he has grounded his campaign in championing ideas rather than establishing human connections.

His lectern-pounding, impersonal campaign style served him well during his first presidential run, especially here in Iowa, where his near-victory in the caucuses against Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, transformed him into a threat for the Democratic nomination.

Yet even as his campaign seeks to project its strength in early primary states, there are signs — in Iowa polls, conversations with local officials and discussion with dozens of voters — suggesting that Sanders, 77, may be struggling to gain traction in the state that fueled his political rise.

It is a dynamic that was perhaps most evident last weekend at the state fairgrounds: As voters talked up first-time presidential candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, Sanders was often an afterthought.

Some voters cited Sanders’ age. Others said they wanted to elect a woman. Many praised his ability to push the party to the left but said it was time for someone else to claim the progressive mantle.

“I’m liking Elizabeth Warren,” said Danielle Hensley, a 22-year-old student from Iowa City, after casting her presidential vote at the fair’s highly unscientific corn kernel poll. Hensley supported Sanders in the caucuses four years ago; now, she explained, she sees him as “a 2016 candidate.”

It is still early in the primary season, and Sanders and his aides dismiss outright any notion that his Iowa campaign has lost momentum, repeatedly asserting that the campaign is well positioned for the long haul. They remain confident that they can energize first-time caucusgoers who were too young to cast their votes four years ago. And they brush off a recent poll that showed Sanders slipping in the state, saying that it does not capture the views of younger voters, working-class Democrats and others who are not yet paying attention to the race — groups that the campaign sees as a big part of his base.

“We’re feeling really, really good,” Sanders told reporters after his turn at the fair’s political soapbox. “I think we’re going to win here in Iowa.”

During a conference call with reporters on Monday, Sanders’ advisers pushed back against doubts about the strength of the campaign, insisting that most polls still have him in second place, and noting that he enjoyed a boost in support in surveys taken after the second Democratic debates. They also maintained that voters trust Sanders on health care, which his team argues is the most important issue to the electorate.

Sanders has some significant advantages in the state.

Through the end of June, he had an estimated 7,000 individual donors in Iowa, according to an analysis of campaign fundraising records by The New York Times, by far the most of any candidate. And he maintains an army of die-hard liberal foot soldiers who are more than eager to propel him to the convention. On Friday, before the state’s annual Wing Ding dinner in Clear Lake when supporters for the various candidates typically gather and chant outside the event as a show of force, Sanders’ team boasted that their volunteers had instead knocked on every Democratic door in the town. He plans to return to Iowa next week for what will be his eighth trip to the state since announcing his candidacy in February.

But the landscape for Sanders is vastly different than it was four years ago. Nearly two dozen candidates are now vying for the nomination. And unlike in 2016, when Sanders was the only candidate with a liberal populist message, there are now many other progressives who have adopted a similar agenda. There is also a surging energy among young activists for diversity, female candidates and generational change.

At the same time, several Iowa Democratic officials said they were miffed by Sanders’ campaign, which they see as operating as something of a lone wolf.

Jeannine Grady, Democratic chairwoman in Marshall County, where Sanders defeated Clinton in the caucuses in 2016, said Sanders’ campaign is not following the traditional campaign playbook of staying in close contact with county chairs.

Though running an unconventional, outsider campaign had worked for him in the past, she said, it may not work this time, especially now that his message is no longer novel and voters have so many other candidates on offer.

“I don’t believe it’s possible for him to run an insurgent campaign like he did four years ago,” said Grady, who caucused for Sanders in 2016. “Part of being an insurgent is being relatively unknown. He can’t now be unknown.”

“Sanders is running on the fumes of his last campaign,” said William Baresel, Democratic chairman in Floyd County. “And weakness is starting to show in get-out-the-vote efforts they have done.”

Sanders allies say it is precisely that willingness to operate outside the established political system that is part of Sanders’s appeal, especially for those who believe the current system is broken and requires wholesale change.

Pete D’Alessandro, who ran Sanders’ Iowa campaign in 2016 and is now a senior adviser, stressed in an interview that the campaign was working behind the scenes to woo voters who had not yet tuned in to the political process.

“If we do as a team what we’re supposed to do each day, we will be in a position to talk to that voter who can’t engage right now when they’re ready to engage,” he said. “Then you’ll see a whole different dialogue going on.”

