I Shook Bernie's Hand Today :) (after his campaign rally in Ypsi)

When I learned last Friday evening that Bernie Sanders would be speaking at the Convocation Center of Eastern Michigan University, a location within walking distance from my house, I immediately made plans to attend. In this post, I’ll give you a little background about my city, Ypsilanti; about Eastern Michigan University; and then I’ll offer some impressions of the crowd and their reactions to Bernie’s speech. Along the way I’ll give you some details about the weather, the length of the line, and the demographics of the people who wanted to see one of the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates for the 2016 election.

The announcement said that doors would open at 12:30 PM. Anticipating a full house, I arrived to get a spot on line at 11:00 AM. I learned from other folks, once I was inside, that the earliest were in line at about 9:00 AM. 

I happened to have occasion to go back out and drive by the end of the line at about 12:15 (a friend of mine was holding my place). The map here shows, by the purple line beginning with a circle and ending with a star at the Convocation Center, the line of attendees at close to its longest extent. I estimate that the line was about 2/3rds of a mile. With temperatures in the mid-20s, under damp and gray skies, that’s pretty impressive.

But let’s get a sense of what Ypsilanti is like before we assess what a crowd of 10,000 people on a Monday afternoon might indicate. 

Ypsilanti is the second-largest city in Washtenaw County. Most everyone has heard of the largest city (and county seat), Ann Arbor, along with the university based there that tends to suck all the air out of the room. Ypsi and its own university, Eastern Michigan, have long labored in the shadows of their better-known and flashier neighbors to the west. There’s definitely a love-hate relationship between the two cities. Ann Arbor likes to think of itself as trendy, but of late the descriptor fits Ypsi better. A2 is coming to resemble a college-town-as-theme-park, while Ypsilanti is closer to its humbler, blue-collar roots, with an interesting and lively DIY culture. Further exploration would deserve a separate post; it’s sufficient here to note that while the population of Ypsi City is relatively small, with an official population of about 22,000, it’s in the middle of a reasonably-large county (population approximately 350,000), with at least a quarter of that number living within an easy 15-minute drive.

Does that make the turnout of 10,000 negligible? I don’t think so. Today is a federal holiday, but relatively few people have that day off from work. Eastern (22,000 students), U-M (45,000 students) and Washtenaw Community College (just across the street from Eastern, with another 12,000 students) are all in session too. Thus many people would have had to skip work and/or classes to attend. By no means were all of the attendees students, for that matter, as I’ll describe below, nor is there reason to assume that all people at the rally today came from nearby.

It’s a big time sink to go to a campaign rally like this, as anyone who has been to one can attest. Today, after however long a trip it might be for someone to travel there, it took at least an hour to stand in line outside in the cold and dank; a couple of hours—or more—waiting inside the arena for everyone to get in and get settled, given the security checkpoints that slow down entry; then an hour or more to hear the candidate’s speech, and then at least 30 minutes, maybe more, to get home. 

So who seemed to be Feel the Bern enough to spend more than half a day at this event? These are impressions, not empirically validated, but FWIW: My read of the group is that it was probably about 50-50 male and female; about 80% white (maybe 12% black; 3-4% Arab-American; 3-4% other people of color); about 60% students, that is people in their late teens or early 20s, with the rest of the crowd significantly older. This is not too far off from the overall population of the county, which is about 75% white and about 13% African-American, though it is a little more white than the student body of Eastern, which is about 67% white, 20% African-American, and the balance comprised of other people of color.

Were they all genuinely enthusiastic about being there? Maybe, though that’s hard to tell. But he got plenty of applause, plenty of appreciation for his hardest-hitting lines.

For most of us, these are not going to be new. Some sounded different to me, however, so perhaps you can weigh in below as to whether they are tweaks given the audience, or simply material that I have missed until now. I’ll post below the jump many of the points that he made during his hour-long address, quoting directly as best as I can.