Baristas For Bernie: Sanders' Service Worker Strategy To Win Iowa

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Posted February 1st, 2020 at 6:09pm by Team Starting Line

Excerpt:

You can’t lead a working-class political revolution without working-class voters. And if Sen. Bernie Sanders prevails in the Iowa Caucus on Monday night, it’ll be in part thanks to thousands of baristas, cashiers, bartenders and restaurant servers standing in his corner.

For most of this caucus cycle, the Sanders campaign has been quietly organizing service industry workers, an untapped voting bloc of Americans that would likely stand to benefit the most from a Sanders presidency. The typically younger, online and over-worked workforce is perfectly primed for the message Sanders is offering; the trick is just getting them all out to caucus.

Starting Line has found that Sanders’ Iowa campaign has hired many local service workers as field organizers over the past few months.

Sanders’ approach starts local, attempting to turn service industry workers who have a wide personal network in their community into trained political organizers. Many of the potential local voters they know won’t ever show up in a VAN list (the party’s voter database), but a few Facebook messages to an old co-worker could turn into an one-on-one meeting and then a new, committed caucus-goer.

Both strategies are perfectly viable in building a strong campaign, but if Sanders is successful in this, it could be a model picked up by more Democratic campaigns in the future to mobilize these less-likely voters who lean left.

https://iowastartingline.com/2020/02/01/baristas-for-bernie-sanders-service-worker-strategy-to-win-iowa/