“Who’s ready for a little political revolution?!?”
Monte Jarvis, the Oregon state director for the Bernie Sanders campaign, is standing before a small crowd of volunteers and staffers. It’s the morning of the Oregon primary, and young people in jean jackets and Bernie T-shirts have gathered in a squat storefront on a busy street in Portland. They’re preparing to hang flyers on doors throughout the city, reminding people to get their ballots in by the 8 p.m. deadline.
“You are the heart of soul of this political revolution,” Jarvis tells them. “Bernie has always said this is not about him. It’s about us.”
Pundits, pollsters, and politicos claim to know how this story ends—they’ve declared this political patient terminal. Dead man campaigning. The math just isn’t there for Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Heading into the Oregon primary, Clinton had 1,716 pledged delegates to Sanders’s 1,433, and 524 superdelegates to his 40. As of Monday, in order to surpass Clinton, Sanders needed to win almost 90 percent of the remaining delegates, according to the L.A. Times. And while Tuesday was expected to go well for Sanders in Oregon and Kentucky, Clinton would take some—and very likely half—of the delegates in those proportional contests.
Washington and Oregon were both expected to favor Sanders. But in the days leading up to Oregon’s primary, the state seemed to be moving away from a guaranteed win for Sanders. A small survey of Oregon voters conducted in early May showed Clinton up by between 7 and 15 percentage points, depending on the turnout. And Oregon’s primary, like Kentucky’s, is closed, meaning independents couldn’t vote for the Democratic nominee unless they changed their party registration by April 26. Sanders has struggled in states with closed primaries.
On top of that, enthusiasm in some corners of the Sanders camp appears to be waning. In the weeks since my own super pro-Sanders caucus in Seattle—where I caucused for Sanders—calls for Democrats to unify around Clinton have grown louder. My own excitement about Sanders’s candidacy has been eroded, beat down by delegate math and the outlandish behavior of some Sanders supporters. (Exhibit A: The death threats Sanders supporters sent the chairwoman of the Nevada Democratic Party after a bitter rule dispute at last weekend’s state convention.)
But the Sanders supporters I encountered over two days in Portland—an assignment to chronicle what may be the last big, futile win of the Sanders campaign—did not share my waning belief in Sanders’s candidacy. If I am at the “acceptance” stage of grieving in this campaign, and Sanders supporters in Nevada are at the “anger” stage, most of the die-hard Sanders fans I encountered in Portland are deep in either denial or bargaining.