And he suggested that Sanders should not be measured by the usual political metrics for success.

“The reason that I’m not concerned is I know at the end of most days, we sit around as a senior staff and we say, ‘We just won today,’” he said.

But if the stakes are high for every presidential candidate in Iowa, they are even more elevated for Sanders: Many political observers say success for him in 2020 is predicated on a repeat strong performance in the caucuses.

And as he traveled across Iowa ahead of his visit to the state fair, Sanders declared that he planned to win not just the Iowa caucuses, but the nominating contests in New Hampshire, Nevada and California as well.

Though he has faced some criticism for adhering strictly to his message, it is, perhaps above all, his constancy that has loyal fans still flocking to his events — he had one of the biggest crowds at the fair — and pledging their allegiance.

Waiting to hear Warren speak at the fair on Saturday, Misty Cornelius, 38, of Des Moines, said she remained “a strong Bernie supporter” — a declaration confirmed by the glittery “Bernie 2020” tattoo she bore on her chest.

But there were also skeptical voices.

“He’s unrealistic,” said Michael McDonald, 64, of Altoona.

“I like Bernie, but he seems a little too old, honestly,” said Andrew Ball, 22, of Iowa City.

Teresa Brumer, a 51-year-old dental assistant from Urbandale who caucused for Sanders in 2016, said she wanted to see if Sanders was “the same man as he was four years ago.”

He was, she said after hearing him speak. But she was now also considering Buttigieg.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/us/politics/bernie-sanders-iowa.html" id="3d8934d0-e129-312f-a89f-311b9747fc6d">The New York Times</a>.

Is Bernie Sanders 'a 2016 Candidate' Campaigning for 2020?

DES MOINES, Iowa — Bernie Sanders examined the butter cow. He power-walked by the Ferris wheel. He gobbled a corn dog.

On Sunday, he took about a dozen people with diabetes on a bus from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, to get insulin at a Canadian pharmacy, just minutes from the border. Because of traffic, and multiple stops along the way, it took an hour and 17 minutes to get there and about the same time to get back.

But the duration and the mileage were not really the main points. Sanders’ goal was to underscore how much the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs is hurting Americans, a view even President Donald Trump shares. By buying insulin in Canada, everyone had saved a lot of money. A vial that one woman said could set her back $340 in the United States had cost her about a tenth of that.

If the trip was something of a stunt — there were more reporters than patients — it was also in line with what has long been one of Sanders’ signature issues. So long, in fact, that the trip was a reprise of one he made in 1999 with a group of women who had breast cancer. That time he traveled from Vermont, his home state, to Montreal.

Sanders still talks about that trip on the campaign trail, using it to illustrate what he calls deep flaws in the health care system in the United States.

His stump-speech anecdote now has an update. Here is what happened:

10:08 a.m. | Sanders boards the bus.

“Good morning,” Sanders says. The reporters and cameramen accompanying him on the trip eagerly wait at the front of the bus for him to say more. No more comes. He promptly heads to the back of the bus, where the people with diabetes are waiting for him.

One of them is Quinn Nystrom, 33, of Baxter, Minnesota. A Type 1 diabetic, she said this would be her third trip to Canada to buy insulin.

“Regardless of what you think about Senator Sanders’s politics, this is the single biggest thing that has happened to the insulin affordability crisis,” she said before the bus departed. Nystrom, who defined herself as a “conservative Democrat,” said she had not endorsed any presidential candidate but appreciated that Sanders had embraced this issue.

“We’ve never had this type of media coverage,” she said.

At 10:10 a.m., the bus rolls out of the parking lot in Detroit. A bag of snacks falls out of an overhead bin, prompting momentary panic from some reporters.

10:20 a.m.

The bus arrives at the first border checkpoint.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer steps onto the bus and jokes about the well-functioning air-conditioning on a hot, humid day. The mood is very relaxed.

10:27 a.m.

Sanders attacks the drug industry.

Sanders has been holding court in the back of the bus, talking to patients. Not content to sit so far away from him, the journalists edge closer. The Vermont senator mostly asks the patients questions, but also takes some time to rail against pharmaceutical companies, which he says are making “huge profits.”

“You are likely talking about corruption and price fixing,” he says. “You’re talking about collusion.”

