Bernie Sanders

• 1. Introduction

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  Bernie Sanders delivered a speech in the United States Senate on the 10th of December 2010 that lasted 8 hours and 34 minutes. His target was a tax bill that would extend the Bush-era rates, which he argued favored the wealthiest Americans. "Enough is enough!... How many homes can you own?" he asked.

  The bill passed with a strong majority and was signed into law a week later. The speech still found a second life. Nation Books published it in February 2011 as a book, and the author's proceeds went to Vermont charities.

  That mix of defeat and afterlife runs through his whole career. He is a senator from Vermont who has never been a Democrat, yet he has caucused with Democrats for most of his time in Congress and twice sought their presidential nomination. He calls himself a democratic socialist.

  This documentary asks how a man from Brooklyn, who had never won an election before 1981, ended up in that position. It asks what he actually accomplished in Congress, given critics who say he rarely wrote major laws. And it asks what he means by socialism, and why so many people argue over the answer.

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• 2. Brooklyn and Chicago

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  Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders was born in Słopnice, a town in Austrian Galicia that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now lies in Poland. He reached the United States in 1921 and made his living as a paint salesman. In Brooklyn he and his wife Dorothy, who was born in New York City with the maiden name Glassberg, raised a family that included Larry and his younger brother Bernard. Bernard was born on the 8th of September 1941.

  The family lived in Midwood. Larry later said they never lacked food or clothing, but a purchase like curtains or a rug was out of reach. In the 1940s, many relatives left behind in German-occupied Poland were murdered in the Holocaust. Bernie says that history pulled him toward politics at an early age.

  At P.S. 197, the young Sanders helped his basketball team win a borough championship. In the afternoons he attended Hebrew school, and he celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954. At James Madison High School he captained the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race. His first run for student body president ended in last place among three candidates. His platform was aid for Korean War orphans, and he kept raising money for them anyway, even organizing a charity basketball game.

  Grief came early. His mother died when he was 19, at the age of 47. His father died two years later, in 1962, at 57. Sanders spent 1959-1960 at Brooklyn College, then transferred to the University of Chicago and graduated in 1964 with a degree in political science. He later described himself as a mediocre student, because the classroom felt "boring and irrelevant".

  In January 1962, Sanders joined a rally at the University of Chicago administration building against the segregated housing policy of university president George Wells Beadle. "We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments," he said. He and 32 other students then entered the building and camped outside the president's office. After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination. More protests followed, and in the summer of 1963 the university ended racial segregation in its private housing.

  Sanders chaired the university's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, which merged with the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Fellow sit-in participant Joan Mahoney described him in a 2016 interview as "a swell guy, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he wasn't terribly charismatic. One of his strengths, though, was his ability to work with a wide group of people, even those he didn't agree with." Not every effort paid off. After he spent a day putting up fliers against police brutality, he noticed that Chicago police had followed him and taken them all down.

  That summer of 1963 he attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. He was also fined $25 for resisting arrest at a demonstration in Englewood against segregation in Chicago's public schools. Beyond civil rights, he joined the Student Peace Union. During the Vietnam War he applied for conscientious objector status. His application was eventually rejected, but by then he was too old to be drafted. He never criticized those who fought, and he has backed veterans' benefits throughout his career.

  He also joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America. For a short time he organized for the United Packinghouse Workers of America. He worked on the reelection campaign of Leon Despres, a Chicago alderman who opposed Mayor Richard J. Daley's Democratic machine. Sanders later called his Chicago years "the major period of intellectual ferment in my life." He read Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John Dewey, Karl Marx and Erich Fromm, in his words "reading everything except what I was supposed to read for class the next day."

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• 3. The Liberty Union Years

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  Stannard, Vermont, had 88 residents at the 1970 census, and in 1968 Sanders moved there. He had spent the years after college in New York City as a Head Start teacher, a psychiatric aide and a carpenter. Rural life in the Northeast Kingdom had "captivated" him, he said. In Stannard he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker and writer, selling what he called "radical film strips" and other educational materials to schools.

  He also wrote for an alternative paper, The Vermont Freeman. One of those articles opened with an explicit sexual fantasy reference, in service of a larger point. It was discovered and widely reported 45 years later, after he had become famous. By the mid-1970s he had moved from Stannard to the more populous Chittenden County. In his 2018 reelection campaign he went back to town for an event with voters and other candidates.

  His electoral career began in Burlington with the Liberty Union Party, a national umbrella for socialist-oriented state parties that grew out of the anti-war movement and the People's Party. He ran for governor in 1972 and 1976. He also ran for the U.S. Senate in a 1972 special election and again in 1974. In the 1974 race he finished third with 5,901 votes, or 4 percent. Patrick Leahy, then a 34-year-old state's attorney for Chittenden County, won with 70,629 votes. Incumbent Representative Dick Mallary took 66,223.

