How indie rock could help Bernie Sanders win the Nevada caucuses

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., celebrates on stage with his wife, Jane, at a campaign rally in Henderson, Nev., on Feb. 19. (Photo: Jim Young/Reuters)

HENDERSON, Nev. — After spending much of the final day before the Nevada Democratic caucuses prospecting for votes in the northern part of the state, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders returned to the population-rich Las Vegas area Friday night to reconnect with some of his core supporters: people who like to attend indie-rock concerts.

I’m only half kidding.

Sanders addressed the crowd at the very end of his three-hour “A Future to Believe In” rally here, delivering his signature spiel about the need for “a political revolution” and urging Nevadans to caucus for him on Saturday.

“Tomorrow morning all of you have the opportunity to make American history,” Sanders said, after walking on stage to the sound of Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own” (the same song, intentionally or not, that President Obama played at his reelection rallies in 2012). “That’s not just phraseology. That’s reality. It could well be that 10, 20, 30 years from now, people will look back on what happens in Nevada and say this was the beginning of the political revolution.”

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But while Sanders was the headliner Friday night, the vast majority of the program — which featured a culturally and racially diverse roster of California-based bands — was more musical than political.

This isn’t a new strategy for Sanders. On the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders teamed up with Killer Mike and Vampire Weekend for a similar concert, even joining the latter on stage to croon “This Land Is Your Land,” an old Sanders favorite.

The question is why Sanders keeps rocking out — and whether it will make any difference in Saturday’s caucuses.

“These concert rallies speak to the diversity of the political revolution,” Sanders press secretary Symone Sanders told Yahoo News. “People young and old coming together for the enjoyment of music, but also because they are moved by the message of Bernie Sanders.”

The bands themselves were certainly on message. Chicano Batman, a besuited psychedelic-soul four-piece from Los Angeles, played a song that included the lyric “freedom isn’t to be bought and sold.” Fantastic Negrito, a multiracial black-roots quintet from Oakland, kicked off their set with “Nobody Makes Money” — a track that frontman Xavier Dphrepaulezz wrote, he said, when he was “playing on the streets.”

“The food and gas prices are really starting to soar,” Dphrepaulezz sang.

And shortly before the show, Cold War Kids singer Nathan Willett took to Twitter to champion his favorite Sanders policy proposals. “In my former life, as a high school teacher in LA, I was so discouraged by the education system that I had to get out,” Willett tweeted. “@SenSanders ideas for education alone make me genuinely hopeful. In the future we don’t want to lose all the best teachers to rocknroll.”

But the real reason Sanders invited Cold War Kids & Co. to Henderson doesn’t have anything to do with messaging. It has to do with turnout.

Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama by six percentage points in the 2008 Nevada caucuses, running up huge margins among union workers, Latinos, and suburban women, especially in Clark County, home of Las Vegas. If Sanders is going to upset Hillary Clinton in Nevada, he needs to convince thousands of new voters to spend several hours locked in a caucus room debating politics with their neighbors on a Saturday afternoon — not the easiest sell in a state that only started caucusing in 2008.

“If it’s a sky-high turnout, that’s good for Sanders,” David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, told Yahoo News earlier this week. “Most of the new entrants … some of them will go to Hillary, but he’ll probably win more of them.”

The campaign’s thinking seems to be that the best way to get new voters in the door on a Friday night — or a Saturday night, in the case of Iowa — is by staging events that don’t feel like politics as usual. The audience doesn’t even have to care about the bands. Only one guy at the Henderson rally was dancing during Cold War Kids’ set; an older couple, seemingly perturbed by the volume, left long before Sanders even spoke.

The important thing is persuading new caucusgoers to come to the concert venue — and every participant who isn’t another politician helps. (In Henderson, actors Gaby Hoffmann [Transparent] and Stephen Bishop [Moneyball] also worked the crowd.) Once a potential supporter shows up, the Sanders campaign is quick to harvest their personal information. On Friday, a staffer with a clipboard approached every attendee and asked him or her to navigate to bernietickets.com/vegasconcert to “retrieve your tickets.” From there, attendees were prompted to enter their contact info and to check off a pair of boxes — one that asked if they wanted to receive text messages from the campaign and another that asked if they would “commit to caucus for Bernie tomorrow.” When the attendee clicked the “done” button, a QR code containing his or her info appeared on screen. A second Sanders staffer scanned the code, as if it were a ticket, and voila — all of the attendee’s info was instantly uploaded to the campaign’s database, where it could help shape the campaign’s last-minute turnout efforts.

Fans cheer for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during a Feb. 19 rally in Henderson, Nev. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The 2,444-seat Henderson Pavilion — the largest outdoor amphitheater in Nevada — never quite filled up Friday night, though many locals lounged on the sloped lawn just beyond the back row. But the Nevadans who did show up probably didn’t look a whole lot like those who were cheering on Clinton at her concurrent rally across town. There was a dude in a Star Wars hoodie. A man with Chinese-character tattoos on his triceps. A couple with Mohawks at least two feet tall: his black with green tips, hers orange, fringed with blond.

These are the voters with the potential to propel Sanders past Clinton on Saturday — if they show up.

After the concert, I approached more than a dozen young voters; all of them said they’d never caucused before, and all of them insisted that they would be caucusing for Sanders. It was a good — if unscientific — sign for the senator from Vermont.

“A night like this helps people get their stoke on,” said Tori Goodwin, a self-described “vegetarian, music lover [and] punk rock hippie” who had driven out from Long Beach, Calif., to volunteer.

But some of the more seasoned attendees were skeptical.

“I’m waiting to see if these people show up,” said Melissa Hamner, 51, a technical writer for the Clark County government. “There’s a lot of this stuff going on” — Hamner gestured at the youthful crowd — “but there was also a lot of this stuff going on when I went to, like, a John Kerry rally in 2004, and nobody showed up at the polls the next day.”

I asked Hamner if she was planning to caucus on Saturday.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have two days off to clean the house. I don’t know that I want to spend an entire Saturday afternoon in a room with people I don’t know when I could be going to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with my sister because Thursday was my birthday and she owes me a dinner.” Hamner laughed. “That’s real life.”