It can’t be earned by top-heavy, message-controlled campaigns based in, say, Brooklyn…this is interesting and is a good lesson for anyone wanting to plug in or spread the word on plugging in.

The sauce is not top secret:

“They’ve reversed the normal political formula” in which professional staffers take the lead and pound the phone to drum up crowds, said Chip Evans, a liberal radio host and former chairman of the Washoe County Democratic Party, who watched the event take shape and said he was struck by the extent to which it had been organized by local amateurs.Now, the campaign is working to whip all those energized supporters into a political machine that can deliver votes and send Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire a message that, in the words of senior adviser Tad Devine, “there’s something big happening across the country and they can be a part of it.”

To that end, the campaign is adding data specialists to its staff and more racially diverse faces to its speaking rosters. And it is refining methods of gathering data on attendees and converting them into volunteers.

But in an age of advanced analytics and micro-targeting, the campaign’s process of throwing rallies remains a relatively simple one (the event staff has even settled on pen, paper and clipboard for gathering information from supporters, having found them easier for many attendees to use, and cheaper, than tablets or laptops).

It begins with selecting rally locations, often based simply on the number of supporters the campaign has on its email list in a given city.

“There’s actually no secret sauce” to the turnout, said digital director Kenneth Pennington.

And:

When a location is determined, staffers often simply turn to Google to find an appropriate venue by searching for coverage of large political rallies held in that area in recent years.The campaign takes the basic steps of sending an email to local supporters, issuing a press release, creating a Facebook event, and posting a notification on Sanders’ Facebook page, which has more than one million followers.

According to field director Phil Fiermonte, it does little else to promote turnout. “We have not spent any advertising dollars on these events,” he said. “It’s not like we have lots of staff on the ground making phone calls.”

Instead, it’s left to Sanders’ largely self-organized grassroots support to deliver the crowds.

One unexpected source of bodies has been the Bernie Sanders for President page on Reddit — the message-board-style online social network that is not often associated with political organizing. The page is administered by Vermont-based Sanders admirer and winery employee Aidan King, 23, along with a fellow supporter he met online.

As the rallies became a focal point of the campaign, King added a sidebar to the Reddit page with an event schedule. “At first it didn’t even dawn on us how important it would be to get the word out,” he said.

King first glimpsed the power of the Sanders Reddit page — which has 90,000 subscribers — to drive turnout ahead of an early July rally in Madison, Wisconsin, that drew 10,000 people.

And lastly:

About one in five Sanders event attendees checks the box to become a volunteer when they RSVP, according to Pennington.“As the campaign moves on, we hope to increasingly convert those event attendees into real actors who can secure votes for the campaign,” he said.

As part of that effort, the campaign put a twist on its massive rally formula with a nationwide network of organizing parties on July 29, with remarks made by Sanders from a Washington, D.C., apartment simulcast to 3,500 events across the country. Over 100,000 people RSVP’d for the events and the campaign deployed a new tactic, asking attendees to text “work” to its organizing number. Texters received a link to a page where they could fill out a detailed form about their level of commitment to volunteering and the types of work they’d like to perform.

39,000 people texted the number and filled out the form, according to Pennington.

The campaign is also adjusting its rally messaging to reach a broader swathe of the Democratic electorate.

Sanders’ rhetoric has been remarkably consistent for decades, and on Tuesday night he hit on his standard themes of inequality, access to health care, and the power of “the billionaire class.”

But the messaging has evolved in recent weeks in the wake of disruptions at Sanders events by Black Lives Matter protestors and as observers point out that the senator’s support is concentrated among white primary voters.[emphasis added]

The point here is two-fold. First, there’s some real infrastructure building that is happening in many places, in particularly a huge base of small donors.

Second, though as I for one have said repeatedly Bernie has a steep hill to climb trying to match the network the Clintons have built over the years through buying favors, the energy seen in rallies isn’t just a cotton-candy sugar-high that dissipates quickly. It’s slow movement building, a lot of it not being picked up by the political elite class.

Will it be enough? Who knows? But, damn, I’d take that inspiration and authenticity any day over Chipotle-stop PR-driven campaigns.

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