Sanders runs his own race

Watching Sen. Bernie Sanders’ surging run for president triggered flashbacks for Kate O’Connor, senior adviser on former Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.

Eyebrow-raising crowds. Flummoxed media. A straight-talking politician who appeals to the liberal wing of the Democratic party.

O’Connor watches Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nomination with a combination of nostalgia and sympathetic stress.

“Oh God, I know exactly what’s happening,” said O’Connor, who traveled with Dean during his busy summer tour.

“I think they’ve been really successful,” she said. “When people are listening to what you’re saying, you’re successful, and I think that’s what’s happening.”

Dean himself has jumped into the comparison game.

“There’s certainly an insurgency,” Dean said of Sanders in a recent Washington Post article. “An attractive candidate is basically calling out the Democrats, much the way I did in 2004.”

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The two campaigns may feel similar — but whether Sanders staffers have learned the lessons of the Dean campaign remains to be seen.

Sanders is gaining on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, widely seen as the party’s presumptive nominee. The Vermonter tops the field in New Hampshire, and in a poll released Thursday took the lead for the first time in Iowa, where Dean’s campaign ran aground.

That test is five months away.

Same state, different fields

Vermonters know the two men strike different notes: Sanders focuses on economic equality, campaign finance reform and breaking up big banks. Dean rose on the national stage in part by challenging the Iraq War.

Dean took on several candidates from within the Democratic establishment. Sanders faces just one competitive Democrat so far, Clinton, although Vice President Joe Biden is considering a run.

These differences have prompted some pundits to shy from putting the two politicians in the same category.

“These comparisons are insane,” said Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Dean. He says the dynamics of the Democratic primary are almost completely reversed this year.

Trippi also points out a key difference in the field. Dean became frontrunner with about 30 percent support. If Sanders reaches that level — a current poll average at RealClearPolitics puts him at about 23 percent nationally — he would still trail Clinton’s current level of support.

A Sanders spokesman said the campaign is drawing from a broad history.

“I think he’s looked at lots of prior campaigns and absorbed some lessons from them,” said Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs, “and also is pursuing his own path that’s different in a lot of ways.”

Pitfalls of popularity

For a scrappy, rising campaign, challenges can come from within.

“Our support is growing faster than our political infrastructure,” Sanders told the Des Moines Register's editorial board this month, answering a question about why his website lacked foreign policy position statements.

The Dean campaign, too, struggled to keep up with demands.

The former governor’s popularity created a “enormous and constant strain on the campaign and our resources,” said Bob Rogan, who was deputy campaign manager for Dean..

“It was a constant struggle to grow the organization and target resources to keep up with the trajectory of Howard’s candidacy from the DNC speech right through to Iowa,” Rogan wrote in an email, referring to a Democratic National Committee speech in February 2003.

Sanders has drawn thousands of enthusiastic fans to campaign events, as Dean did in 2003. Large crowds make headlines and build momentum — but also can lull campaigns into false confidence.

O’Connor recalls sitting at rallies in Iowa with a different perspective on the adoring throngs than her Dean campaign colleagues in Burlington.

“They would drive days to come to a rally to hear Howard speak,” O’Connor said of the crowds. “It was great that these people supported him, but they weren’t Iowa voters.”

In the end, Iowa caucus organization proved too much for the Dean camp. Dean ended the night with a third-place 18 percent. Within weeks, his campaign collapsed.

“Our people did not show up at the caucuses, and this is why I get really nervous about people basing the success of a campaign about how many people show up at a rally,” O’Connor said.

Scud missiles

Although Sanders has challenged Clinton in New Hampshire and Iowa, he has yet to face the kind of headwinds that tussled Dean.

“The one thing I can tell you for sure is until the establishment starts attacking the living daylights out of him, he’s no threat,” Trippi said. “The second he becomes a threat, you will know.”

In the weeks before the Iowa caucus, Dean surged into the lead, bolstered by an endorsement by former Vice President Al Gore — and the attacks intensified.

“Hardly a day would go by without a Scud missile, fueled by opposition researchers digging deep into Dean’s personal history and his record as governor, sailing into our Burlington headquarters,” Rogan said.

