Bernie Sanders Holds Boston's Largest Democratic Primary Rally Ever [View all]

[merrily]

Before you read, I believe Bernie's campaign underestimated the size of the Boston crowd.

Election 2016
Bernie Sanders Holds Boston's Largest Democratic Primary Rally Ever
The event made history, topping the size of the Boston's biggest Obama rally.
By Zaid Jilani / AlterNet
October 4, 2015

On Saturday evening, Bernie Sanders finally took his campaign to Boston, Massachussetts, having canceled an earlier appearance there because they couldn't find a space large enough at an affordable price. The Boston stop was the second stop of the day, following a rally of 6,000 in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The Boston Globe noted that the rally in their city made history – topping the size of a 10,000-person rally Barack Obama held during the 2008 Democratic primary.

Sanders was introduced by several speakers, including both nursing students and a representative of National Nurses United, the large nursing union. Bill McKibben, one of the nation's most prominent climate activists, took the podium before the Senator, and praised his opposition to the Keystone pipeline, a project Sanders opposed first in 2011.

“We have raised substantial sums of money because 650,000 Americans made contributions averaging 30 dollars a piece,” said Sanders to a crowd of around 25,000 both inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and more watching the event on screens outside who were unable to get in. The fundraising numbers have given renewed credibility to his campaign, with The New York Times noting that “Mr. Sanders was initially dismissed by political insiders as a fringe candidate running only to push Hillary Rodham Clinton to the left. But he has now demonstrated that he has the resources and the supporters, whom he has only begun to tap financially, to compete for the Democratic presidential nomination.” Indeed, the $26 million he raised placed him right behind Hillary Clinton's own $28 million haul (as of this writing Clinton did not release number of donors or the average donation).

It's worth pointing out that the crowd size Sanders generated tops where Obama was at this point in the campaign not only in Boston, but nationally. The Obama campaign went to a city more than ten times as large, New York, and spoke to 24,000 around this time in 2007.

much more http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-sanders-holds-bostons-largest-democratic-primary-rally-ever