Thursday, January 28, 2016
Bernie Sanders is getting a surge of volunteers in rural Iowa from Reddit
A group of redditors at a campaign event for Sen. Bernie Sanders in Winterset, Iowa, on Jan. 26, 2016. (Photo: Hunter Walker/Yahoo News)
DES MOINES, Iowa — They call it “Operation Iowa.”
In the past five days, a group of people on the online forum Reddit have been working to mobilize out-of-state volunteers to flood rural Iowa on behalf of Sen. Bernie Sanders as his presidential campaign heads into the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.
The effort is being led by 26-year-old Sanders campaign volunteer Alexander Rhodes through the “SandersForPresident” subreddit, as highly topic-specific sections of the website are known. In a phone conversation with Yahoo on Wednesday, Rhodes said he began posting his calls to action on Jan. 22. Since then, he has written multiple times on Reddit and also posted an item on Medium, naming the effort Operation Iowa and describing it as a “grassroots project” rather than an official campaign initiative.
“I’m acting as a middle-man ‘connector’ between you and campaign staff on the ground. I have many friends in the campaign and have the ability to get people assigned to field offices really quickly,” Rhodes wrote.
When not organizing for Sanders, Rhodes is a Web developer and the founder of NoFap, which he described as an online community dedicated to helping people recover from addiction to pornography. He said he was inspired to create the site based on his own experiences.
Rhodes said he hopes to keep recruiting volunteers from Reddit as the primaries continue. Because of this, he has come up with a name for the project as it extends beyond Operation Iowa. Rhodes is calling his Reddit recruitment operation the “Sanderstorm.”
“The people who are helping me — they’re actually called Sanderstormtroopers,” Rhodes said.
There were six of those Sanderstormtroopers in the crowd that showed up at an event at the Sanders campaign field office in Winterset, Iowa, on Tuesday afternoon. They were treated to an appearance from Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of the ice cream brand Ben& Jerry’s.
Brendan Carpenter, a redditor who came to Iowa from Salt Lake City, said he found out about Sanders on the site.
“They had a post there that said they really needed volunteers out in rural areas, so I asked my boss if I could get a week off to come out here because they were understaffed,” Carpenter explained.
Carpenter said he was staying in a spare room provided by a Sanders supporter. He wasn’t the only redditor from Salt Lake who came to hear Ben and Jerry speak.
Clark Newhall, who said he is a retiree, told Yahoo he and Carpenter realized they live in the same city when they met at the event.
“We didn’t know anybody,” Newhall said. “I figured since Obama didn’t get us single-payer health care like I thought he would, then Bernie’s going to do it. and I’m here to help him.”
Joe Elliott, a 20-year-old student, came down from Michigan State University.
“It just kept growing. I’ve seen posts, buses are coming, you know. People are coming up from Florida,” Elliott told Yahoo.
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