There are strong indications that Vermont’s U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will show new strength in Hawaii’s presidential preference poll on Saturday.

According to the raw numbers from The Associated Press, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton needs 777 more delegates to win the nomination. Sanders needs 1,532 delegates. The figures include both delegates and the Democrats’ so-called superdelegates tallied by AP.

So Sanders is not going take a lot away from Clinton by winning a share of Hawaii’s 35 delegates, but still.

In Hawaii, there has been a huge surge in Democratic party membership, with observers thinking the flood of new members will be Sanders’ supporters.

Stephanie Ohigashi, the Democratic chairwoman, said the party has grown by 5,700 since December.

“We are looking at big surges on the neighbor islands and some Oahu districts,” Ohigashi said in an interview. She pointed to the Pearl City to Manoa areas as also showing rapid Democratic growth.

“We saw a steady increase from December on. It was a regular pace of maybe two to three hundred a day, but when the Republican caucus was held, it went to a thousand a day,” Ohigashi said.

Other Democratic political observers are saying that a last minute jump in membership “bodes well for Sanders.”

The thinking is that Clinton is likely to do well with the party establishment members who are older and not so plugged into social media.

“We are seeing new members who are coming because of the social media campaigns by the millennial generation,” Ohigashi said.

Sanders organizers in Hawaii say they are concentrating their push for Sanders supporters to attend Saturday’s preference poll via Facebook and other social media outlets with a strong emphasis in getting new voters on the neighbor islands.

Ohigashi said the party figures show there have been big increases in membership on Kauai’s North Shore and the Big Island’s lower Puna district.

“The highest jump was in the Big Island’s 4th House District (Puna), where we registered 500 new members in one day,” Ohigashi said.

Both the Clinton and the Sanders campaigns have sent in campaign aides from the mainland to help turn out the vote, which Ohigashi said is also helping to crank up interest in the preference poll.

While some observers are expecting maybe 25,000 Democrats to show up, Ohigashi said she thinks the vote will top the record-setting 38,000 that voted in the Clinton versus Barack Obama contest in 2008.

Back then, the party ran out of ballots and some votes were cast on hastily scribbled pieces of paper. This year, Ohigashi said she has printed 100,000 ballots, just in case.

Ohigashi said she doesn’t have a firm number for total party membership, because some members are double counted, but figures the Democrats have about 70,000 members. In past presidential preference polls, the party has attracted only 1,000 members, so even if the Democrats bring in 20,000, it shows renewed interest in this year’s campaign, even without the trash talking from Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner.

———

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.