Bernie Sanders at Drexel: “If You Come Out to Vote, We’re Going to Win in Pennsylvania”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a campaign rally at Fitzgerald Fieldhouse on the University of Pittsburgh campus, Monday, April 25, 2016.

In the waning hours of Monday evening, as voters prepared to cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary, Bernie Sanders held the final rally of his Pennsylvania campaigning at Drexel University.

Despite numerous polls expecting Clinton to win, most by double-digits, Sanders asserted that winning Tuesday’s primary in Pennsylvania was within reach if voters went to the polls in droves.

“If you come out to vote tomorrow, and you drag your friends, and your aunts, and your uncles, and your coworkers, we’re going to win here in Pennsylvania,” Sanders declared early in his speech Monday. 

Before the rally began, the line to enter Drexel’s modest gym snaked throughout the better part of the school’s campus, leaving more on the outside looking in. The gym crowd was capped at 1,200, with easily more than twice that outside watching a projection of Sanders’ speech.

At one point, an audience member passed out. Sanders stopped the rally, stepped to the side of the podium, and asked for medics to attend to the person. As he did when the same thing happened in New Hampshire in February, Sanders waited for the person to be helped up and taken to the side to be attended to before returning to the podium.

Fainting aside, it was a relatively uneventful rally for Sanders, with no bird appearances or Black Lives Matter protestors.

The night’s best sign replaced most of the lyrics from the Eagles’ fight song with rallying cries for Sanders supporters.

Wonder how Bernie feels about the Bradford situation. pic.twitter.com/KahErbTtqf

— Adam Hermann (@adamwhermann) April 25, 2016

Sanders, who spent the morning and early afternoon campaigning on the other side of the state at the University of Pittsburgh, arrived in University City a bit before 8 p.m., and, must like he did at his Temple rally earlier this month, spoke to the group assembled outside the gym before heading inside to address the indoor crowd. The assemblage was entirely pro-Sanders, as the majority of his rallies have been recently, including his previous stops in Pennsylvania.

Before Sanders took the stage, actors Susan Sarandon and Kendrick Sampson spoke about what they saw in the Vermont senator.

“Kurt Cobain once said, ‘The duty of youth is to challenge corruption,’” Sarandon said, to applause. “This is a miracle that [Sanders] has ended up here.”

Surprisingly, Sanders did not follow up on the op-ed he wrote for Philadelphia magazine on Sunday in which he slammed Clinton for backing Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney’s proposed tax on soda, which he called “regressive” because it would target low-income families and neighborhoods.

Instead, he pointed to the differences between himself and Clinton on national issues, like his supporting a tax on carbon while she opposes it, and his long-held support of raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which Clinton only recently came around on at a debate in Brooklyn.

“If you work in America, 40 hours a week, you should not be living in poverty,” Sanders said. “Secretary Clinton thinks we should raise the minimum wage to 12 bucks an hour? Not good enough. Together we’re going to raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour.”

Clinton held a competing event at roughly the same time at City Hall. Polls are open tomorrow from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Voters in line by 8 p.m. will be allowed to vote.)

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