Nevada Democratic Party Chair William McCurdy called police after supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) protested outside his home from 11 p.m. the night before the state’s caucuses, Politico reported on Thursday.
One protester, Maria Estrada, shouted into a bullhorn while live streaming her actions on her Facebook page. At around 12a.m. McCurdy went outside to confront the group, saying they had “crossed a line” before eventually calling the police. Officers arrived after the protesters had already left.
“I want assurances that there isn’t going to be any shenanigans going on tomorrow. The Democratic Party does not control what happens,” Estrada shouted, repeatedly insisting she didn’t want to see a repeat of the 2016 primaries in which Sanders lost to rival Hillary Clinton.
“Protesting is our right—whether they called the police or not is irrelevant,” Estrada, a self-described “Berner” who is not a member of Sanders’s campaign, told Politico. She added that none of the other protesters were employed by the Sanders campaign.
“William didn’t want this story out there before or after the caucus because he takes his role very seriously overseeing a party-run election and knows how much this needed to be viewed as a fair process for every candidate after 2016,” a person close to McCurdy told the publication.
Estrada and other protesters have recently demonstrated outside the houses of Democratic officials in California, including California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who manages the state’s elections. Padilla also called the police.
The Sanders campaign has struggled to rein in the actions of the senator’s most virulent supporters. Many of those supporters, known pejoratively as “Bernie Bros,” engage in social media harassment of campaign rivals and supporters of those rivals to an extent that critics claim is disproportionate relative to other candidates.