This is anecdotal, but you know how Facebook suggests people who you might want to be friends with? For some reason, over the last month or so the algorithm has been serving up nearly 100% people who have few friends in common with me but who love Bernie Sanders so much that they use him in their avatar. And I spent some time yesterday looking at these folks and their bios are a lot different from the old suggestions I was getting. In the past, most suggested friends were in three groups: academics, journalists/editors, or employed progressive organizers. But most of these Bernie folks are just regular people who work as food servers or have a job at Lowe’s or maybe do some charity work with the homeless. There’s a lot of young people still in their first job. There are stay-at-home moms and people who are self-publishing short stories.
In any case, there are a lot of them and they’ve managed to get connected to each other and want to bring me into The Borg.
Nothing wrong with that, but I thought about it when I saw that Bernie has just reached the million donor plateau. That’s right, a million people have donated money to the Bernie Sanders campaign, which is more than any other candidate and more than Obama had attracted at the same point in his campaign.
How many of these folks are infrequent voters? How many would be disengaged from the process if not for Bernie being in the race?
Those are the big questions. Because something could be afoot.
