Bernie-mania spreads to Texas as Sanders' speech draws crowd of 5,000
Ninety minutes before the scheduled start of Bernie Sanders’ speech on Sunday night, a 500-person-long line snaked around the arena, in 100F heat – and in Texas.
The Democratic presidential hopeful’s fans showed up long before the doors opened and bellowed their approval once inside, as he spoke for more than an hour in front of 5,000 people, concluding a weekend in which he addressed about 25,000 in Arizona and Texas and showed that Republican-dominated states are not immune to Berniemania.
The independent Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist attracted more than 8,000 people to a rally in Dallas earlier in the day and 11,000 in Phoenix on Saturday, the highest turnout of his campaign.
Like his speech at the Phoenix Convention Center, the Houston rally was moved to a larger venue: an 8,000-capacity basketball arena at the University of Houston. A speech by Hillary Clinton last month at Texas Southern University, less than a mile away, drew an attendance of around 1,000 on a weekday afternoon.
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/20/texas-bernie-sanders-speech-draws-crowd
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