Sanders’ team realized they could harness the energy bubbling up around the country following Trump’s return to power and launched the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, a series of arena-scale rallies that drew crowds as large as 35,000. Internal numbers from the Sanders team showed 40 to 50 percent of attendees weren’t Democrats at all — roughly 30 percent were independents and 10 percent were Republicans.
That tour also doubled as a talent pipeline. Sanders’ team worked each stop to feature working-class speakers, people they would like to see represent the future of the movement — and several of them went on to become candidates themselves.
I remember lemmy's centrists dismissing the Fighting Oligarchy Tour as pointless since the election was already over. I also remember speculating at the time that what Sanders was doing was building a movement.