“This is an insane, unacceptable situation, and it has got to change,” he says as the bus crosses the Detroit River.

He takes one question from a reporter, about states importing drugs from Canada.

”At the end of the day, nobody in this room thinks this is the solution,” he says, gesturing toward a patient. “You should not have to be going to another country for this young lady to get the medicine that she needs. We should be doing what the Canadians do.”

It is validation for America’s neighbor to the north.

10:40 a.m.

Sanders asks what everyone is wondering.

10:52 a.m.

The bus pulls up to the Canadian customs checkpoint.

There was a long line of cars and trucks waiting to cross the border, but the insulin caravan finally arrives. Everyone disembarks to show their passports. When Sanders took the group of women to Canada 20 years ago, crossing the border took almost no time at all, Kathleen Keenan, 79, who went with Sanders then, said in a phone interview last week.

“It was very easy going over the border in those days,” she said. “It was a matter of five minutes at the most.”

“I thought the trip went very smoothly,” she said. “We all had a chance to talk to him.”

11:27 a.m.

The bus arrives at a pharmacy in Windsor.

A crowd of Canadians greets the bus as it arrives at the old-fashioned pharmacy, which is minutes from the border. Someone is playing the accordion.

Sanders enters the pharmacy to stand beside Nystrom as she orders insulin. He mentions that diabetics sometimes must ration their insulin because they cannot afford to take it as prescribed: “The time is long overdue for the American people, for the Congress, to say, ‘Enough is enough. We’re tired of being ripped off by a very, very greedy and corrupt industry.’”

The first group of reporters is then shepherded out of the pharmacy to allow another group of reporters in.

12:04 p.m.

The crowd goes crazy. A young girl holds a Bernie doll. A man wears a hat that says, “Canada already great, eh!”

Sanders speaks for about four minutes outside the pharmacy, and then hands the microphone to some people who traveled on the bus with him.

One woman, Kathy Sego, of Madison, Indiana, speaks about her son, Hunter, 22, who began rationing insulin when he was in college. Insulin was so expensive, she said, that her family would sometimes make the choice between paying for the drug and paying for electricity.

“He felt that he was a burden to us,” she said. “So my son decided that he was going to start rationing his insulin.”

At 12:20 p.m., Sanders takes a second (and final) question from the news media, about what he could do as president to lower the cost of pharmaceutical drugs. He ticks off a number of things he would try to do, including using antitrust laws to break up monopolies and jailing pharmaceutical executives.

“What you do is you throw these people in jail if they engage in price fixing,” he says.

12:26 p.m.

‘This is an issue whose time has come.’

And with that, Sanders wraps it up. He shakes some hands and poses for a picture, and then boards the bus to head back to the United States.

His aides inform reporters that the rest of the trip is off the record. The bus arrives back on United States soil at 1:41 p.m.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/28/us/politics/bernie-sanders-prescription-drug-prices.html" id="c3f72119-6bf9-3f82-a5d9-3e66187d2da4">The New York Times</a>.

Bernie Sanders Goes the Extra Mile to Make His Point About Drug Prices

WINDSOR, Ontario — Bernie Sanders wanted to make a point about a crippling injustice. So he crossed the border.

On Saturday, Sanders’ campaign plans to kick off its national organizing program with what it says are roughly 5,000 events across every state. Sanders plans to address supporters via livestream.

The date for the organizing events was set weeks ago. But the timing is fortuitous. With Biden’s entry, the race has kicked into a new gear, and the organizing effort gives Sanders — who has been running second to Biden in most early polls — a fresh opportunity to lock up supporters and reassert his grass-roots strength.

The weekend also marks something of a turning point for Sanders’ campaign. For the first two months of his presidential run, he mostly held big rallies in early nominating states, including Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

The rallies were intended, in part, to showcase the enthusiastic crowds he is capable of mustering, but also doubled as opportunities to sign up supporters. Now, with the field largely set, the events this weekend reflect the campaign’s next stage — turning the names on those lists into active volunteers.

“I’m not going to tell you that money is not important — we’re going to raise a great deal of money,” Sanders said in a phone interview on Friday afternoon. “But at the end of the day, I believe now — and I’ve always believed — that grass-roots activism is more important and more effective than 30-second television ads.”

