Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders live video-streamed to more than 100,000 supporters nationwide Wednesday night in what was described as the largest grassroots campaign event ever held at such an early point in a presidential campaign.
"Tonight really is an historic night," Sanders said from a small apartment in southwest Washington, D.C., reported ABC News. "To the best of our knowledge, there has never been a political online organizing event this early in the campaign which involved 100,000 people in 3,500 locations in every state in the United States of America. And that's pretty impressive."
The numbers could not be independently verified, but the amount of online chatter leading up to the broadcast and the 104,290 RSVPs indicate that it was indeed a huge event.
Attendees gathered in homes, coffee shops, union halls and town squares. One of the largest events took place at a downtown bar in New York City on 4th Avenue, with a few hundred people in attendance, according to ABC.
The Democratic presidential hopeful hit on many of the major themes of his campaign, making an impassioned argument for developing a single-payer health system, fixing income inequality, getting rid of student debt and reforming campaign finance, according to Fox News.
"Bernie Sanders alone as president of the United States is not going to solve all these problems," he said. "But when we stand together there is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish."
While the self-described democratic socialist is still polling in second place among Democrats, trailing front-runner Hillary Clinton by 40 points, he has made significant ground and is drawing the largest crowds of any candidate.
An NBC/Marist poll released Sunday found that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have overall negative opinions about every single 2016 presidential candidate except for Sanders, as HNGN reported.
On the national scale, a CNN poll from this week found that Sanders out-polled every leading Republican candidate when matched up head-to-head.
"We never dreamed that this campaign would move as quickly as it has and in fact the problem that we are having is that the campaign is moving much faster than our political infrastructure," Sanders said after his video message. "We have been in this campaign all of three months. We started with nothing, zero."
