Democrats 2020

“The Culture Game Matters”: Inside the Building of Bernie’s Grassroots Celebrity Army

Why have actors and performers like Ariana Grande, Cardi B, Kim Gordon, Rob Delaney, John Cusack, the Strokes, and Boots Riley joined the Bernie Sanders brigade? One reason may be that, as Chloë Sevigny said, “he’s punk as fuck.”
bernie sanders
By Scott Eisen/Getty Images.

Kim Gordon is best known as the preternaturally cool art-world fixture, post-punk icon, and bassist of the sadly disbanded indie-rock institution Sonic Youth. Now you can add another identifier to that list: Bernie Sanders surrogate. “Don’t be afraid to #feelthebern this movement is for all of us,” Gordon wrote in a February 16 Instagram post. She was wearing a white T-shirt that paired Sanders’s name with the signature four-bar logo of the classic hardcore band Black Flag. Her accessories included a large “Unidos con Bernie” button and a clipboard of Sanders paraphernalia. The post got about 32,000 likes. “I just found my grey one from last election,” replied Chan Marshall, the musician known as Cat Power, referring to the Bernie Black Flag shirt.

Gordon’s Instagram, which has more than 303,000 followers, has been almost exclusively devoted to Bernie content over the past few weeks. It’s filled with snaps of poll results and field-office messaging and canvassing expeditions and suchlike. “join me knocking doors for @berniesanders in SFV this Sunday!” reads the caption to a photo of Gordon sandwiched between Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Sign up at link in bio and find events near you at events.berniesanders.com.” As the 67-year-old, recently converted Berner told me the other day from Los Angeles, where she has lived for the past several years, “My daughter’s been really supportive of the Brooklyn bail fund, and she’ll often post a picture of herself and say, donate. I think selfies can work in that way.”

For the Sanders campaign, which has soared to the top of the fractious Democratic field, that is precisely the calculation. The candidate’s support is largely built on small-dollar donations and grassroots organizing, underpinned by a fervent cohort of millennial and Gen Z constituents who are fed up and fired up and clamoring for change. What better way to spread the gospel than through the social-media channels of influential tastemakers who resonate with the Generation X-and-under vote?

Indeed, out of all the candidates who were screaming at one another on a Nevada debate stage Wednesday night, Sanders is the one who appears to have officially captured the cool-kid coalition. Hip-hop stars Cardi B and Killer Mike teamed up with his campaign to create viral YouTube videos. Another such production, focused on Sanders’s “Medicare for all” platform, is forthcoming from the groundbreaking model-actor Hari Nef. Ariana Grande beamed out an endorsement photo to her more than 70 million Twitter followers, and Emily Ratajkowski gave Sanders her blessing in a video shared with the 25 million-something people who gawk at her on Instagram. The Strokes, Bon Iver, and Vampire Weekend have all generated A-list publicity with their performances at Bernie 2020 events, and Rob Delaney and David Cross have been bombarding their Twitter peeps with near non-stop Bernie boosting. Here’s Chloë Sevigny calling Sanders “punk as fuck” in a Guardian interview, Chan Marshall posing with the 78-year-old Democratic Socialist senator on Instagram, and Boots Riley trumpeting his Sanders support in an epic Twitter thread. “I have never voted for a candidate in my life,” he wrote Tuesday in the first of a 33-tweet series. “But I will be voting for Bernie Sanders.”

Sanders also has the usual cabal of lefty legacy celebs in his corner, the Susan Sarandons and Tim Robbinses and Cynthia Nixons of the world. On Tuesday, Neil Young took to his own website to endorse Sanders in the kicker of a scathing anti-Trump screed. (“One of your opponents has the answers I like.…His initials are BS. Not his policies.”) And John Cusack is another bold-faced name who has effectively turned his Twitter feed into a real-time virtual campaign rally. “They just all agreed on @cnn that Bernie Sanders was the big winner tonight, that he’s the frontrunner,” Cusack tweeted on the heels of Tuesday’s debate. “He’s gonna roll through Nevada.”

