As part of his campaign working to rally support for the Harris-Walz campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and first-term Congressman for Texas’ 35th Congressional District Greg Casar, made a stop at Paper Tiger in San Antonio last weekend.
The rally, held on Monday, Sept. 30, was free to the public and filled the venue close to capacity. Sanders’ speech ran just over half an hour, and focused on many topics of current political interest, including abortion, the economy, international conflicts and his concerns surrounding what he espoused as the anti-democratic tendencies of the former Trump administration.
“We cannot maintain our democratic foundations when we have a former president who encouraged an insurrection to overthrow the results of the last election,” Sanders said. “And by the way, he has still not made it clear that he will abide by the results of this election when he loses. We cannot maintain our democratic foundations when we have a candidate like Trump who keeps heaping praise on terrible dictators like Putin in Russia or Orban in Hungary and the leader of North Korea, if you can believe me.”
Beyond sharing his fears about the threat of presidential candidate Donald Trump, Sanders’ speech heavily emphasized the importance of voting.
“I know that there are a lot of folks out there [who say] ‘politics is bullshit’ — forgive my French. ‘I don’t want to get involved,’ ‘I don’t like either of them,’ ‘I’m not going to vote’ and all that stuff. Please do not fall into that trap. That is exactly what the establishment, the people of the money and the power, want you to believe. If you are not voting, if you are not mobilizing, if you are not educating and organizing, they have even more power,” Sanders said.
Representative Greg Casar also focused on the importance of mobilizing the liberal vote in Texas.
“Another really big lie we hear all the time is that Texas is a red state, so your vote doesn’t matter. That’s gotta be the biggest lie I ever heard. The only way it works is if everybody buys into that lie, but not so long ago, Texas sent a president to the White House and organized and pushed him. His name was LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson], and they sent to his desk the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the creation of Medicaid, the creation of Medicare, Head Start; all of that was claimed by and for Texas,” Casar said.
The rally was not limited to just speeches. Prior to going into the event, patrons passed by a series of tables, some promoting voter registration and others handing out stickers to passers by. One booth, run by Buckle Bunnies, was heading out free Plan B and contraceptives, which Remi Vitales, representing Buckle Bunnies, said were increasingly important due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“The more eyes that we get on us, the better. We knew there was gonna be a lot of leftist, DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] type of people here. It definitely helps just being out here,” Vitales said.
The event garnered a lot of attention not just with San Antonians but also with the Trinity community. Carter Aldmon, sophomore finance and accounting double-major, who attended the rally with friends, Matthias Rhytting, Kaleb Woodward and Reed Woodland, discussed his reasoning for attending the event.
“I thought it would be good to come in, listen to what he has to say,” Aldmon said. “I’ve never really been to any political type of speech or place like this before, so I thought it’d be interesting. You know, even if you don’t agree with everything someone has to say, I feel like it’s always important to get every side of everything, just learn what’s there.”
Caia Marcee and Marcey Chandler, sophomore political science majors, also attended the rally and discussed the importance of political involvement.
“Politics kind of influences every single aspect of your life, and so being informed about what’s going on not just nationally but also locally is really important for you to understand the culture of where you live and just like the community you’re in and this different day life,” Chandler said.
David Crockett, professor of political science, explained the impact of rallies like the one held by Sanders at Paper Tiger.
“At the national level for a presidential race … it’s not going to make a difference in most states, but since the electoral college tends to put the focus on a small number of battleground states, the ‘Get Out the Vote’ effort in campaigns can make a difference,” Crockett said. “All you can do is look at really close states like what happened in Florida in 2000 where a few hundred votes is all that mattered, and there the effort can pay off.”