Gaining steam, Sanders forecasts win in Texas

Bernie Sanders barnstormed across Texas over the weekend, holding rallies in El Paso, San Antonio, Houston and culminating Sunday evening in Austin, celebrating his commanding victory in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses as a harbinger of what’s to come in Texas and beyond on Super Tuesday on March 3.

“My God there are a lot of people here tonight,” Sanders said gazing out at the vast throng assembled at Vic Mathias Shores, which security for the event put at 12,718. “I cannot believe how many people there are here. It’s amazing.”

“This is the most consequential election in the modern history of our country,” Sanders declared, saying that the outpouring of support in his four weekend rallies affirmed his confidence that, “We are going to win and win big in Texas.”

“We are not going to have Trump for another term,” Sanders said.

“The pundits tell us Texas is conservative state. I don’t believe that for a minute,” said Sanders. “And I believe that if the working people of Texas, black and white and Latino, Native American, Asian American stand up and come out to vote, you're gonna make this one of the most progressive states in America.”

“The limitations of our imagination are the crisis we face today,” said Sanders, who also picked up the endorsement at the rally of Marianne Williamson, the writer and spiritual guru who grew up in Houston and ended her own presidential campaign in January.

“It’s time for us to take a stand with Bernie,” Williamson said.

Sanders’ Texas weekend was the high point to date of his now soaring presidential campaign, which Jim Hightower, the former Texas agricultural commissioner and Texas co-chair, described as “a people’s campaign hotter than high school love.”

“Not afraid of big ideas. Not afraid of the people,” Hightower said. “Sure, the fat cats have their candidates, but we got the alley cats, and there are more of us than there are of them.

“The corporate powers and the corporate media tried to say, `Oh, well, Hightower, you can't win. You can't beat the corporate money,’ and they’re wrong. As a friend of mine who has been a pioneer in the organic movement put it, `Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.’ That’s us.”.

After what was essentially a tie with former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Iowa caucuses and a narrow victory over Buttigieg in the New Hampshire primary, Saturday’s voting in Nevada was the first with a more diverse electorate. The Vermont senator scored a clear and decisive victory, extending his reach beyond his already demonstrated strength with younger and more liberal voters. Especially significant for the contests in Texas and elsewhere to come, Sanders won overwhelmingly among Hispanic voters in Nevada.

“I think there is this sort of meteoric rise,” said Raul Mejia, 25, who traveled from the Rio Grande Valley with his sister, Diandra Mejia. They attended both Saturday night’s rally, which packed some 4,000 people into at Cowboys Dance Hall in Northeast San Antonio, and Sunday evening’s rally in Austin.

“If it can be explained, fantastic, right? But if it can't be explained, it is similar to what we saw with Trumpism in 2016, and so it almost presents itself as this unstoppable force, right?” Raul Mejia said.

Marshall Copous, 27, who grew up in La Porte and works in film and video in Austin, said he supported Sanders in 2016.

“Back then, he was the underdog up against Hillary Clinton and now he is seemingly the front-runner,” Copous said.

“After 2016 I sort of am just cautiously optimistic,” he said. “If it seems like he doesn’t have enough delegates going into the convention, I perceive the DNC (Democratic National Committee) sort of intervening. I think they’ll do whatever they can to make it not happen.

“The only way I would be OK with it not being Sanders if is everyone else rallied behind Elizabeth Warren because I think she’d be a very good candidate,” Copous added. “But if they for instance said, ‘Alright guys, come on let’s just put Biden in there’ ... that would be nothing worthy of enthusiasm.”

Yuir Gamez, 31, a registered nurse in Austin who came to the Vic Mathias Shores rally with her husband, Joel Gamez, 37, a pharmacy tech, said that when Sanders lost out to Clinton at the convention in 2016, “I had tears in my eyes. I cried.”

She couldn’t bring herself to vote for Clinton and wrote in Sanders’ name, and she will do the same again if Sanders isn’t the nominee. Her husband said he would do the same, unless he was convinced that Sanders was defeated fair and square.

Asked at the San Antonio rally if she could imagine Texas voting for Sanders over President Donald Trump, Charlotte “Charlie” Rouse, a 31-year-old Bexar County employee, said, “It’s the Texas I want to know.”

“I’m really excited that he’s doing as well as he is,” Rouse said. “I feel like he’s going to make changes to make America truly great. He’s going to really drain the swamp.”

“You look at what the current administration has done and all it’s done is make things worse,” Rouse said. “But Bernie has been consistent his entire career. And you know, he sticks to his guns, he’s got a very good moral compass about what he would do, not just for the working class but for all of America.”

“The stars are aligned,” said Rick Treviño, a Bernie Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, who believes Sanders should win the nomination and can defeat Trump.

“He could win,” said Treviño, a former high school teacher now in his first year studying law at St. Mary’s University. “There’s no doubt about it, the people that he can reach, he’s the only one who’s going to get the voters the Democrats need to win over Trump.

“And the elites and the DNC, they are going to do what they are going to do.”

Treviño believes they are out to “sabotage” Sanders, as he believes they did in his 2016 race against Hillary Clinton — “but I’m not voting for anybody but Bernie.”

In 2018, Treviño, with a homemade campaign built on his Sanders’ network and run on next-to-nothing, made it into a runoff with Gina Ortiz Jones in the 2018 contest for the Democratic nomination in the 23rd Congressional District. Jones prevailed, lost that November to U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, but is the favorite to take the seat in 2020.

“I think he’s holding together the coalition of non-voters and independents and the disaffected, and he has the coalition that Obama had of young people, of diversity, the working class,“ Treviño said.

At the San Antonio rally, David Vela, 56, of San Antonio, the drummer for High Voltage, which bills itself as the nation’s premier AC/DC tribute band, said he was there because, “I see how they are treating Bernie. People are against him so it makes me stand behind him. He’s the underdog. His own party is against him, so I’m in.”

“He’s our Trump — a brick through the window,” Vela said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct a quote by Jim Hightower, who described Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign as “hotter than high school love.”