By James Cirrone 

As the 2020 primary heats up, Terps for Bernie 2020 is working overtime to get Sen. Bernie Sanders elected president. The campus organization held a “Plan to Win Party” on Monday night to strategize with fellow supporters and let them know how they can become actively involved.

On the Terps for Bernie website, the group says they are “building a movement at UMD to fight for economic, racial, social, and environmental justice for all by electing Bernie Sanders as president in 2020.” They have been canvassing, phone banking and text banking for the campaign since the summer. On Monday’s event, they passed out canvassing sign up sheets to the 30 or so people in attendance. Many attendees signed up for shifts to go out and talk to people on campus about why Sanders should be the next president. 

Michael Dunphy, a volunteer with Terps for Bernie, said this is his first time volunteering for a campaign. He has a profound reason as to why he’s putting in “20 to 30 hours a week” to help Sanders clinch the Democratic nomination.

“The big thing is ‘Medicare for All’ for me because sadly, my grandfather committed suicide over medical debt,” said the junior government and politics and computer science double major.

Dunphy explained that his grandfather was diagnosed with cancer and ended his own life to save his wife from the medical bills they undoubtedly would have racked up from the expensive surgeries he would need.

Cliff Walker Green, a senior government and politics major and an active Terps for Bernie volunteer, told attendees that he left the hospital with a bill of roughly $52,000 after he was treated for appendicitis. With insurance, he had to pay roughly $4,000. However, he raised the point that nearly half of Americans struggle to pay for even a $400 emergency.

“If we had a ‘Medicare for All’ system, I would’ve been able to get the coverage without having to pay a cent. My dad wouldn’t have had to cash out his bonds to pay for my surgery. He had good healthcare insurance with the Navy, but still, that’s $4,000 that a lot of people don’t have. I’m lucky,” Green said.

Horror stories like Dunphy’s and Green’s aren’t foreign to Sanders. Last Sunday in Des Moines, Iowa, the presidential candidate held a medical debt town hall where voters could share their stories about how the current medical system has failed them. Just last week, he talked down a suicidal veteran with stage 4 Huntington’s disease and over $130,000 in medical debt.

Beyond urging people to sign up for canvassing shifts, Terps for Bernie seeks to educate attendees by showing videos on how the primary election process works. 

They explained that Sanders needs to win a majority of pledged delegates to become the Democratic nominee in 2020. If he doesn’t win a majority of delegates on the first ballot, superdelegates will be allowed to vote on the second ballot. 

In this scenario, Sanders is at a huge disadvantage since superdelegates are largely “members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic members of Congress, Democratic governors, or distinguished party leaders, including former presidents and vice presidents.” 

Democratic party insiders aren’t likely to support Sanders since he is viewed as an anti-establishment candidate who is staging a “political revolution.” Sanders has admitted that he is “an existential threat” to the status quo the Democratic party is accustomed to.

If Sanders is going to carry his campaign to the finish line, he will need to beat out the other candidates. In recent weeks, there have been a multitude of discouraging polls for his campaign. One poll that echoed far and wide in the media was a Des Moines Register poll of Iowa voters that had Sen. Elizabeth Warren in first with 22%, then Former Vice President Joe Biden in a close second with 20%, and Sanders in third with 11%. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in Iowa also suggests that Sanders is struggling in the state.

Michael Hayes, a sophomore civil engineering major, wasn’t at all worried about Sanders’ performance in recent polls, saying that it’s very early and polling is notoriously unreliable at this stage. He added that his message resonates with the most discouraged voters in the country, the very people who are not often considered in primary polls.

Elizabeth Warren’s upward trend in recent polls does concern Hayes, as he finds that she tries to cast herself in the same light as Bernie Sanders.

“In terms of political ideology, Elizabeth Warren can definitely be a threat… because she’s adopted so many of Bernie’s policies,” Hayes said.

Overall, Hayes was optimistic about Sanders’ chances of winning, and he is more focused on getting voters on the side of his policies.

And that’s just it; the Terps for Bernie meeting could be summed up in a single word: policy. Supporters of Bernie Sanders are animated by his policy positions, whether that be “Medicare for All”, canceling all medical debt, canceling student loan debt, tuition-free college or his ambitious Green New Deal to address climate change. Supporters want him as their president because they trust him to fight for these policy goals more than any other candidate.