Delaney, who spoke to me from Montreal, where he’s currently filming a movie, said that the main goal of his Bernie barnstorm, short of actually sending Sanders to the White House, was to try and win over at least a fraction of his more than 1.5 million followers. “For me, social media started as a way to promote comedy,” he said. “I’m coming to Houston, here’s a link to my tickets. But now that I have the amazing good fortune to work in film and TV and have this gigantic mouthpiece, I figure, why not use it to do whatever I can to get people to a place where they’re not afraid to go to the doctor?” Delaney, who moved his family to London in 2014 to work on Catastrophe and ended up staying there, told me that some of his most popular tweets and videos have been those about his experiences with Britain’s National Health Service. “I’ve spoken a lot about that,” he said, “and I think people get that I’m saying, this person has the most aggressive and far-reaching type of plan that I’m tasting the fruits of right now, in a country that has a system that is single payer and truly universal.…I just want people to be able to go to the doctor and not go broke.”

The Bernie crowd’s organic social-media mojo stands in contrast to that of, say, Mike Bloomberg’s campaign, which is working with a new influencer-marketing company to blanket Instagram with sponsored memes, as well as reportedly paying more than 500 social-media users in California $2,500 a month to promote the former New York mayor on their accounts. The Sanders campaign has about 20 people who work on social media/digital and celebrity outreach, including national director of surrogates Shasti Conrad and senior adviser Winnie Wong (who I’ve known for years). Wong’s personal connections have come in handy (she was already pals with Bernie A-listers like Gordon and Sevigny and others), but beyond that, the effort is really just a lot of hustle—sliding into people’s DMs, @’ing them, and so forth.

Cardi B, Ariana Grande, and Rob Delaney.

Photos from Getty Images.

Take the Ariana Grande relationship, which started when a young woman on the campaign’s digital team, having heard the singer was a fan, replied to one of Grande’s tweets last year from the official campaign account. That led to a backstage meeting in November when Grande was performing in Atlanta and Sanders was there for the MSNBC/Washington Post debate. A few hours ahead of the debate, Grande tweeted out her photo endorsement: “MY GUY. thank you Senator Sanders for coming to my show, making my whole night and for all that you stand for !” The following day, according to Conrad, the campaign’s press clipping service tracked 20 articles about Sanders’s debate performance, and more than 55 covering the Grande moment. That February 10 Strokes performance, where the band announced a new album and debuted two new songs? It came about, Conrad said, because singer-songwriter and Bernie supporter Harper Simon (son of Paul Simon), knew that the Strokes were Bernie fans and helped facilitate an intro. The campaign live-streamed the concert and added a donation button—they raised roughly $70,000 in 45 minutes, plus another $50,000 in merch sales.

“When you’re trying to get outside of the echo chamber, to reach people where they’re at, the culture game matters,” Conrad said. “It used to be, you went on the Tonight Show and that’s how you got to everybody. Now, you’ve gotta find all these different influencers, so we have been really thoughtful about making sure we’re doing this type of outreach and connecting with people across all these different backgrounds and genres. We’re trying to reach every potential voter, every potential supporter who has not always been a part of the process.”

Gordon first hipped to Sanders in the mid-aughts, from listening to the weekly “Brunch with Bernie” segments on Thom Hartmann’s syndicated talk-radio program. “Everything he said always made so much sense,” Gordon told me, “and I was always like, well, it’s too bad he’s not running for president!” In the current election cycle, she had initially been gravitating toward Elizabeth Warren—“I really wanted to vote for a woman candidate”—until Warren started backpedaling on “Medicare for all.” Between that and Sanders’s positions on climate change and income inequality, Gordon was sold. “His desire for programs that support workers and the middle class are rooted in values that FDR put forth in the New Deal,” she said, “and I feel like he is electable because those are the No. 1 things people care about.”

For Gordon, who’s old enough to have gone to peacenik demonstrations in the late ’60s, leveraging her public persona in support of a political campaign is something new. “I’ve always been wary of being one of those celebrities who’s suddenly just jumping on a bandwagon,” she said, “but if I can use my platform for something meaningful, that’s great.” I asked her why she thinks Bernie holds so much appeal among the cultural cognoscenti. “He’s incredibly authentic. That’s so hard to find in the culture, and it definitely strikes a chord.”

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