“It probably adds up to 1,000 people,” says Alexander Deatrick, tallying local volunteers for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. A former star of Huron High’s chess club, Deatrick, eighteen, is spending a gap year volunteering sixty hours a week for the Sanders campaign. “I felt I had to see him through, or I was really going to regret it,” he says.
The future Amherst student says local Sanders volunteers include “a very strong core” of U-M students, plus high school kids and retirees. Since mid-February, they’ve been working out of a former hydroponic store on Packard. No Republican candidate in the March 8 Michigan primary has an Ann Arbor office, and neither does Hillary Clinton.
“Ann Arbor tends to lean more for Senator Sanders than for Hillary,” acknowledges Clinton volunteer Jason Morgan. Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” won straw polls in city and county Democratic Party meetings–encouraging a widespread belief among local Dems that Bernie will carry the town in the primary.
