Bernie Sanders' secret weapon? Reddit.

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

published 3 September 2015

The Bernie Sanders campaign still faces an uphill battle challenging the Clinton juggernaut for the Democratic nomination, but there's one place where he's already won: Reddit.

If you're not familiar with the site, Reddit is a massive online forum that allows users to "upvote" and "downvote" user-submitted content, and it's divided into subreddits, which are single-topic forums users can subscribed to or ignore according to personal interests.

Sanders currently has more than 80 subreddits devoted to his cause, including one for every single state plus Washington, DC. The primary subreddit of the bunch, r/SandersforPresident, has nearly 100,00 subscribers, meaning there are lots of upvotes constantly pushing pro-Sanders content into the view of Reddit's 203 million monthly visitors. State-based subreddits have played a key role in organizing for real life events, too, helping Sanders pack stadiums with thousands of supporters.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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