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Election 2016

Community marches in downtown Syracuse to support Bernie Sanders

Tiffany Gomez | Contributing Photographer

The march started on the corner of South Franklin and Walton streets and ended in front of the Chase building on South Salina Street.

By Rachel Sandler

Katerina Agretelis, a sophomore transmedia major at Syracuse University, walked over to an older man, tapped him on the shoulder and asked if she could borrow the megaphone he was holding. He handed it over.

With the megaphone in hand, Agretelis — dressed in a beanie, jeans and a “Bernie Sanders for President” T-shirt — walked past a line of about 80 Sanders supporters and started yelling.

“No more coal, no more oil,” she said through the megaphone. “Keep our carbon in the soil!”

Soon the group of Sanders supporters were walking down Washington Street in downtown Syracuse, chanting and following Agretelis, who was never old enough to vote in a presidential election before now.

Like many young voters, Sanders’s record on environmental issues, his distance from Wall Street and overall honesty, Agretelis said, is connecting with her.



“He gives me a lot of hope and a desire to vote,” she added.

The march was organized by Syracuse for Sanders, the local grassroots outfit supporting Sanders’s campaign in New York before the primary on April 19. About 80 Syracuse community members — and about 10 SU students — participated in the march on Saturday, which started on the corner of South Franklin and Walton streets and ended in front of the Chase building on South Salina Street.

Soon after the march ended, Sanders’s official campaign announced that he will be in Syracuse on Tuesday for a rally at the Oncenter. FiveThirtyEight’s current forecast shows Sanders’s opponent for the Democratic nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, with a 98 percent chance of winning the New York primary and every poll coming out of the state has Clinton ahead, according to FiveThirtyEight.

But despite the bleak polling, Rob Mossotti, an organizer for Syracuse for Sanders, said that if young people in upstate New York, such as those attending SU or Onondaga Community College, turn out to vote for Sanders, he has a chance of winning the Syracuse area if not the entire state.

“We’re depending on young voters, who demographically tend to support Sanders,” he said.

The march stopped in Clinton Square and in front of City Hall, where speakers and volunteers for Syracuse for Sanders criticized Clinton instead of targeting Republican candidates, such as Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). The speakers focused on Clinton’s ties to Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, which are both common complaints among Sanders supporters against Clinton, who campaigned in Syracuse last week at the F Shed to a crowd of about 600 people.

Quinn Leary and Brigitta Pupillo, both freshmen at SU, held a sign in rainbow marker that said, “Gays for Sanders.” Both of them cited Sanders’s record on LGBTQ issues — and Clinton’s past reluctance to support marriage equality in the 1990s — as the major reason for their passion and support for Sanders.

“I’m afraid for the future of queer people,” Leary said. “There’s some f*cked up laws in North Carolina and other states right now, and Bernie has always supported LGBT rights.”

And because Sanders’s campaign in Syracuse is depending on young people, Liz Sedore, a sophomore policy studies and women’s and gender studies dual major at SU, said she’s frustrated with the lack of interest on the SU campus when it comes to political activity outside of social media.

“People should vote instead of getting drunk and being idiots,” she said.

Sanders’s focus on social justice and refusal to bow to corporate interests appeals to Sedore, who said she’s still unsure if she would vote for Clinton if she got the Democratic nomination. She hopes Sanders runs as a third-party candidate in the general election.

“I f*ck with him,” she said. “He’s good for women, queer people, other marginalized people, people in general. Hillary has been very ‘eh’ about her policies, and I trust Bernie.”





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