He added, “When you’re running against 15 or 20 other candidates, I think the candidate who comes out on top will be that candidate which has a very strong and effective grass-roots movement.”

Sanders, perhaps more than any other candidate, is betting his campaign’s success on his grass-roots appeal. He hopes to have an army of volunteers spreading his message on the ground — knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, engaging on social media — to say nothing of the money his campaign hopes to continue raising through individual donations. He is also aiming to get volunteers involved in a “massive voter-registration drive,” focusing in particular on working-class and young people, he said.

There have been signs his strategy is working: In the first quarter, Sanders’ campaign raised more than $18 million, outpacing the other campaigns by far. On the campaign trail, he often boasts that his campaign has signed up more than 1 million supporters.

But as his campaign prepares to compete with Biden’s, those aims have taken on new urgency. On Friday, Biden’s campaign announced it had raised $6.3 million during its first 24 hours, besting Sanders, who raised $5.9 million in his campaign’s debut. (Sanders, however, raised his first-day total from some 225,000 donors, more than double the roughly 97,000 donors who gave to Biden’s campaign, which held a big fundraiser Thursday night.)

Biden has also planned a campaign stop next week in Pittsburgh — union country — underscoring that he is homing in on the same blue-collar voters who were drawn to Sanders in 2016.

In the interview, Sanders said he was aware he was unlikely to draw the same level of support — from working-class people and others — that he enjoyed in 2016, given there are so many other candidates, including Biden, in the race.

“It is absolutely true that not only Joe Biden, but every other candidate, is going to be going after the support that we have had in the past,” he said. But, he said, he still thought his campaign was well-positioned for the battle ahead.

“I think we are doing well in hanging on to the support of the folks that we had last time — not 100 percent, that’s for sure — and also reaching out and bringing new people in,” he said. “But you know? That’s what the fight is about.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-events.html" id="8d264a55-a4ef-334f-a29a-eb0172a9aa48">The New York Times</a>.

Sanders Campaign Sets Thousands of House Parties for Supporters

Just days after former Vice President Joe Biden became the 20th candidate to join the Democratic presidential race, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is readying what he hopes will be his latest show of force: thousands of house parties across the country.

“If everybody would just get out of the way,” he said on a recent afternoon, “I’d have a clear path.”

Castro is in need of a breakthrough moment. Once considered a rising star in the Democratic Party — he was the first Latino to give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — he has been outshined in the ever-expanding field by brighter stars and nonstars alike. While he has many fans in his hometown, San Antonio, where he once served as mayor, he is not well known on the national stage. And with the sudden rise of the former El Paso Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Castro is not even the most well-known candidate in his own state.

Still, during an interview at one of his favorite Tex-Mex restaurants, Castro seemed relatively unfazed, and maybe for good reason: At age 44, and as the only Latino candidate in the race, he would seem to satisfy the Democratic Party’s desire for youth and diversity, to say nothing of strategists who view Hispanic turnout as an important factor in winning back the White House.

A former housing secretary under President Barack Obama, he is the sole candidate with Cabinet experience. And he is from a border state that Democrats hope they can one day flip into their column.

Castro also seems well situated in another way: With President Donald Trump eager to make his hard-line immigration stance a central part of the 2020 campaign, Castro, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, has already made immigration his signature issue.

Earlier this month, he was the first candidate to introduce an immigration plan, with detailed proposals that included decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants in the country without permission and establishing a “21st-Century Marshall Plan” to aid Central American countries that have a high number of migrants.

Last week, with Trump swinging through Texas to talk up his anti-immigrant message, Castro held a rally of his own in San Antonio that was billed as an opportunity for the city, whose population is more than 60% Hispanic, to voice its opposition.

“This is the issue that the president has put front and center, so I wanted to put my own vision for immigration up against his,” Castro said, hours before he told a crowd of several hundred that “this is personal for me.”

It was Castro’s boldest attempt yet to position himself as a formidable candidate and challenger to Trump, as images of migrants at the border — in whom he sees the face of his grandmother, he has said — continue to jolt many Americans.

He seized on the issue again Tuesday night, denouncing a move by the Justice Department to deny some immigrants seeking asylum the chance to post bail. “This administration’s bottomless cruelty has failed time and time again,’’ he wrote on Twitter.

But if this should be a defining time for Castro, so far it is not.

