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VISALIA, Calif. — Charles Rothbaum has waited a long time for a presidential candidate to visit this traditionally red, Central Valley agricultural town. The last he can remember was Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988.
Rothbaum, 70, was at that Dukakis rally. And 28 years later, almost to the day, he was at Visalia Community Stadium Sunday to see Bernie Sanders. He thinks he knows what took so long.
“Maybe everyone just figures they can count on Republican support here,” Rothbaum said. “There’s a lot of Trump supporters around here. Lots of farmers. They would vote for Trump, but they like Bernie. Everybody recognizes the honesty. That’s what they like about him.”
Sanders almost skipped Visalia, too. It wasn’t originally part of his Memorial Day weekend swing through California, which holds a must-win primary on June 7.
But on Thursday the Vermont senator added a stop here — a decision made all the more noteworthy by the fact that he had already planned to rally supporters in nearby Fresno on Sunday night.
One local Sanders volunteer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign, said he and his colleagues were “stoked” about the addition of Visalia. They had planned to drive about 45 minutes to Fresno, but the chance to see their candidate in their hometown seemed all the more special.
Wess Hardin, a local musician who served as Sanders’s warmup act in Visalia, used the exact same word to describe his own amazement that a presidential candidate would come here.
“It’s so great this is happening in my town right now,” Hardin told the crowd between songs. “I’m so stoked. Just speaks to the kind of guy [Sanders] is.”
Indeed, gratitude for Sanders’s mere presence seemed to permeate the crowd. People here clearly are not used to the attention and did not expect it.
“I think it says a lot about his character, that he really cares about small towns,” said Christina Seitz, a Visalia native who moved back to her hometown a few years ago.
Her husband Danny, 36, completed the thought: “[It shows] that he’s willing to work for all the votes, too — to come to a place where the other candidates aren’t stopping.”
For the record, Bill Clinton stopped in Visalia last week on his way to Fresno to stump for his wife, likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But he didn’t hold a formal event; he chatted with small groups of voters on Main Street.
While locals still consider Visalia a small town, it is growing rapidly; with almost 131,000 people today, the population has swelled 73 percent since 1990. And almost half of that population is now Latino.
Translation to political strateg-ese: Visalia is a much bigger prize than it was when Dukakis came here, and many of the newcomers belong to a demographic group that tends to vote for Democrats. Sanders, it would seem, saw an opportunity to pick up votes in an area that Rothbaum described as “Republican country.”
Sanders has already earned the votes of Erica Salazar and Brenda Salazar, friends whose shared surname is a coincidence. Erica Salazar, 21, is a college student; Brenda Salazar, 22, just graduated.
Are they worried about student debt, one of Sanders’s core issues?
“Oh yes,” said Erica. Brenda said she wants to go to graduate school to study sociology but has to work for a year because of the cost of her education.
In short, they are prototypical Sanders voters. And Sanders found them in Visalia, a place where few presidential candidates have bothered to look.
