Janet Simmelink—69, retired, and like many people in her milieu, visibly agitated—recently lingered on the outskirts of Denver’s Civic Center Park on a colorless evening, politely tolerating my questions. She told me she’d never particularly liked the man she’d now come to hear speak—the man a stunning 34,000 people had come to hear, in fact, in a desperate bid to address Donald Trump’s increasingly autocratic transformation of America. To do something that the Democratic Party, which she had long supported, was clearly failing to do.
She didn’t support the man in 2016, when he first became a breakout who, however fleetingly, seemed like he had a long-shot chance to transform America himself. She also didn’t support him in 2020, when he tried again. So I asked Simmelink if the version of herself 10 years ago would be surprised to find her at a Bernie Sanders rally.
“Quite surprised.”
On a scale of 1 to 10?
“A 9,” she laughed.
Simmelink described herself as a pragmatist—she didn’t back Sanders in those primaries because, in her words, “he wasn’t that effective as a senator.” What changed? It’s simple: In the new era of Trump, Simmelink feels like she no longer has a choice: “He’s the crotchety old guy,” she said. “He’s the only one willing to do something.”
For three months now, Sanders has been headlining his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, a series of campaign-style political rallies headlined by the senator and his protégé, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The two politicians wrapped up a suite of dates in the Midwest in February, and in late March, took on a crammed Southwest itinerary. The tour aims to galvanize the wounded Democratic base. By the time I touched down in Denver to see them for myself, they had already received an audience of 11,000 in the municipality of Greeley, 60 miles north. Now, a far bigger crowd awaited.
The 34,000 people who came to see Sanders speak that night weren’t just the largest congregation Sanders has ever hosted. The gathering was among the city’s largest political events this century, second only to a Barack Obama rally in the summer of 2008. At the twilight of his career in public service, Sanders has become something he’s never been before: The lifelong independent has transformed into a genuine leader of the Democratic Party—one of its lonely ringleaders providing a political alternative in the face of Trump 2.0.
It certainly doesn’t hurt that the second Trump administration, and its association with a newly MAGAfied tech elite headlined by Elon Musk, has made Sanders’ convictions more legible, his fears more cogent, and, indeed, his appeal accessibly broad. Sanders’ enduring opposition to a takeover of the government by the ultrarich has been vindicated, in the worst possible way.
That’s probably why the Fighting Oligarchy tour is populated by loads of people who never pulled the lever for Sanders. In fact, they might outnumber those who did. Of those who RSVP’d to the tour, “at least half” aren’t members of the mammoth email bank the senator accumulated during his presidential bids, Sanders said. “I think some of them are Republicans, some of them may be conservative Democrats,” Sanders told reporters the morning after the Denver event. “But they’re all looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
Sanders is here to reassure them that they aren’t crazy—and that maybe he’s been the one with the answers all along.
They’re showing up for it in droves. According to a poll conducted by NBC, two-thirds of Democratic voters want the party to take the fight directly to the Republicans, rather than broker a pact with their colleagues across the aisle. They aren’t getting that from the nominal Democratic leadership in D.C. Sure, Cory Booker made Senate history last week with a new record for how long any American senator had stood on the chamber’s floor and spoken, clocking in at 25 hours and 5 minutes—a rare sign of life in the chamber. And some members of Congress joined the louder and louder protests that broke out across the country last weekend as Trump continued to sledgehammer nearly every corner of American life. But no one is quite pulling off what Sanders is. What I saw in Denver—and later in Arizona, a state that went to Trump by more than 5 points—suggested that the moment Sanders has long sought may be here.
For the length of his career in national politics, Bernie Sanders has been described as a thorn in the establishment’s side. That’s certainly how party leaders saw him when he secured more than 22 million votes across both of his bids for president. That translated to 43 percent of the primary share in 2016, and 26 percent in 2020. During the 2020 Nevada primary, in a state Kamala Harris lost last year, Sanders nearly beat out the numbers posted by Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar combined.
Those metrics make him a very popular politician. And yet his rise helped create a schism between mainstream Democrats and progressives that’s at least in part to blame for thrusting the Democrats into their ongoing identity crisis and leaving the opening for Trump. No matter how close he got to the Oval Office, Sanders has long been understood to be fundamentally external to the party’s overarching project—for better or worse.