  In 1971, while researching a story for the party newspaper Movement, Sanders stayed three days at Myrtle Hill Farm, a back-to-the-land commune in Vermont. He was asked to leave because he did not do the physical work expected of every member. Some residents said he kept pulling others into political talk, and one claimed work would only get done if people were pulled out of his orbit.

  The 1976 race was the high point of Liberty Union. Sanders won 11,317 votes for governor. His total was large enough to keep either major party from getting a majority in the races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, so the legislature had to decide them. But the effort drained the party's money and energy. In October 1977, Sanders and Nancy Kaufman, the party's candidate for attorney general, announced they were leaving it.

  During the 1980 presidential election he served as one of three Vermont electors for the Socialist Workers Party. After 1977 he worked as a writer and directed a nonprofit, the American People's Historical Society. There he produced a 30-minute documentary about Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader who ran for president five times as the Socialist Party candidate. On the 25th of October 2025, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation gave Sanders its namesake award, which had first gone to John L. Lewis in 1965.

  The 1976 results held a hint of what came next. In Burlington, his vote share for governor was double his share statewide, at 12 percent against 6 percent.

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• 4. Burlington Is Not for Sale

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  Richard Sugarman, an Orthodox Jewish professor of religious studies at the University of Vermont, pushed his close friend to run for mayor. He showed Sanders a ward-by-ward breakdown of that 1976 governor's race. On the 8th of November 1980, Sanders announced his candidacy, and on the 16th of December he made it formal at a City Hall press conference. Linda Niedweske became his campaign manager. The Citizens Party considered nominating Greg Guma, but Guma declined, saying it would be "difficult to run against another progressive candidate".

  Sanders won by 22 votes over incumbent Gordon Paquette, Richard Bove and Joseph McGrath. A recount cut the margin to 10 votes, and Paquette did not contest the result. Sanders had never won an election before. He spent around $4,000. Paquette had barely campaigned, because neither Sanders nor Bove looked like a serious threat. He had also proposed an unpopular tax increase of $0.65 per $100, which Sanders opposed. Volunteers, university professors, social welfare agencies and the police union backed Sanders, and the result shocked the local political establishment.

  The fight over the waterfront defined his early years. Developer Tony Pomerleau wanted to turn the industrial Lake Champlain shoreline, owned by the Central Vermont Railway, into condominiums, hotels and offices. Under the slogan "Burlington is not for sale", Sanders opposed the plan. The area was instead redeveloped as a mixed-use district with housing, parks and public spaces.

  Sanders ran as an independent, and in January 1983 the Citizens Party voted unanimously to endorse him. He won reelection that year over Judy Stephany and James Gilson. He won again in the following cycle, and in December 1986 he announced a bid for a fourth term, even though close associates said he was tired of the job. He beat Democratic nominee Paul Lafayette. Then he drew a line, saying "eight years is enough and I think it is time for new leadership, which does exist within the coalition, to come up".

  His supporters, including city councilor Terry Bouricius, formed the Progressive Coalition, forerunner of the Vermont Progressive Party. It never held more than six of the 13 council seats. That was still enough to stop the council from overriding his vetoes. Under his leadership Burlington balanced its budget, and the city attracted the Vermont Reds, then the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. Burlington became the first US city to fund community-trust housing, and it sued the local cable television franchise to win lower rates.

  The mayor's office also had a cultural side. In 1985, Noam Chomsky gave a foreign policy speech at City Hall, and Sanders introduced him as "a very vocal and important voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America". From 1986 to 1988, Sanders hosted and produced a public-access program, Bernie Speaks with the Community. In 1987 he joined 30 Vermont musicians to record a folk album, We Shall Overcome. That same year US News & World Report ranked him among America's best mayors. In 1988 he visited the Soviet Union and interviewed the mayor of Burlington's sister city, Yaroslavl, about housing and health care.

  When Sanders left office in 1989, Bouricius said he had "changed the entire nature of politics in Burlington and also in the state of Vermont".

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• 5. The Amendment King

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  Jim Jeffords left Vermont's only House seat in 1988 to run for the Senate, and Sanders ran for it as an independent. Former lieutenant governor Peter P. Smith won with 41 percent. Sanders placed second with 38 percent, and Democrat Paul N. Poirier took 19 percent. Two years later Sanders beat Smith 56 percent to 39 percent. He was the first independent elected to the House since Frazier Reams of Ohio won his second term in 1952. He was also the first socialist elected since Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party won his last term in 1948.

