Donald Trump, John Gotti with a Southern strategy, is considering telling the Pope to go scratch his ass with a broken milk bottle.
The other “anti-establishment” candidate, Bernie Sanders, who’s been in D.C. for decades, has become a darling of the Left for identifying serious problems with healthcare, prison overcrowding, etc., and offering sweeping solutions often based on Paul Ryan-esque fuzzy math. The Un-Hillary has been aided in his shocking ascendancy by a cadre of mostly young coders who’ve enabled the eldest candidate in the race to be the most app-friendly. The unsolicited volunteers work remotely and are usually not familiar with one another except virtually.
From Darren Samuelsohn at Politico:
Late last spring, inspired to action by what he was hearing from a renegade Democratic candidate named Bernie Sanders, Jon Hughes began building a website. Hughes, then a 29-year-old father in southern Oregon, didn’t have any connection to the Sanders campaign; in fact, the last presidential candidate he’d been interested in was Ron Paul back in 2012. But he knew how to code and built a page that does a very simple but important job: You click on your location, and it tells you where and when to vote in the Democratic primary or caucus. It launched in June.
Today his site, voteforbernie.org, has landed over 2 million unique views. It’s the top search hit not only for people who want to support Sanders, but for anyone simply googling “how to vote in the primaries.” All across America, people looking simply to participate in the primaries are now directed straight to a site that asks, in large and florid lettering, “Will you be able to Vote for Bernie?”
Story Continued BelowThe site is just one of the dozens of websites, tools and apps built by coders lining up behind Bernie Sanders, often people—like Hughes— with no affiliation to the campaign at all. Behind Sanders’ astonishing success in the primaries so far stands a coterie of more than 1,000 volunteer techies pumping out innovations like this at a rate of about one new app a week.
If viral videos, data analytics, Twitter and meet-up pages were the big breakthroughs of past presidential elections, 2016 could very well go down as the year of the app. And no one has been a bigger beneficiary than Sanders, an anti-establishment independent-turned-Democrat with legions of code-savvy, unpaid helpers. Many of his volunteer coders are under-30 political neophytes first drawn to Sanders through a fan-driven Reddit page, an online message board that is far and away the largest for anyone in the 2016 field. With more than 188,000 subscribers, the SandersForPresident subReddit is more popular than pages featuring cars, beer or even porn.•