The Brotherhood of the traveling Bernie shirt
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Adam Peters bought the shirt only because it made him laugh.
The 28-year-old Iowa City resident was Christmas shopping with his family at Raygun, an Iowa-based store famous for its snarky, politically themed clothing, and there it was: an all-black tee dotted with floating heads of Vermont senator and current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. They weren’t just any heads, they were heads that expressed an impressive spectrum of Bernie emotions — from fed-up-with-the-billionaires furious to doting Jewish grandfather. Plus, he’d seen it on the Internet.
“The first time that it kind of blew up online it was this random kid that was wearing it,” Peters told Yahoo News at The Java House in Iowa City. “He went to an event, took a picture with Bernie. The stories I read said Bernie was like, ‘What the hell is my head doing on this shirt?’ I thought that was funny and I was like, ‘I want that shirt.’”
Peters, a Democrat, was still shopping for a candidate. When Hillary announced she was running in April 2015, he was almost sure he’d vote for her. He remembers barely caring about Sanders when he first heard about him.
“There was a flier on campus,” he recalled. “It was just information about Bernie. I just looked at the picture and was like, ‘This is an old guy. Whatever.’”
But within the next few months, Sanders gained impressive grassroots support across the country. By appealing to young voters facing a finicky job market and an uncertain economic future, he was able to fund his campaign without the use of a single super-PAC. At a September quarterly earnings report, his campaign announced that it had received more than a million contributions, surpassing the record that Barack Obama’s historic digital campaign set in 2008.
As financial support for Sanders has skyrocketed, a uniquely Sanders-inspired pop culture has taken off. While President Obama’s first campaign aimed to put his ubiquitous “Hope” poster in every college dorm, Sanders’ campaign has managed to generate a Bernie meme in every college student’s social media feed. His passionate online supporters have Photoshopped him in retro photos with cats, they’ve silkscreened patches that read “Bernie is bae ” (a term of endearment used online), and they gleefully quote Larry David’s impression of the Brooklyn-bred socialist.
It was Sanders’ appeal to an Internet-savvy demographic that, according to Raygun owner Mike Draper, first sparked the idea for the shirt. The store carried a third-party item with a similar pattern featuring a range of different Zach Galifianakis faces. The store wanted to do its own for the election.
“I think the idea of Bernie was funnier to us than the man himself,” a shoeless Draper — who can recite David’s impression of Sanders verbatim — told Yahoo News from his desk in the Raygun store in downtown Des Moines. “This wild-haired grandpa, beloved by young people. The marketing was built into it: Cover your torso in 100 percent Berns.”
According to the shirt’s designer, Jennifer Leatherby, they momentarily considered using Donald Trump’s face, but decided that Sanders would appeal more to their customer base.
“The people who are Donald Trump supporters, they don’t wear funny sublimated shirts,” Leatherby told Yahoo News. “They’re not like the hipsters of America.”
The moment Peters decided to support Sanders came as he watched Clinton invoked 9/11 while answering a debate question about Wall Street.
“That was the final thing,” he said, “I support Bernie because I want reform on big banks, Wall Street, campaign financing. And you look at Bernie — he’s supported gay rights for years, decades. It was just little things like that.”
Peters began wearing the shirt to rallies in Muscatine and Davenport. That’s around the time he started seeing himself, covered in Berns, all over the Internet: The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Des Moines Register, Yahoo News. Bernie fan accounts retweeted him, Reddit upvoted the shirt to its front page. There was just something compelling about a piece of clothing covered with the disembodied head of a grandpa. And even more endearing — everyone knew Bernie disliked the shirt.
Peters at a Sanders rally in Muscatine, Iowa. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP).
“The campaign photographer told me on the D.L that Bernie hates the shirt, it creeps him out,” Peters said. “I get it, because every single time he’d come up to me — he smiles and he’s nice to everyone — but he would come up to me so cautiously.”
Peters, who plans to caucus for Sanders on Monday, says it’s that genuine display of personality that has ultimately made Sanders — and the shirt — successful.
“People believe in this message,” he said. “People believe in him. But there’s also this quirky fact that it’s this 75-year-old cranky man. He is your Seinfeld character; he is your Larry David.”
