Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders (born September 8, 1941, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) American politician who was first elected to represent Vermont in the U.S. Senate in 2006 and took office the following year. Previously he served (1981–89) as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1991–2007). Formally unaffiliated with any political party, he sought the Democratic nomination in the U.S. presidential elections of 2016 and 2020.

Sanders, the son of Jewish parents of Polish descent, grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, New York. The family struggled financially, and income inequality would later become one of his key political issues. He attended Brooklyn College before earning a bachelor’s degree (1964) in political science from the University of Chicago. While in Chicago, he became involved in the civil rights movement, and in 1963 he participated in the March on Washington. After graduating, he lived on a kibbutz in Israel.

Upon returning to the United States, Sanders moved to Vermont, participating in the communal back-to-the-land movement and working as a union carpenter and freelance journalist. He also became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, which drew him into electoral politics. Running as an Independent, he made several unsuccessful bids for governor of Vermont (1972, 1976, and 1986) and the U.S. Senate (1972 and 1974). In 1981 he ran for the mayorship of Burlington, where he had settled. He won by a handful of votes. Soon thereafter Sanders (who had a son from a previous relationship) met Jane O’Meara Driscoll, who had three children from a prior marriage; after a seven-year courtship, the couple married.

In 1988 Sanders ran for the U.S. House of Representatives but lost. Two years later, however, he was elected to the body. After taking office in 1991, Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, caucused with the Democrats. Known for his liberal stance, he founded (1991) the Congressional Progressive Caucus. A reliable opponent of Pres. George W. Bush’s administration and the Republican Party, he voted against the Iraq War and distinguished himself in particular for his opposition to tax cuts benefiting wealthy individuals and corporations and to cuts in spending for social welfare programs. He was reelected seven times, usually by wide margins.

In 2006 Sanders ran for the U.S. Senate and easily won. He took office the following year and subsequently continued his campaign for tax reform. In 2010 he held the floor for nearly nine hours in a filibuster against the extension of the Bush tax cuts. His populist speech was published as The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class (2011). He was also a vocal opponent of the shutdown of the federal government of 2013, which he attributed to the undue influence of big-money interests in the Republican Party. Apart from tax and social-welfare matters, Sanders sponsored bills and amendments that mostly concerned climate change, veterans’ affairs, and renewable energy.

In April 2015 Sanders announced that he was entering the U.S. presidential election race of 2016. His candidacy was initially dismissed by many pundits, as Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as the inevitable Democratic nominee. However, his populist policies—which some criticized as unrealistic—and enthusiasm proved popular with numerous voters, especially younger Democrats. Much of Sanders’s campaign platform focused on domestic issues. He supported universal health care, tax increases on the wealthy, and free tuition at public universities and colleges. He also backed campaign-finance reform and proposed stricter regulations on Wall Street. As the primary election season began in February 2016, the race between Sanders and Clinton was surprisingly close. However, by the following month, he trailed far behind Clinton in delegates, though he maintained a strong—and highly enthusiastic—voter base. In July Sanders officially endorsed Clinton, who had claimed the party’s nomination the previous month.

After the presidential election—which Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump—Sanders published Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (2016). Sanders remained an influential force within progressive politics, and he was considered to have played a key role in moving the policies of the Democratic Party to the left. Amid speculation that he would launch a second bid for the presidency, reports surfaced of sexism and pay disparity in Sanders’s 2016 campaign. In January 2019 he publicly apologized and promised to “do better” if he were to run again. The following month Sanders announced that he was running for president.

Sanders quickly became a frontrunner, but his progressive agenda raised questions about his electability in a general election. The more moderate wing of the Democratic Party grew increasingly worried, especially after Sanders’s impressive showings in the early primaries and caucuses. However, a resounding victory by Joe Biden in South Carolina in late February 2020 completely transformed the race. Biden, who was less progressive than Sanders, soon took a commanding lead in delegates, and Sanders’s attempt to regain momentum was hindered by the coronavirus pandemic, which caused a number of contests to be postponed and prevented in-person rallies. In April Sanders suspended his campaign, and shortly thereafter he formally endorsed Biden. Sanders continued to press for universal health care, an issue that became more pressing as the pandemic worsened in the United States. In August 2020 he cosponsored the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a proposed bill that would tax the wealth gains of billionaires during the crisis, with the revenue going toward the out-of-pocket health costs of Americans for one year.