Bernie Sanders leans on star power of ‘AOC’

Simon Lewis -

US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders drew large, passionate crowds in Iowa this weekend, even when he was not there. The US Senator from Vermont has been rising in opinion polls just as Iowans prepare to pick their choice of Democratic presidential nominee on February 3, but has been stuck in Washington, where he is serving as a juror in Republican President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.

In lieu of the candidate himself, Sanders supporter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a first term US congresswoman from New York, has proven almost as much of a draw, filling rallies and town halls and galvanizing members of what she called a “mass movement” led by Sanders to push progressive politics.

“It doesn’t rely on any one person to carry this whole movement on their back. We all shoulder a little,” she told a group of volunteers going out to canvass for Sanders in Cedar Rapids on Saturday morning.

The strong turnout for Sanders even in his absence underscores the strength of his young and diverse base of supporters, who have rallied behind his unapologetic liberalism. But it also shows as much enthusiasm for 30-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, who became a star of US left-wing politics after being elected to the House of Representatives in 2018. Interviews with a dozen prospective caucus-goers over two days showed her backing had lent Sanders a degree of youth appeal and bolstered his progressive credentials, especially on Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue of tackling climate change.

Sanders, proposing tax hikes for the wealthy and corporations to fund measures such as universal government-run healthcare and tuition-free college, is rising just as the first voting nears, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll this week, polling at 20 per cent and just behind Joe Biden, the front-runner and former vice president.

In Iowa, whose first-in-the-nation caucuses have an outsized role in picking presidential nominees, Sanders is leading some polls or in a statistical tie with Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

His rise has come since Ocasio-Cortez, wildly popular among progressives and known for her bare-all social media presence, formally endorsed him in October just after a heart attack threatened to cut short his second run for president.

“It gave him a needed boost at an important time, but also I think it signaled for a lot of young progressive people that this is the campaign that we should throw down for,” said Sayles Kasten, Iowa State director for the Sunrise Movement, a youth group organising on climate change that endorsed Sanders this month.

Grant Woodard, an Iowa lawyer and former Democratic political operative in the state, said Ocasio-Cortez and film-maker Michael Moore, who campaigned alongside her this week, were “cat nip” to Sanders’ base, but were not likely to expand his appeal to moderate Democrats.

Sanders, an avowed Democratic Socialist, remains a “polarizing figure in the party,” he said.

“I guess we’ll see as this plays out how much of a thirst for Democratic Socialism there in the national Democratic Party. I don’t know if it’s that great,” said Woodard.

All the Democrats running for president are sending out high-profile allies, Hollywood stars and family members to campaign on their behalf or alongside them, but few attract the level of excitement seen for Ocasio-Cortez, better known by her initials AOC. Last Friday night, Sanders’ voice boomed in briefly at a college hall in Iowa City when he called in from Washington by phone after the day’s impeachment trial proceedings, but it was Ocasio-Cortez who got a rock-star welcome from the crowd of

more than 800. — Reuters