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With the California primary approaching, it’s hard to predict if Sanders will win or what happen next. What seems certain, however, is that regardless of whether Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, his campaign reflects the current mood and state of progressive movements in California, along with much of the country. There is a palpable dissatisfaction with the status quo among many Californians.
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I recently walked with a Bernie Sanders canvasser as he knocked on people’s doors in my hometown of Pittsburg, California. Pittsburg is a multiethnic, working-class industrial city that is 40 miles east of San Francisco. It is 42 percent Latino and 17.7 percent Black, with a per capita income of US$23,330 and 18 percent poverty rate. The city started as a coal mining port in the mid-1800s. In the early 1900s, it became known as a steel town when Columbia Geneva Steel opened a steel mill in the city in 1906. Like many industrial towns, the decline of manufacturing is felt in Pittsburg. In 1984, US Steel shut down a steel mill in the city, laying off over 400 workers. In recent years, the steel company USS-POSCO, one of the city’s top employers, has had regular layoffs.
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Even though homelessness has decreased throughout Contra Costa County, in East County it has increased. The number of people without shelter increased almost 33 percent in East County, from 227 in 2015 to 301 in 2016, according to a report by the Contra Costa Council on Homelessness. In Pittsburg, homelessness jumped from 56 in 2015 to 60 in 2016 and, in Antioch, increased to 164 this year from 122 last year. This increase is thanks largely to home foreclosures during the 2008-2009 recession—which hit East Contra Costa particularly hard the Bay Area’s increasingly expensive housing market leading to economic displacement from cities like San Francisco and Oakland to outer East Bay cities like Antioch, Pittsburg and Vallejo.
Peter Costanza, the Sanders canvasser I walked with, is a resident of Pittsburg who also spent much of his youth growing up in Davis, California. For a long time, he gave up on politics. His reasoning, “Everyone lies. Everyone’s full of shit. How do these millionaires really know what’s going on in my neighborhood? How can they relate to me? They’re out of touch. Blocking bills that raise minimum wage but passing bills that gives them more money. Giving themselves raises. I’m not down with that shit.” He became more engaged, however, when he heard Bernie Sanders talk about income inequality and say things Costanza believed for a long time. “Here’s someone who’s speaking the truth. Who knows what’s going on. Is in touch,” he said.
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While many people were not home when Costanza knocked, of the ones who did answer their doors most said they supported Sanders or were leaning toward him. Costanza said that is pretty typical of the neighborhoods he’s canvassed throughout Pittsburg. Those who supported Sanders agreed with his policies, such as raising the minimum wage to US$15 an hour and implementing a universal, single-payer healthcare system in the U.S. One resident, who’s been a school worker for 16 years, started making more than US$15 an hour for first time last year. Her son is on Medicaid (health insurance for low-income people) but even that’s not enough. She supports Sanders’ policies because “I do need that help.”
There was a very similar vibe at the May 30 Sanders rally in Oakland that drew over 20,000 people from across the San Francisco Bay Area. A huge number of those people signed up to be volunteers for the campaign. Ed Stres, a volunteer with the Sanders campaign, said 2 out of 10 people he asked at the rally to sign up as volunteers were already volunteers. There has been much cross-pollination between the Sanders campaign and other movements, such as Black Lives Matter and the fight to raise the minimum wage. In fact, during the Frisco Five hunger strike that eventually forced former San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr to step down, I saw some Sanders supporters showing their support for the hunger strikers. Stres said many people from those movements are involved in the Sanders campaign and that there is a larger social movement that goes beyond Sanders. “Bernie’s just the person of the hour to represent this movement,” he said.
Lydia, an organizer with the political party Socialist Alternative, said that the Sanders campaign helps radical/anti-establishment left groups by putting their ideas on a national stage. “The role that the election plays for groups like us is that it brings attention to these issues to a national scale. The word ‘socialism’ was a dirty word since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” she said. Now, more millennials “are positively inclined toward the word ‘socialism’ than toward the word ‘capitalism.' That’s a huge shift. That wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for Bernie Sanders unapologetically saying, ‘I am a socialist’ on a national scale.”
Lydia also noted that there is a changing mood in the country, in terms of dissatisfaction with the capitalist status quo, that is propelling Sanders’ campaign. That mood, she said, “has less to do with Bernie Sanders than it does to do with the crushing recession. The recession has improved, ostensibly, but it’s only improved for some people. Most working-class people are not feeling the improvement since the recession.”
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While unemployment has decreased, many of the jobs created after the recession are low-paying. According to a National Employment Law Project report, low-wage industries “accounted for only 22 percent of job losses during the downturn, but 44 percent of jobs gained over the past four years,” a higher increase than in mid-wage or high-wage industries. Another study by Alliance for a Just Society pointed out that “48 percent of national job openings, or 2.4 million out of 5 million total projected jobs, are expected to pay less than US$15 an hour," which they consider a living wage. It is also the amount Sanders wants to raise the minimum wage to. While there may be more jobs available than during the darkest days of the recession, those jobs don’t pay enough for people to fully support themselves. Interestingly enough, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis, not only do large numbers of small donations fuel Sanders’ campaign but 28.6 percent of his donors are unemployed. As Lydia said, “People are feeling the crush of capitalism.”
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Kshama Sawant, who currently sits on the Seattle City Council, is also a member of Socialist Alternative. She, like Sanders, is one of the few openly socialist politicians in the United States. Sawant and Socialist Alternative are encouraging Sanders to run as an independent instead of within the Democratic Party. Lydia explained, “We’re socialists. We don’t think that running within the Democratic Party is the answer. We ran Kshama Sawant as a socialist, unapologetically. And we got her elected twice.” She also pointed out that the Democratic Party establishment has been blocking Sanders as much as it can, despite the widespread support he has. Lydia encouraged Sanders supporters “to not be satisfied with going through electoral politics and to organize themselves within their communities and fight for some of Bernie’s platform on a local level, like fight for 15 [dollar an hour minimum wage] in their own town.”
Whether or not Sanders wins California or the Democratic nomination, the movement behind his campaign is not going anywhere.
Adam Hudson is a writer based in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter: @AdamHudson5
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