PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Coming off an appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” Bernie Sanders still finds old material works for him in New Hampshire.
In the Granite State, Hillary Clinton has made an effort to shift her stump speech to the left in order to win over fans, but Sanders has stuck to the same stump speech for months. His fans are still eating it up.
“This is a loud and boisterous crowd,” Sanders exclaimed as he took off his jacket and threw it to a supporter. The room went nuts.
According to the campaign, 1,220 people gathered in the Great Bay Community College gymnasium, although the crowd seemed louder than due to the room’s acoustics. The Vermont senator reveled in the crowd’s enthusiasm, laughing as they repeated his lines like a song where they knew all the words.
In every New Hampshire poll that’s come out since the Iowa caucus, Sanders leads Hillary Clinton by double digits. Sanders still says he won’t get cocky and “it’s going to be a close race.”
Manchester resident Stephen Philbrook said that today marked his fourth Sanders rally. While he knows the candidate’s message well he keeps coming back to “feel the Bern.”
“I’ve been on campaigns since 1988 and no one brings the buzz like Bernie does,” he said. “I once saw Obama speak in Manchester and it’s the same kind of buzz.”
Although many of those at Sunday’s rally were from New Hampshire, a number of supporters the Washington Examiner spoke to were from Massachusetts or Maine, both within close driving distance. These supporters have to wait over a month to cast their vote in the Democratic primary, but one Massachusetts resident in a custom made “Bernie to the Future” t-shirt said he “couldn’t wait” to find out more about the candidate everyone was buzzing about.
Part of the reason Sanders has been so successful in the Granite State is that he’s been able to attract the majority of first-time voters and voters under age 30. The candidate has held numerous events on New Hampshire college campuses, all of which have been filled to capacity. On the other hand, when Clinton held a student town hall at New England College on Saturday, young voters asked her a series of uncomfortable questions about her past political scandals.
“Most of my friends didn’t care about politics, but Bernie has woken up something inside of them and they suddenly care,” Erin Reagan, 23, told the Washington Examiner. “If it goes back to the same old, same old, which I think is represented by Hillary, it’s going to go back to not caring.”
“The people here, they already agreed with him,” she added. “They just wanted to hear him say it in person.”