Though he has drawn some recent notice, including for being among the first of the candidates to support a congressional bill to study reparations, he is in many ways a 2020 afterthought: In a Monmouth University poll of Iowa Democrats conducted April 4-9, Castro came in ninth in a field of 24 announced and potential candidates, with 2% support.

Some Democrats believe that Castro’s moment has, if anything, already passed — that his best shot at national success occurred after he gave his electrifying speech at the 2012 convention. Some wonder whether he is too quiet, too inexperienced and too careful to compete in such a crowded, high-powered primary field.

While Castro tries to brush off the inevitable comparisons to O’Rourke, whose challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz last year turned him into a national celebrity, the attention drawn by O’Rourke — who speaks fluent Spanish, and whose hometown is on the border with Mexico — has cast something of a shadow over Castro’s candidacy.

When he left Washington at the end of the Obama administration, Castro returned to Texas but resisted entreaties to run for statewide office. He finished writing a book, did some teaching and spent time with his family, but some Texas Democrats believe he missed an opportunity to advance his career and gain the kind of political profile that could have fortified his presidential run.

Because Castro never ran for statewide office, he has not built up a big email list of supporters, and he still has not met the 65,000-donor threshold to qualify for the first Democratic primary debates. In the first three months of the year, he raised only $1.1 million (though his campaign said it had raised over half a million more by mid-April).

“I don’t believe that from the presidential perspective, it was a mistake,” Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said about Castro’s decision not to run statewide. “But I do believe that, like Beto, had he run for one of those offices, that he would have done really well even if he wouldn’t have won.”

Castro is more circumspect, betting that voters will come to appreciate his background and executive experience, eventually.

“People are going to have their moments,” he said, without naming names but perhaps alluding to Pete Buttigieg, another 2020 candidate and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, whose popularity has grown substantially in the past month. “I would rather have my moment closer to the actual election than right now.”

He ticked off former Republican candidates who surged early, then flamed out, naming Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann.

“I’m sure that’ll come,” he said, “but I don’t just want two weeks in the sun.”

Castro was born and raised in San Antonio. His grandmother emigrated from Mexico when she was 7. His mother, Rosie Castro, was a prominent civil rights activist in the 1970s.

He went to Stanford, then Harvard Law School, and was elected to the San Antonio City Council in 2001, when he was 26. He ran for mayor of San Antonio in 2005 and lost. Four years later, he ran again and won.

Allies of Castro praise him for implementing a full-day pre-K program when he was mayor that was funded by increasing the sales tax by an eighth of a cent. They also credit him with helping to revitalize parts of the city, including its downtown district.

His keynote address at the 2012 convention immediately rocketed him into the national political conversation. When Obama approached him about serving in his Cabinet, he demurred, saying he preferred to stay in San Antonio, but he relented in 2014 when he was asked again.

Youthful and soft-spoken, with hair parted on the side, Castro describes himself as a progressive — he supports agenda items like “Medicare for All” and universal higher education — but is not blazingly so. Friends describe him as methodical and disciplined.

“That’s not his fallback position — to be this extrovert, light-up-any-room kind of guy,” said Jaime Castillo, who worked for Castro both in the mayor’s office and in Washington.

Castro is also not his twin brother, Joaquin, who is a U.S. congressman, though it is hard to tell them apart. (Joaquin once stood in for Julián at a parade; it did not go over well.) Joaquin’s name has recently been floated as a possible challenger to Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, a rumor Julián did not dispel.

“They carry the hopes and dreams of the Latino community on their shoulders,” said Pete Gallego, a former Democratic congressman who represented a district that stretches from San Antonio to El Paso.

Even if Joaquin does not decide to run, Democrats across the country hope that Julián’s presence in the race will inspire Hispanic voters, a group that the Pew Research Center predicts will be the biggest minority voting bloc in 2020.

Julián Castro hopes so, too, but he also does not want to be pigeonholed as a Latino candidate, and he has taken pains to try and appeal to a broad swath of voters.

“There’s a significance there,” Castro said about being the only Latino candidate for president. “But it’s not the totality of who I am or what I’m pitching to America.”

SAN ANTONIO — Julián Castro, in a baseball cap and zip-up hoodie, sipped an iced tea and considered how he could win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sydney Ember

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