Vermont senator and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders was back in the Bay Area Sunday.
Sanders held a rally in San Francisco as part of his first trip to California since entering the 2020 presidential race.
Cheering supporters gathered at Great Meadow Park at Fort Mason to hear Sanders speak.
Sanders is one of a number of Democrats running for the White House in 2020.
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The race for the 2020 presidential election is underway, and the field of Democratic candidates is packed. Those who have announced presidential bids include a vice president, senators, House members and three mayors. As for the GOP, a single Republican has announced his bid to challenge President Donald Trump for the party nomination: former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, who ran for vice president (and lost) in 2016 on the Libertarian party ticket.
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Updated Nov. 20, 2019
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Sanders on Saturday was back in California three years after arriving there as a beaten man in the 2016 presidential race. Now he is trying to reawaken the West Coast donor base and devoted volunteers he built then in the shadow of Sen. Kamala Harris, the state’s junior senator who has won statewide races in California three times.
Sanders sent a message Saturday to doubters. Just under a year before California's March 2020 primary, he attracted a crowd of thousands to an outdoor rally in downtown Los Angeles. Supporters waving blue "Bernie" signs jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into a park and lined the steps of City Hall across the street, while others looked on from behind steel barricades a block away.
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In a voice that echoed off downtown buildings, he ticked through his now-familiar proposals including universal health care and bridging the wealth gap, thrusting his finger in the air for emphasis, his white hair blowing in the breeze.
"Our job is to complete the revolution we began" in the last campaign, he told cheering supporters, while also promising to defeat Harris in California.
The Vermont senator made a second-place finish in California's 2016 presidential primary, when he won 27 of 58 counties. Where you win is especially important in a Democratic presidential contest in the state, because of party election rules that divvy up delegates reward candidates who do well in areas thick with Democrats, like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Sanders is expected to make a strong push in the state, in part because even the second and third place finishers could end up with a significant load of delegates under the party's complicated election rules.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
