How the Sanders Campaign Got a Punk Sensibility

Last Thursday, a few hours before the end of the Democratic National Convention, two consultants to the Bernie Sanders campaign, Scott Goodstein and Arun Chaudhary, sat in the lobby of their Philadelphia hotel and considered what had become of the grassroots support for the candidate. Goodstein and Chaudhary’s firm ran the campaign’s digital operations, and so they had tracked the Sanders phenomenon from the beginning. Now, at the Wells Fargo Center, an angry core of Sanders holdouts was chanting through the speeches and staging periodic occupations of the media tent. Goodstein and Chaudhary believed that the outrage would subside. “So many people are being brought into the process for the first time,” Chaudhary said, and they weren’t used to the tidal emotions of political involvement, “where every moment is either utter catastrophe or complete triumph.” He continued, “After thinking their whole lives that no progress was possible, they had just been told that now maybe a hell of a lot of progress was possible. And now we’re like, well, some progress is possible. And there’s a gap.”