This year’s Sanders and his Democratic rival have largely avoided calling each other out by name. Clinton recently told reporters that her campaign is “focused on the Republicans,” according to the Washington Post.

But Dean pollster Paul Maslin already suspects some unease in the Clinton camp.

“The fact that there is somebody out there that is beating her in New Hampshire and closing the gap dramatically in Iowa has to be a real threat right now,” Maslin said.

“The lesson from Dean is that at some point you rise to the level that you become a target, and when that happens you’d better be ready to defend yourself,” Maslin added. “Basically what I would say to them (the Sanders campaign) is, ‘get ready,’ ”

Dean also faced internal questions about how a president should speak.

“In some ways Howard and Bernie are a lot alike, because they say what they’re thinking,” O’Connor said.

Dean, who did not respond to messages seeking comment for this article, told Vermont Public Radio last month that he should have changed the tone of his message when he surged into the lead.

“I had a problem because I had run as an insurrectionist candidate, and people don’t elect the insurrectionist as president of the United States,” Dean said.

Briggs, the Sanders spokesman, said he expects his boss to push ahead as usual, even if he becomes the frontrunner.

“I would say, based on the record of the past four decades or so, that what’s going to happen is that he will remain consistent,” Briggs said.

A new challenge

Sanders’ greatest challenge, according to Dean strategist Trippi, is demographics. Even if Sanders wins Iowa and New Hampshire — getting farther than Dean — he will need to broaden his base in South Carolina and other states.

“There’s no way that he can win the nomination with his support among minorities being as low as it is,” Trippi said. “White progressives equal about 30 percent of the party. He’s got ‘em.”

O’Connor said Dean faced the same challenge to some extent. Name recognition and appeal among black and Latino voters can be difficult for a Vermont politician who is used to talking to mostly-white constituents.

Maslin, the pollster, thinks Sanders’ support is more ideologically liberal than Dean’s, “but they’re both still probably mostly affluent whites.”

Clinton already has built support within African American and Latino communities, and has greater name recognition. The Clinton campaign is said to be counting on Southern primaries to win.

“It’s possible that Sanders could embarrass Clinton in Iowa just as in New Hampshire,” said Dennis Goldford, professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. “It’s hard to see how he goes beyond that.”

Sanders, in his interview with the Des Moines Register, acknowledged Clinton’s advantage among non-white voters.

“I will not deny for a moment that we have a lot of work to do. We are going to do that work,” Sanders said. “We think we can and should do well within the African-American community and the Latino community.”

A chain of volunteers

The Sanders campaign will try to get beyond New Hampshire and Iowa with what it calls an innovative grassroots organizing effort.

“We’re moving into a new phase of the campaign,” Sanders told the Des Moines Register editorial board this month.

Sanders’ digital team is leading the effort by building a massive volunteer structure, said digital director Kenneth Pennington.

Pennington said the Sanders camp organized people who signed up at thousands of simultaneous house parties on July 29 into a pyramid structure that relies heavily on volunteers leading other volunteers.

The campaign can expand rapidly because not every volunteer has to be supervised and trained by a staffer, Pennington said.

“What we’re doing online is kind of using digital tools in order to organize people outside of the early states where we don’t have a large field presence yet,” Pennington said.

The Dean campaign was “famous for kind of starting this distributed organizing,” Pennington said. Former Dean campaign staffer Zack Exley is one of two people leading the volunteer structure for the Sanders campaign.

But Dean is just one among many sources of inspiration, he said.

“We’re learning from every campaign, so it’s not just Gov. Dean’s campaign,” Pennington said. “We’re learning from what the Obama campaign did, which was really impressive on a grassroots level, and we’re trying to make it better.”

Briggs, the Sanders spokesman, also pointed to the limitations of looking to Dean’s campaign alone in measuring the latest presidential bid by a Vermonter.

“I would shoot for doing better than Gov. Dean did,” he said

This story was first posted online on Sept. 13, 2015. Contact April Burbank at 802-660-1863 or aburbank@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AprilBurbank.