Now, maybe The New York Times can catch up…
After a poll this week showed the previously unthinkable — the 73-year-old Independent senator from Vermont surging past Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire — there’s a feeling that the Bernie Sanders operation is maturing from a quixotic pursuit for the White House into the real deal.Sanders’ campaign is calling the Franklin Pierce University and the Boston Herald poll, which found Sanders beating Clinton 44 percent to 37 percent in the Granite State, an “astonishing” feat. It gives even more fuel to a momentum that the Sanders team is riding to significantly expand its ground game, especially in New Hampshire.
The campaign has already outgrown its modest office on Manchester Road in Concord, and will be moving the state headquarters to Manchester in the coming days. Over the next three weeks, aides will be scouting out more real estate to open field offices across the state to add to the 10 currently set up. Another six or seven open on Monday.
As for manpower, a handful of staff are starting in New Hampshire on Monday, and a week after, another new crew is starting.
“And then in the next month, our staff size is going to really bloom,” said Julia Barnes, Sanders’ New Hampshire state director, in an interview with POLITICO on Friday at her desk in front of a stack of resumes.
To be clear, as I have said from the outset, Bernie has a huge big hill to climb–he has started late, in relative terms, for a presidential campaign and he does not have 30-years of a history of buying the loyalty of political operatives in every state with favors, political appointments and political spoils.
But, he’s changed big parts of the campaign conversation–let’s see, his weeks-ago free college- education for all to be paid for my a financial transaction tax on Wall Street forced the Clinton campaign to come up with its own–far weaker–proposal–is a feature of the “Bernie proposes and then we hear, “Me, too, me, too” campaign season.
But, this is true:
“What this says to me is there’s a lot of fluidity in the race. And it’s going to be a long haul,” Jay Surdukowski, who has served as legal counsel for New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan and is giving legal advice to former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley as he runs for president.
This is clearly part of the dynamic that is playing into Joe Biden’s mulling of a race, despite the fact that he’d be getting into the race pretty late.
==============
BUY The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America
