Bernie’s And AOC’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour Didn’t Bring In Tens Of Millions Of Dollars

Bringing In Money Wasn't The Point— So Politicians Will Soon Forget It

Discounting people who might bring rotten fruit to throw, do you think any politicians could turn out the number of people— 60,000 according the the Sheriff’s Department, 36,000 according to Bernie’s own team— who came out to hear Bernie and AOC on Saturday? I approached a former higher-up in the Kamala campaign with the question. He wouldn’t stop talking about the numbers of people who attended her fundraisers— “hundreds”— that brought in immense sums of money from the rich people for whom she prostituted her policy agenda (causing her to lose to Trump). On September 29, 2024, she attended a high-profile fundraiser in L.A., which was attended by elites and celebrities such as Stevie Wonder, Keegan Michael-Key, Sterling K. Brown, Demi Lovato, Jessica Alba and Lily Tomlin with performances by Halle Bailey and Alanis Morissette. This fundraiser, he told me, along with another in San Francisco, raised a combined $55 million for the campaign. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around the question I was asking about people. 

Adam Schiff’s and Alex Padilla’s Southern California rallies have drawn hundreds of people, not thousands, or even a thousand. Trump’s biggest rallies in Southern California since 2016 were notable for protestors, not big crowds. But even the biggest anti-Trump demonstration only drew 8,000 people.

As for the crooked, greasy-haired governor, no one wants to see him but he participated in a mass rally in 2010 with Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton on the UCLA campus and there were 4,000 people… although that included people who stopped by for a minute or two on their way to classes— and no one would claim there were more than a few dozen, at best, there to see Lt. Gov nominee Gavin Newsom, who wins elections as the lesser-of-two-evils candidate but is basically unliked.

Bernie and AOC, on the other hand, are very much admired and Saturday wasn’t a red carpet event or a billionaire brunch that brought tens of thousands into the streets— it was a democratic socialist from Vermont via Brooklyn and a congresswoman from the Bronx. No velvet rope, no gated estate… just Bernie and AOC, standing shoulder to shoulder with working people, immigrant families, striking hotel workers, and the young, furious, and politically awake. This wasn’t a spectacle of influence; it was a surge of belief. Belief that politics might actually mean something again. That policy could be shaped by people who don’t have PACs. That solidarity might matter more than strategy. That the future could be reclaimed from the dead-eyed consultants and the rotating cast of cautious millionaires trying to cosplay authenticity.

Kamala, Schiff, Newsom, Padilla—they can raise money. Bernie and AOC raise something else entirely: the possibility of a politics rooted in moral clarity and mass participation. One side gathers in backyards of the ultra-rich; the other fills entire city blocks. That difference isn’t just optics— it’s a dividing line between what is and what could be. And on Saturday, some 36,000 people showed which side they’re on.

Needless to say, Politico has a different interpretation of what’s happening— progressives’ problems in California, which Melanie Mason referred to as “a wilderness [rather] than the promised land. Efforts by progressives in California to enact single-payer healthcare and other sweeping policy priorities have fizzled. Prominent Democrats, from Gov. Gavin Newsom to an ambitious crop of big city mayors, have tacked to the center, and on Tuesday in Oakland, the progressive icon Barbara Lee is confronting an unexpectedly tight election for mayor against a more  [conservativee, corporate] Democrat.

Sanders’ rise jolted California’s political establishment. It saw an influx of new party activism from the left, with progressives sweeping low-level party elections that were typically insider affairs. In an echo of Sanders’ call for Medicare for All, single-payer healthcare dominated the 2018 governor’s race, where then-candidate Newsom seized the progressive mantle as the left’s healthcare champion.

But multiple bills to establish a statewide single-payer system fell flat, and Newsom [who has never believed in anything but his own career trajectory] quickly pivoted from his campaign pledge once in office. Statewide rent control, another signature issue pushed by Sanders’ allies, sputtered as voters rejected multiple ballot measures to enact more renter-friendly policies. And progressives came up short in elections to oust many entrenched Democrats— or to punish politicians like Newsom for their moderation. Progressives failed twice to elect one of their own to the top post in the state Democratic Party. They threatened primary challenges to Democrats who blocked single-payer bills, but lost. And in the process, they alienated many voters in the state, who installed a more [conservative corporate] mayor in San Francisco last year and ousted progressive district attorneys in Oakland and Los Angeles.

“California is much more a machine state than people realize. Bernie Sanders broke through on a presidential level with his vision and conviction,” said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, a former co-chair of Sanders campaign who is seen as one of the few national potential heirs to the Vermont senator’s movement. “That has not translated yet on a local or state level. It’s going to take more people winning at the congressional level, at the state Assembly level, at the governor level.”

…Progressives could flex some muscle in next year’s gubernatorial elections. But so far, no one in the crowded field of Democratic contenders is assertively carrying the banner for Sanders’ movement… [Jane] Kim, of the Working Families Party, predicted that most Democrats in the race will tack eventually to the left, copying the winning formula that elevated Newsom into office. But, she cautioned, “what they’ll do when they’re in office is very different from what they will campaign on, and that is the challenge.”

This morning I got a call from an old friend asking me if another old friend of mine— who is getting ready to declare their candidacy in a congressional race— would be running as a Democrat or as an independent. “Bernie,” he told me, “has been encouraging candidates to run as independents.” That sounds like an awful good idea to me as long as feckless corporate whores like Gavin Newsom, Alex Padilla, Jimmy Panetta, Adam Gray, Ami Bera, Jim Costa, Scott Peters, Robert Rivas, Josh Harder, Scott Wiener, Toni Atkins… run the state Democratic Party— and Democratic parties in other states.