Some of that divisiveness was self-inflicted. In 2016, when the country was first getting to know this senator from Vermont, he branded his campaign as a “political revolution,” promising a comprehensive remaking of the American social order by tugging the party further left than it’s ever gone before, with a platform centered on a sweeping redistribution of wealth. Sanders was running against two forces at once: an increasingly unhinged MAGA front, and the sclerotic Obama-era technocrats, themselves a political hierarchy that was about to go extinct, though nobody quite knew it yet. The approach accentuated his differences with neoliberal doctrines—socialized medicine, tax hikes on the rich, deep cuts to the Pentagon budget—and more importantly, it convinced his voters that the only way to effect lasting change within the Democrats was not through reconciliation but by defeating them. His ideas brought him incredibly loyal fans—but the way they championed his ideas also created some nasty intraparty debates that proved fatal when November rolled around.
Some rivals, like Hillary Clinton, have never forgiven him for the consequences of that shake-up. And as anyone who lived through it can remember, one of the primary attributes of the rise of Sanders was the reality that so many of his champions never seemed especially interested in establishing a détente with other voters in the party—and more than that, they could be more annoying than convincing.
“To the pragmatists out there … get this through your fucking head,” said prominent Bernie supporter Will Menaker shortly after the first election of Trump: “You must bend the knee to us. Not the other way around. You have been proven as failures, and your entire worldview has been discredited.” Sanders had his own spin on this notion. In 2020, he posted: “I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”
The establishment did, in fact, stop Sanders. Hardcore supporters of the senator chalk his defeat up to a perceived Democratic conspiracy. In the days before Super Tuesday, Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden, solidifying momentum around its chosen candidate, and he cruised to victory from there.
But even before that downfall, this combination of arrogance, intensity, and failure created the “Bernie Bro” pejorative. The term was first coined by journalist Robinson Meyer in a 2015 Atlantic essay, and it described a sweaty coterie of white men harboring a veiled exasperation for the Clinton-voting normies in their wake. “The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him,” Meyer wrote. “White; well-educated; middle-class.” The term caught on, and later dispatches from the campaign trail assailed the perceived jingoism of male Bernie supporters more acutely. A reporter at Mashable called them a “sexist mob,” singling out two demented Facebook comments to make her point.
Exactly how white and male Bernie supporters are remains a point of contention, but the stereotype was sharpened by a renaissance in leftist alternative media, which bloomed into vibrancy shortly after the first Trump victory. The most successful was the podcast Chapo Trap House, founded by three Bernie backers who were notoriously unencumbered by the eggshells-walking purity promulgated by establishment Democrats. The show never sought an alliance with its cadres in the greater left-of-center field. Chapo’s oozing hatred for Clinton, specifically, was pungent—and at times, arguably verged on chauvinistic. “She never really cracked the glass ceiling,” joked Felix Biederman, one of the show’s hosts, in a quote circulated by a leering New York Times feature published when Sanders was inches away from the nomination. “She more like fell down the glass staircase.” Bernie supporters were largely portrayed as toxic men who hated Hillary, and little more than that.
If you remember the vicious primaries of 2016 and 2020, I can tell you it was almost otherworldly to witness all flavors of Democrats united under this charge on the 2025 Fighting Oligarchy tour in Denver. College kids in T-shirts printed with elegiac silhouettes of firebombing revolutionaries shared breathing space with graying boomers in moldering Kamala merch. A grandmother in full suffragette cosplay posed for photos. A scraggly crust punk wore a jacket patched with an upside-down American flag. A woman with tears in her eyes showed me the frilly pink pussyhat she originally acquired in 2017. There was a time, not long ago, when these people belonged to rival factions, bifurcated by both politics and taste—the establishment and the radicals, the institutionalists and the militants, the Resistance Libs and the Bernie Bros, flaming each other online into eternity.
But in this confused juncture of history, whether they realize it or not, they’ve found common ground. It is the coalition Sanders always wanted: a cross-section of humanity who, regardless of how much theory they’ve read, have settled on an enemy.
“A few years ago, when I used the word oligarchy, people didn’t know what I was talking about,” Sanders said in his speech, noting how at the inauguration, the president was flanked by three of the richest men on the planet. “They know what I’m talking about now.”
When I look back at that Atlantic piece today, I can see it asks the exact wrong question at every turn. “The Berniebro seems to have taken Sanders’s rhetoric that America is trapped in a number of deep, unprecedented crises to heart,” Meyer wrote in 2015. “The Berniebro always writes with an urgent, anxious seriousness when discussing national politics.” This was one of the traits that made them so irritating. In retrospect, can you blame them?
