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Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are appearing together across the West in rallies aimed at mobilizing Democrats and independents against Trump.

Bernie Sanders launched the next round of his “fighting oligarchy” tour Saturday in Los Angeles, where he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) drew thousands of people to a park across from City Hall as they advanced their effort to build a “working class movement.”

“We are living in a moment of extraordinary danger, and how we respond to this moment will not only impact our lives but it will affect the lives of our kids and future generations,” Sanders said to a crowd that organizers said totaled 36,000 people. “We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of our country.”

The Trump administration “is moving us rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society — and Mr. Trump, we ain’t going there,” Sanders said to cheers.

As Sanders called out billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk for “decimating” the Social Security Administration — saying cuts to services will harm old and disabled people — attendees in the crowd shouted, “Monster!”

As he makes stops in red House districts in Utah, Idaho, Montana and several of the most competitive California districts over the next few days, Sanders will be meeting with potential candidates who share his vision and ideology — both independents and Democrats — as they weigh runs for office up and down the ballot in 2026. Sanders’s latest organizing effort is still taking shape, building off the energy that the independent Vermont senator has generated in rallies since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

But at a moment when the Democratic Party is still trying to chart a clear path after its 2024 losses, some moderate and establishment Democrats are watching Sanders warily. Many are trying to determine whether he will limit his recruiting efforts to safe red or blue districts and local offices — or whether he could build a machine backing independent candidates in more competitive districts, potentially setting up a collision course with the Democratic Party establishment.

Sanders has said that one goal is finding more candidates who espouse his values to run in red areas of the country where Democrats have ceded ground. He is also looking closely at open Senate and House seats with the aim of ensuring that there are working class populists running in those districts — either as independents or Democrats.

And he has also made it clear that he wants to prevent heavily funded super PACs from playing an outsize role in those races. Some candidates weighing whether to run in the most competitive House races in the country have sought his advice and guidance, according to people familiar with his operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal private conversations.

Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at the centrist group Third Way, said the size of Sanders’s crowds has been impressive. But he argued they are driven largely by anger about the Trump administration’s policies rather than any sudden embrace of Sanders’s agenda of controversial policies like Medicare-for-all.

“The problem with the far left is that they have scored their victories only against other Democrats. They have yet to flip a single House seat, not to mention the Senate,” Bennett said.

Bennett said the only way to stop “the absolute catastrophe of Trumpism” is “to win majorities, and the only way to win majorities is with moderates in purple and red districts and states.”

But Faiz Shakir, a longtime Sanders adviser who ran for Democratic National Committee chair earlier this year, said Sanders is ascendant in this moment because he is channeling the wrath of regular people toward the billionaire class and “the hubris and lack of humanity” in people like Musk. Sanders remains popular at a time when the Democratic brand has hit historic lows because he’s known as “a class-based populist warrior against concentrations of wealth and power,” Shakir said.

“He understands this moment,” Shakir said. “There’s a muscularity in the way he wants to fight against them with a clear conviction of where we would go.”

The Democratic brand, by contrast, Shakir said, is still “unsure of the class prism, far more focused on left versus right, social racial justice issues that are not on the main highway of the thing that millions and millions and millions of people are upset about.”

Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report, said Sanders is filling a power vacuum in the Democratic Party because the Vermont senator has always had a strong identity at a time when many voters feel the party has lost its own.

“But does that make him or his brand, and his ideology — or an Ocasio-Cortez ideology — more appealing to Democratic primary voters two years from now, or four years from now? We don’t know,” Walter said.

The appeal of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez speaks to the broader problem for Democrats, Walter said, which is that “for eight years now their most compelling message and their unifying message within the party was that Trump was evil, and they now have to figure out who they are at a time when 50 percent of Americans voted for him.”

Sanders argued in a recent interview with The Washington Post that while Democrats have done “a pretty good job” fighting for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, they have failed in “representing the needs of the working class of the country, creating more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever seen.”

He believes Americans’ alarm about the influence of Musk — and Trump’s transactional approach to changing policy based on the whims of his big donors — offers an opportunity for him to demand a transformation when it comes to the money that powers the Democratic Party.

Democrats, he said, have “got to accept their fair share of the blame” for what he describes as a “corrupt campaign finance system which allows billionaires to buy elections.”

Sanders began speaking openly about supporting independent candidates willing to take on both parties shortly after the November election.

He told the Nation magazine that Dan Osborn, a steamfitter and former union leader who ran as a working class independent for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, was “a model for the future.” Osborn ran an unexpectedly strong campaign against U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) and is now considering another independent run for federal office or for governor.

The Vermont senator also argues that Democrats shouldn’t accept candidates who aren’t prepared to stand up to moneyed interests as they fight for the working class.

“You have a two-party system, both parties dominated by big money equally,” Sanders said at a recent rally in Las Vegas. “Our job in the coming weeks is not just to take Trump on every step of the way. … It’s to have a vision for where our country should be going. … You’re not going to make the changes we need so long as we continue to have a corrupt campaign finance system.”

Ocasio-Cortez highlighted similar themes Saturday in Los Angeles.

“This isn’t just about Republican attacks on working people. We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us, too,” she told the crowd, saying this “movement is not about partisan labels” and that they need to be more judicious in “voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class.”

Since Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez started drawing huge crowds this year while railing against “oligarchs,” some of the highest-profile voices in the party have increasingly echoed their populist tone.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) has been advocating for his party to be more purposeful and transparent about talking about power, including addressing why corporations and billionaires have too much. He went out on the road in states like Michigan with Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Florida) “to fight the billionaire takeover of our government.” And he has urged his party to be more deliberate in targeting Trump’s obsession with billionaire donors, calling Musk “a proxy for the broader corruption, which is the handover of our government to billionaires and the theft of wealth and resources from ordinary Americans to make the billionaires happier.”

On March 25, Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pennsylvania) and colleagues including Reps. Ro Khanna (D-California), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Greg Casar (D-Texas) took over the House floor for speeches arguing that the Democratic Party needed to “wake the hell up,” as Deluzio put it. The Pennsylvania congressman argued it was time for the party to embrace a “spirit of economic populism” by “fighting for a life that people can afford,” “bringing corporate power to heel” and “taking on the corruption that pervades this town.”