As we enter the last week before the Iowa caucuses on Monday, February 3rd, the first event in which actual voters get to indicate their preferences, the Bernie Sanders campaign is telling its volunteers to dial back the phone calls and instead focus more on talking to friends and neighbors. This may be due to their feeling that given the rising enthusiasm of the their supporters, this may be a more effective tactic of persuasion.

In the final week leading to caucus day in Iowa on February 3, Democrats there are bombarded with phone calls from pollsters, campaigns, and outside advocacy groups. That, in addition to baseline spam, creates a cacophony that is hard for campaigns to break through. It is far more effective, campaign leaders have argued, to have friends and relatives urge those close to them to come out to caucus than to carpet bomb phone lines, what is known as relational organizing. The campaign’s original goal for phone calls before Iowa was 5 million, but volunteers have already surpassed 7 million. The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One sign of enthusiasm is the packed event held in Ames yesterday, even though Sanders himself could not attend, since he was attending the impeachment hearings in Washington. The event featured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former congressional candidate Brent Welder, but the absence of the candidate did not seem to dampen attendance or enthusiasm.

Now in Ames w @BernieSanders and @AOC. I came to an Ames Bernie rally right before the 2016 Iowa Caucus & there were 1/4 the people. I’ve been to prez events here since 2000 and I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s also a packed balcony above and overflow room with 500 ppl pic.twitter.com/tv8izeSZIP

— Brent Welder (@BrentWelder) January 26, 2020

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Naomi Klein describes how she overcame her initial infuriated reaction to Hillary Clinton’s savage attack on Bernie Sanders, the news emerging just after Sanders had appealed to his supporters to dial back attacks on other candidates. She says that we should all take a deep breath and avoid Clinton’s attempt to disrupt the Democratic primary for who knows what reason.

Within seconds, that 2016 primary feeling flooded my bloodstream. Screw what I had planned for the morning — none of it felt as importing as firing off a volley of rage tweets about Clinton, her staggering absence of self-awareness, and her outrageously revisionist history.

But I did something else instead. I blocked Twitter, chatted with my son about why he’s such a Bernie fan (“He will beat Donald Trump”), and started writing about being on the Sanders campaign trail in Iowa and New Hampshire over the last couple months. Because among Sanders’s steadily growing base of supporters, the mood is about as far from rage tweeting as you can get. In fact, despite the senator’s reputation as a finger-waving grump, the more time I spend with the campaign, whether in small meetups or huge rallies, the more I am struck by the undercurrent of tenderness that runs through all these events. Surprisingly enough, the force that is bridging what at first seem like huge divides — between multiracial urbanite Gen Z-ers and aging white farmers, between lifetime industrial trade unionists and hardcore climate organizers, between a Jewish candidate and a huge Muslim base — is a culture of quiet listening.
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