Over a Million People Have Signed Up to Volunteer for Bernie's Campaign

[eridani]

https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/55904-focus-over-a-million-people-have-signed-up-to-volunteer-for-bernies-campaign

The campaign will provide volunteers at the gatherings with specific strategies and methods to begin helping Sanders. The Vermont senator will tape a “special broadcast” for supporters to watch at the parties.

“Our biggest strengths are Bernie and his message and policies and the size and dedication of our volunteer base,” said Claire Sandberg, the 2020 campaign’s national organizing director. “So we are very prepared to put people to work, to give them the tools to organize on their own.”

Sandberg guided Sanders’ “distributed organizing” strategy in 2016, which trained his army of supporters to mount their own phone-banking and texting efforts. According to Sandberg, that initiative led to “80,000-volunteer hosted events, 85 million phone calls, 10 million peer-to-peer text messages and also 5 million doors” knocked on in conjunction with Sanders’ field operation.

But that organizing team got off to a late start in 2016, a delay the Sanders operation is intent on not repeating.

“What people don’t realize about the program is that most of that voter contact didn’t even begin until January 2016, and it didn’t actually really achieve scale until March of 2016. We only got the machine fully up and running once by the point that it was almost too late,” Sandberg said. “So we’re very excited this time around that we’re going to give volunteers the tools to do those things right from the jump.”