Richie Floyd: Bernie’s 2016 Campaign Changed My Life
In 2021, Richie Floyd was elected to the St Petersburg City Council, becoming the first openly socialist elected official in Florida in over a century. Writing in Jacobin, Floyd explains how Bernie’s 2016 campaign launched him into organizing.
Richie Floyd is a socialist city councilor in St Petersburg, Florida. Floyd credits Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign with inspiring him, and a whole generation of organizers, to join the fight for a socialist future. (Charles Ommanney / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Bernie Sanders changed my life. And it happened overnight.
Just over ten years ago, I was working as a hardware engineer. I grew up working class in the deeply conservative Florida Panhandle, where the Democratic Party had next to no foothold. The neoliberal ideas leading the conversation in the Democratic and Republican parties left me feeling disillusioned and unmoored from both the Left and the Right. I didn’t believe politics as it existed could have much of a positive impact on my life.
While visiting with family at my parents’ house, I was asked by a friend if I had heard of Bernie Sanders. I had not, so he queued up a YouTube video called “Progress” in which Bernie stood on a stage on the shore of Lake Champlain in Burlington and outlined the major themes of his presidential campaign.
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