Call it the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. Call it flirtation. Call it curiosity.
Or call it 2015's version of Americans going to the window and screaming: "I'm mad as h---, and I'm not going to take this anymore."
Whatever you call it, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an Independent Vermont senator who announced several weeks ago that he will seek the Democratic presidential nomination, is pulling in lots of unexpected support in Iowa, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. That support is taking pundits who dismissed Sanders as a "fringe" candidate by complete surprise.
Salon magazine Tuesday summed up the Sanders surprise with this headline: "America is feeling the Bern: Bernie Sanders draws overflow crowds - and surges in the polls."
"Feeling the Bern," says author Sophia Tesfaye, is "an enthusiastic reference" to the 73-year-old's caustic, tell-it-like-he-thinks-it-is criticism of politics and money in America - both among Republicans and Hillary Clinton, who he thinks is not liberal enough.
Sanders, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, drew a standing-room only crowd for a Friday night rally in Iowa. The Wall Street Journal said the crowd consisted of 700 supporters - the same number who went to a Hillary Clinton event on Sunday that featured a buffet table and live band.
In Wisconsin, Sanders took 41 percent in the Democratic Party straw poll, losing to Clinton by just eight points.
And in New Hampshire, Sanders is surging with an early poll showing 32 percent support compared to Clinton's 44 percent. At one event in Keene, N.H., more than 1,000 people who showed up to see Sanders couldn't all fit into the room, according to Salon.
Sanders has long crusaded against income inequality as well as corporate and PAC money in politics - things that also clearly prickle under the skins of many every-day Americans.
On one of his campaign websites, go.berniesanders.com, he writes: "It's about a grassroots movement of Americans standing up and saying: "Enough is enough. This country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of billionaires."
Sanders also calls for expanding, not cutting, Social Security, as well as a program for debt-free college. Additionally, he is a progressive voice on climate change and civil liberties.
Many among the political media credit Sanders, a son of Polish immigrants who entered politics in 1981 to become a four-term mayor of Burlington, with pushing Hillary Clinton further left from her last campaign's centrist tack. That's fine, says Sanders, who later became a Vermont congressman and then senator. But he says his presidential campaign is not an educational campaign or a protest campaign. "This is a campaign to win," he told reporters.
Nonetheless, the fiery Sanders acknowledged surprise at the support he's seeing. He told National Public Radio that he has been "stunned."