February 17, 2020 08:40 AM UTC

Wow Man That Was A Huge Bernie Rally

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post’s Alex Burness reports, but from the look of it plenty of our readers were there:

Sen. Bernie Sanders took the stage in Denver on Sunday evening to a deafening roar from a crowd of many thousands of people who rarely let up…

Sanders spent only a fraction of his roughly 35-minute speech criticizing President Donald Trump. That segment of the speech was concise and forceful, with Sanders calling Trump “a pathological liar who is running a corrupt administration, who has no clue what the Constitution of the United States is about, who is a bully, who is vindictive, who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a homophobe, who is a xenophobe, who is a religious bigot.”

These and many other lines drew ear-shattering applause. A significant portion of the crowd arrived hours early, and some waited in hour-long lines to buy campaign stickers and shirts. The campaign claimed more than 11,000 people attended, a total confirmed by a fire department official.

Colorado Public Radio’s Sam Brasch:

“Don’t tell anybody, but I think we’re gonna win here in Colorado!” he told supporters on Sunday.

The massive crowd packed into adjoining exhibition halls at the Colorado Convention Center responded with deafening cheers.

After narrowly winning in New Hampshire, Sanders has taken the lead in most national polls for the Democratic nomination. The state of the race in Colorado is much harder to nail down…

Westword’s Chase Woodruff:

“If we are going to bring about the fundamental change that we need in this country, we have got to address the incredible power of the corporate elite,” Sanders said. “What this campaign is about is not just beating Trump — it’s taking on the greed and corruption of Wall Street, the insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil-fuel industry, the military-industrial complex. It’s taking on the entire one percent, the corporate establishment, the political establishment, and telling them: This country belongs to all of us.”

It will take a powerful grassroots movement, Sanders told the crowd, to enact a sweeping political agenda that includes new taxes on corporations and the rich, the cancellation of student debt, federal legalization of marijuana, and a climate-change plan that he called the most ambitious ever proposed. But this uncompromising vision is what helped draw thousands of supporters to the Denver rally, where they cheered transformative ideas like Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal, which would abolish private health insurance and replace it with a universal, government-run program.

For those keeping score, the estimated 11,000 people who turned out to see Sen. Bernie Sanders last night at the Colorado Convention Center would not physically fit inside the 8,000-seat Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs, where President Donald Trump is set to hold his own campaign rally later this week. So, there’s that. Of course, those 11,000 attendees are only good for a single vote each, and with 1.1 million Democrats and 1.5 million unaffiliated voters in Colorado in receipt of Democratic primary ballots no crowd short of a Broncos Super Bowl victory parade can predict much. We do expect to see polling soon that will give us a clearer picture of the race in Colorado.

In the meantime, it was a compelling night for those so inclined to “Feel The Bern.”