Standing on stage before more than 3,000 people last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders took an unusual poll for someone vying to be the Democratic Party’s standard bearer for 2016.

“I’ve never asked this question before, and I’m kind of curious to know the answer,” said the senator from Vermont. “How many people here have at one point or another gone to a Democratic Party meeting?”

Only a hundred or so members of the audience put up their hands.

“I would say that’s about 3 percent of the people here,” said Sanders. “I understand why that is the case. The message to the Democratic leadership is that the Democratic Party is to be the party of working people and young people and the middle class, they’ve got to open up the doors.”

In the course of a year, Bernie Sanders has managed to shift the Democratic Party to the left, in part by leveraging the power of liberals who feel disconnected from it. Now, the party’s leaders have begun the delicate task of trying to bring those voters back into the fold.

And Sanders isn’t making it any easier for them. With questions like that one in Santa Cruz, he continues to position himself outside of the party. He has done so in other ways as well – notably in his selections to sit on the 15-member Democratic platform committee.

Now, it may fall to that committee to broker a peace between Sanders supporters and the rest of the party.

Sanders was given the appointments as a concession by Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Now, the committee’s makeup is a hybrid of long-time party activists and elders and leftist critics, a combination of figures appointed by Sanders, front-runner Hillary Clinton and Wasserman Schultz.

While the Wasserman Schultz and Clinton appointees have worked within the party for years – including its chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), former Rep. Howard Berman (Calif.) and former top aides to President Obama Carol Browner and Wendy Sherman – Sanders’s picks include a climate activist who has been arrested while protesting at the White House fence and an Ivy League African American studies professor who dubbed Obama “a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”

“They were provocative picks and were meant to be,” said David Axelrod, a Democratic strategist who help guide Obama’s two presidential campaigns and served in the White House. “Bernie has built his campaign around distinct positions and he appointed outspoken exponents of his point of view to the platform committee. The question is whether common ground and language can be found, or whether his appointees will take an all-or-nothing approach.”

Several members of the platform committee, which has yet to formally meet, say they are committed to forging a consensus.

“We’re not going into this platform discussion to pick a fight,” said James Zogby, a Palestinian rights activist and DNC member whom Sanders placed on the panel. “This isn’t pitchforks and torches at night. This is a mass movement in the country, like the civil rights movement and the women’s movement created a different dynamic in the country.”

Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden, whom Clinton appointed to the committee, said the two presidential candidates share similar policy goals on issues ranging from college tuition to child care and regulatory reform.

“There is a debate about the speed and scale, but not the subject or end goal,” Tanden said. “There really isn’t a difference in the analysis of the problem.”

Still, there are significant differences between the campaigns on a handful of issues, including whether to ban all fossil fuel extraction from federal lands and waters, the use of U.S. miltary force abroad and how to address the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At a Wednesday morning press conference next to a Monterey County lettuce field, Sanders said that the old Democratic platform that blandly referred to “safe” exploration of natural gas needed to be updated, with a ban on fracking.

“There are tens of thousands of homes, right here in California, where you can turn on the faucet but can’t drink the water,” said Sanders. “Absolutely, the Democratic platform going into the general election should make it absolutely clear that the Democratic Party stands with the American people, stands with the people of California, for a ban on fracking.”

One of Sanders’ platform committee appointees is Middlebury College professor and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who engaged in acts of civil disobedience at the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and blasted Obama for allowing Shell to pursue drilling in the Arctic Ocean last summer. McKibben said in an email that the pace of climate change means the next administration must take more aggressive action to curb the nation’s carbon output.

“The science has gotten steadily gnarlier over the last eight years, as we break one temperature record after another,” he said, “so the policy response needs to get steadily tougher.”

McKibben said he had not attended a Democratic Convention since he covered it for Harvard University’s Crimson in 1980. “A lot of people in funny hats!”

One of Sanders’s picks was blocked: Roseann DeMoro, the no-holds-barred executive director of National Nurses United. The DNC informed the campaign it did not want an additional labor representative on the platform-writing committee since one already sat on the full platform committee.

Sanders did get to appoint Cornel West, a prominent racial justice activist who holds appointments at both Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary, and who has attacked Obama for several years. In a 2014 interview with the author Thomas Frank, West said of the president, “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” The following year West described him as “the first niggerized black president,” which he defined as “a black person who is afraid and scared and intimidated when it comes to putting a spotlight on white supremacy and fighting against white supremacy.”

Cummings, who is also African American, said in an interview that his goal is not to bring the platform committee members “to common ground, it’s to get us to higher ground. I’m going to preach that.”

“My position is that both sides need to be heard,” he added. “And they need to be respected.”

Cummings said he will welcome the insights academics such as West, who “can present their vision of the way the things should be, and then you balance that with folks who are in the trenches working on things day to day.” Speaking from his home in inner-city Baltimore Tuesday, the congressman noted that on his way home he ran into five young black men who were “begging for jobs,” and yesterday he found a family on his stoop, seeking help with housing.

“We need to come up with practical solutions, contrast our positions with the Republicans and show the American people we are on their side.”

No Democrat has come to the convention with enough delegates to demand platform and rules changes since Jesse Jackson in 1988. Sanders, Jackson said, ought to “use his forces to expand the party,” and cement his more progressive economic ideas.

“Everybody’s talking about the $15-per-hour minimum wage now. Everybody’s talking about student debt, credit card debt. But Bernie cannot let himself get so far out where he can’t control his own troops,” Jackson said. “The language you hear from Hillary now tells you that he’s already winning.”

He added that Clinton Democrats this year are not the moderates of Bill Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council of the 1980s and 1990s. “They’re the rainbow Democrats,” Jackson said.

Several top Democratic strategists said in interviews that they remain confident that several politicians embraced by the party’s progressive wing – including Obama and also Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), whose advisers are regularly talking with the Clinton campaign – will be able to win over the left.

Obama’s approval ratings among liberals, at 93 percent, are higher with that group than with moderate Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll.

One of the people party operatives will have to win over is Chris Siennick, a 26-year old who attended Sanders’ rally in Santa Cruz this week. His right arm was tattooed with an image from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and his left arm bore the slogan “Peace Land Freedom” from a 1917 uprising in Ukraine.

“Getting this many people registered as Democrats can really move the party in a progressive direction – more socialist, less capitalist,” said Siennick. “I think that starts at the Democratic National Convention and moves onward from there.

Before Bernie, I thought it was just another profiteering, capitalist party. I never thought the party could be salvaged. But Bernie pulled it left.”

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · David Weigel, Juliet Eilperin