They gathered early in North Las Vegas, waiting under the hot sun in a snaking line in the middle of a workday for their chance to see Senator Bernie Sanders.
With stucco houses and apartment blocks interrupted by strip malls and trash-strewn vacant lots, this is not the Vegas you see in glamorous movies. It was, however, the setting for what Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, called the biggest crowd he had ever drawn here. Nevada was the first Southwestern stop for Mr. Sanders, who, along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had set out on what the pair called the Fighting Oligarchy tour.
Packing venues all over the country — in Nebraska, Iowa, Arizona and Colorado — Mr. Sanders appears more popular than ever. His core message hasn’t changed in decades, but it’s hitting harder now. In hours of interviews with all kinds of people at the Nevada rally on Thursday, two unbroken trends emerged: Everyone I met was having money problems. And all of them were frightened, some for the first time, that the country they’d always counted on was sliding away because of President Trump.
If these conversations are any measure, many Americans are reaching a breaking point. Already struggling to make ends meet, people are wondering how much leaner things could get if a recession hits. They see Mr. Trump defy the Constitution and ravage parts of the federal government that have long seemed as unremarkable and permanent as boulders — and they fear that, before all is said and done, he’ll come for Medicaid, public schools, veterans’ services and Social Security, too. Maybe take our freedom of speech, while he’s at it.
It was all there at the Sanders rally: dread, yes, but also an anger and an appetite — a tremendous, largely untapped political energy looking, it seemed, for an outlet.
“I just got the worst of fears,” a recently retired sheet metal worker named Kelly Press told me. “You get up in the morning, you don’t know what you’re going to go to bed losing.”
I just got the worst of fears. You get up in the morning, you don’t know what you’re going to go to bed losing. … There’s nobody giving anybody any kind of direction. I think everybody is really scared and lost. I can see this whole country being like Russia, where you can’t even speak about elected officials.Kelly Press, age 65, retired sheet metal worker from Detroit
Mr. Press, a strapping 65-year-old from Detroit who spent his working years bouncing around construction sites in the West, wore a cap from his union (Sheet Metal Workers Local 88), a chunky ring on each hand and dark glasses shading his blue eyes. Moving to Vegas inspired him, at one point, to work as a craps dealer, which gave him a lingering aversion to the cruelties of gambling and sent him scuttling back to the comparatively placid world of construction sites.
If someone got on the stage that very day, he said, and asked the crowd to march all the way to Washington to protest against Mr. Trump, Mr. Press would take that long walk without hesitation — “I swear to God.”
“But there’s nobody like that,” he said. “There’s nobody giving anybody any kind of direction. I think everybody is really scared and lost.”
When he retired two years ago, Mr. Press calculated that he could get by on $1,000 a month for gas and food. And for a while, he could — but prices have crept steadily higher, and his monthly bare minimum has ballooned to $1,400. He understands, in a way, why some of his union friends went for Mr. Trump — Mr. Press said they were tired of paying taxes and union dues and protective of their guns — but he believes they made a grave mistake.
“I can see this whole country being like Russia,” he said. “Where you can’t even speak about elected officials.”
The hunger Mr. Press described — for somebody to stand up to a White House that is flouting judges’ rulings, threatening public services and scoffing at civil liberties — was pervasive in the crowd.
While Democrats agonize over losing the working-class vote, visiting podcasts and TV studios to strategize how to get it back, only Mr. Sanders seems to understand how to tap into the dissatisfaction of the crowds.
Which is interesting, because he’s not really saying anything new. Mr. Sanders’s rally speeches offer the same program he’s been advocating, often for decades: Medicare for all, lowering prescription drug prices, taxing the wealthy, free state college, strong unions, raising the minimum wage. If you follow him, you’ve heard it before.
One could hardly accuse the willful Mr. Sanders of adapting himself to the moment; it’s more accurate to say that the moment has adapted itself to him. Now that his most dire warnings have manifested themselves, gradually and then with sickening speed, he looks, at once, prescient and thoroughly relevant.