Ironically, in 2025, the Democratic Party should be dying for anything resembling the Bernie Bros. Young men across racial lines have been unilaterally captured by the GOP. And in that sense, regarding a highly engaged contingency of progressives so flippantly was a humongous mistake. One of the enduring axioms of the Bernie movement is that when its creeds are explained on their virtues alone, anyone—no matter the retrograde views they might hold—can become amenable to the cause. The most illustrative example of this dynamic might be a clip from The Adam Friedland Show, where the socialist comedian and podcaster convinces Dave Portnoy, of Barstool Sports fame, to endorse Medicaid for All. But when the party moved past Sanders and prostrated itself on the Altar of Late-2010 Norms, it lost touch with that protean blob of unaligned masculinity.
Perhaps Democrats piously believed that the party could survive without them. Unfortunately, the blob proved to be much larger, and more influential, than anyone realized. The Republicans swooped in, and the rest is history. Of the voters who supported Sanders in the 2016 election, as many as 12 percent of them eventually pulled the lever for Trump.
This is where I must admit that I was one of those careful liberals. I didn’t vote for Sanders in 2016, and was essentially undecided through the early months of 2020. Meanwhile, my friends—who were by then fully on board with Bernie—relished one of the only happy political moments of their lives as he blitzed through the early primaries. I have always shared the same big ideas and a similar lack of faith in the ossified Democratic aristocracy as Sanders, but I still could never get my arms fully around the senator.
I’ve never been able to come up with a great answer for why that is the case. There was just something about the Sanders coalition that felt too prickly, too online, and too brusquely dude-ish, all beyond the pale for my priggish liberal sensibilities in the mid-2010s. For a project ostensibly built around empathy—one committed to the unifying catharsis of class solidarity—I found the loudest Bernie backers to be surprisingly spiteful to those who might have been personally moved by a different candidate, or who could not totally conceptualize what a radical change in the status quo might mean to them. It was as if they believed that they had already convinced everyone worth convincing, thus deeming a huge collection of American voters as counter to their revolution. That attitude left someone like me—many people like me, it turned out—standing on the sidelines. Ultimately, my suspicions of Berniedom were rooted in how it felt, rather than what it stood for. But now, in 2025, when the Sanders cause is more pressing than ever, I am willing to admit that I feel pretty stupid about that.
In Denver, I detected a similar attitude in Terri Landers, another 69-year-old, who was with her daughter, Morgan Wiener, under the shade of leafless branches near the rally. Neither of them have ever been die-hard Bernie people—until this precise moment.
“I’ve started to get those texts from the Democrats again asking for money, and it’s like, ‘This is your job! What are you doing? We elected you to do something!’ ” Wiener said. “None of our elected representatives are doing anything. I mean, our governor supported RFK Jr.”
“In hindsight,” Landers added, “Bernie was right. … And maybe this time, we need to pay attention.”
The crowd at Civic Center Park was full of people like Landers. This audience didn’t resemble the brawny, toxic Sanders cabal the media warned about for so long. There were more women than men, and as in many of the recent protests that have been rising around America, most of them skewed toward retirement age. Yes, the field was pockmarked with a smattering of alpha-wave Bernie Bros—the young, college-educated progressives who might get a little uppity online about their favorite Vermonter—but they, too, have largely shed the bitterness imbued by the previous campaign failures. “I’m here because Bernie is filling the space in the right way, and AOC is going to run for president in 2028,” said one twentysomething legal assistant, and a dude, who was especially thrilled to be interviewed.
The big tent is working this time around. Consider John, a red-in-the-face Englishman in a Broncos cap, who, despite being a naturalized citizen, refused to give me his last name out of fear of deportation. (I wasn’t sure if he was joking. I don’t think he knew either.) John described himself as someone who skews conservative. He was a fan of McCain, Romney, and the rest of the pre-crisis GOP. I’ve encountered never-Trump Republicans in the past, but I pointed out to him that by being at this rally, he was throwing his support behind a self-described socialist.
“But it’s about the person. Bernie and AOC, they’re not corrupt,” he told me. “Bernie is rising to the top, in my eyes, because I’m seeing all this corruption that’s going on at the top of the Republican Party, all the robber barons. I relate to him more.”
Oddly, there is more vigor behind the eyes of a recent conservative convert than some of the longtime Sanders supporters I speak to at this rally, some of whom regard the festivities as evidence of a lost cause. “This should have been happening before the election. This should have been happening years ago,” said Corrie Van Horne, a therapist who counts herself as an early Bernie booster. She sat on the patchy grass and grasped at the sense of melancholy that pervades the Fighting Oligarchy tour. It’s easy to see where she’s coming from. The Sanders coalition has been freshly energized, but given the way so many of our fellow citizens are parading toward fascism, will it ever have another chance to thrive?
Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who spoke on the Fighting Oligarchy tour, is more hopeful. He told me that the paralyzing risk-management that has infected the liberal mainstream for far too long might finally be ending. “The Democrats who didn’t vote for Bernie in 2016 or 2020 never questioned his moral leadership,” he told me. “Oftentimes, they were making a strategic choice.” He hopes that what has changed now is that American civic dynamics have shifted to the point where meaningful progressive legislation is both good policy and good politics. “It’s the only way the Democratic Party can survive and grow. That’s been Bernie’s pitch for a long time,” Casar said. “The problems he’s been describing have become so bad, and so publicly undeniable, that people who didn’t vote for him are going, ‘Damn, maybe he was right about all this.’ ”
And for what it’s worth, in 2025, the Bernie movement has finally found a salient rallying cry—one that goes beyond policy ideas and scratches at a more elemental dissatisfaction stoked by liberals and leftists alike, no doubt one that was exacerbated this past summer as the party faced down the reality of its past-his-prime president who had failed to adequately account for his reduced abilities, and was seemingly enabled by his staff. Before the senator’s appearance, Ocasio-Cortez warmed up the crowd by rattling off all of her talking points: more affordable housing, more humane health care, the abolishment of Citizens United. But the biggest cheer of the night, by far, came when she aimed inward. “We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us,” said the congresswoman. A park full of constituents went wild.
The next morning, I’m in Arizona, planning to catch the final event on this leg of the Fighting Oligarchy tour. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are scheduled to speak at a high school football stadium at 11:30 a.m. It’s the octogenarian’s fifth event in three days, and he seems to be drooping a little in the desert heat. Sanders rolls up his sleeves to his elbows and rams through the exact same speech he’s given on every stop of the tour—providing material context for the roots of our discontent, urging the audience to keep up the fight, while never mincing words about just how far his vision is from the crucible of Washington.
“The oligarchs have unlimited amounts of money. They own the media, they have tremendous power over the political process,” Sanders proclaims, his voice noticeably hoarser than it was yesterday. “So we need you involved in the process, every step of the way. At the end of the day, 99 percent is a hell of a bigger number than 1 percent.”
It leaves me with a sensation I rarely experience for political figures, especially ones with such a complicated history. Watching Bernie on stage—his face growing steadily pinker, with sheet-white hair pouring out from the baseball cap protecting his bald spot from the sun—it is impossible not to feel some grief for the man. Nobody in America would be more justified to rejoice in the pratfalling of the Democratic Party. If Sanders wished to spend the last few summers he has left on this earth relishing in schadenfreude while the country burns, I don’t think anyone could blame him. At 83, he is in all likelihood too old to try again for the White House in three years (though I suspect some people here would try to fight me if I said that out loud). And yet here he is, sloughing off yet another weekend for the cause—ignoring all evidence to the contrary that a better world is possible.
Sanders’ new profile in the early days of Trump 2.0 is clearly breaking through. On Wednesday, Anderson Cooper will host him at a prime-time town hall on CNN, at which he’ll answer questions from anxious Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike.
Like the Denver rally, the 23,000 supporters in Tucson have exceeded expectations. Originally the event was scheduled for the school’s smaller basketball arena, but it was moved outside once the RSVPs came pouring in. The audience is of a similar makeup to what I’d found the day before—hardcore leftists and adrift liberals alike are bobbing around in the dark, hoping to uncover a path forward.
A college kid has been waiting to vote for Sanders her whole life. A Gen Xer who is more skeptical of progressive causes, she is here because she’s “just really pissed off.” An older gentleman tells me that he has some issues with Sanders’ college-debt relief proposal, but currently has bigger fish to fry. A software developer adds that everyone in his office but him voted for Trump, and if the United States is going the way of the fascists, he at least wants his objections to be immortalized in the public record.
“The Democratic Party is in shambles. They lost to a freaking Nazi party! And then they’re just like, ‘Good game everybody, we’ll get them next time,’ ” he says. “I guess I’m a reformed neoliberal dude.”
Outside the gates—where the line winds around the block—someone is hawking bootleg “Bernie 2020” T-shirts. They are an exact replica of the merch Sanders sold during the campaign. The senator still thinks his movement can win. And at long last, he might be right.
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