The New Yorker:

In Arizona, a crowd of thousands suggested that the left still has a pulse.

By Emily Witt

On a recent Saturday, a group of rank-and-file Democrats, standing in the blinding midday sun on a football field in Tucson, Arizona, spoke about their frustrations with their party.

“They’re not stepping up,” a retired nurse named Mark Creal said. “No spine, no backbone,” he added. “They’re not doing their jobs.” He wore a button that said “Proud Democrat.”

It was shortly before noon, and thousands of people were in the process of filing through a security checkpoint onto the field at Catalina High School. They were there for the latest stop of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, a series of rallies organized by Senator Bernie Sanders which have, in recent weeks, garnered attention for attracting significant crowds: at a rally in Denver the day before, Sanders and the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had reportedly drawn thirty-four thousand people. (By way of comparison, Vice-President Kamala Harris’s appearance in Houston, with Beyoncé, late in her campaign, had drawn some thirty thousand people; President Trump’s preëlection extravaganza at Madison Square Garden had had an audience of nearly twenty thousand.) But the 2024 election proved that in-person displays of enthusiasm are not an adequate measure of political strength—the collective political imagination is increasingly defined by social media. Still, in Tucson, it seemed striking that thousands of people (the organizers reported a crowd of twenty thousand) had turned out on a Saturday to see three out-of-state politicians—Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Greg Casar, a young congressman from Austin—none of whom is actively campaigning for national office. As an attendee named Cindy Brooks told me, “I’ve never really heard Bernie speak from end to end, and that’s why I’m here, because I want to hear everything that he has to say.”

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