  Sanders served from 1991 until 2007 and won by large margins, with one exception. In the Republican Revolution of 1994 he won with just 50 percent of the vote, a margin of 3 percent. In his first year he alienated colleagues and potential allies by criticizing both parties as serving the wealthy. In 1991 he and five other members co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus. He chaired it for its first eight years while still refusing to join the Democratic Party or its caucus. In 2005, Rolling Stone called him the "amendment king", because since 1995 he had passed more roll call amendments than any other House member, even with Republicans in full control.

  In 1999 he voted and argued against rolling back the Glass-Steagall provisions that separated investment banks from commercial banks. In June 2003 he confronted Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan at a hearing. He said Greenspan was "way out of touch" and that Greenspan saw his main job as representing "the wealthy and large corporations."

  On the 7th of February 1992, worried about high breast cancer rates in Vermont, Sanders sponsored the Cancer Registries Amendment Act, to create registries for collecting cancer data. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a companion bill on the 2nd of October. The House passed the Senate bill on the 6th of October, and President George H. W. Bush signed it on the 24th of October 1992.

  His record on guns and crime was mixed. In 1993 he voted against the Brady Bill, which required federal background checks and a waiting period for gun buyers. It passed 238-187. He voted against it four more times in the 1990s, explaining that his Vermont constituents saw waiting periods as a state matter. He backed other gun-control measures. In 1994 he voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, because it included the Violence Against Women Act and a ban on certain assault weapons. He still criticized the rest of the bill, saying "we can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails."

  At times he leaned toward tougher enforcement. In 1996 he voted against a bill that would have barred police from buying tanks and armored carriers. In 1998 he supported a ten-year minimum sentence for possessing a gun during a federal crime, including nonviolent offenses like marijuana possession. In 2005 he voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields firearms makers and dealers from negligence claims. By 2016 he said he would vote to defeat that law.

  On security and war he was a steady critic. He voted against the original Patriot Act, which passed the House 357-66, and against each reauthorization. In June 2005 he proposed limiting the provisions that let the government obtain library and book-buying records. The House passed it with a bipartisan majority, but House-Senate negotiators removed it on the 4th of November. He voted against the resolutions authorizing force against Iraq in 1991 and 2002 and opposed the 2003 invasion, especially the Bush administration's decision to start the war unilaterally. He did vote for the 2001 authorization against terrorists, which has since been cited as legal cover for controversial military actions.

  In February 2005 he introduced a bill to withdraw the permanent normal trade relations status granted to China in October 2000. He called trade policy with China "an absolute failure" that "needs to be fundamentally overhauled". The bill gathered 71 co-sponsors but never reached a vote on the floor. Two months later, a vacancy in Vermont's Senate delegation changed his plans.

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• 6. Small Provisions, Big Ambitions

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  On the 21st of April 2005, Sanders entered the Senate race after Jim Jeffords announced he would not seek a fourth term. Chuck Schumer, who chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and had also attended James Madison High School, endorsed him. That mattered, because it meant no Democrat running against Sanders could expect party money. Harry Reid and Howard Dean backed him too, and Dean called him an ally who "votes with the Democrats 98% of the time". Barack Obama campaigned for him in Vermont in March 2006.

  Sanders struck the same deal he had used in the House. He was listed in the Democratic primary but would decline the nomination if he won, which he did. In the most expensive campaign in Vermont history, he beat businessman Rich Tarrant by almost 2 to 1. Many national media outlets projected him as the winner right after the polls closed, before any returns came in. He won reelection in 2012 with 71 percent against John MacGovern, and in 2018 with 67 percent against Lawrence Zupan. On the 6th of May 2024 he announced a fourth Senate campaign against Republican Gerald Malloy. He won and has said this term will likely be his last.

  As a Senate independent, Sanders votes with Democrats on procedural matters unless whip Dick Durbin agrees he need not. In exchange he kept his seniority and received the committee seats he would have had as a Democrat. His caucusing gave Democrats a 51-49 majority in the 110th Congress of 2007-08, since Vice President Dick Cheney would likely have broken ties for Republicans.

  Measured by passed bills, his record is modest. Politico wrote that he had rarely forged actual legislation or left a significant imprint on it. The New York Times said his ideas usually sit far to the left of the Senate majority, so he presses his agenda by attaching small provisions to other senators' larger bills. Sanders has sponsored over 500 amendments, and many became law. They include a ban on imported goods made by child labor, $100 million for community health centers, and $10 million for outreach to service members with conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Others created a public database of senior Defense Department officials who seek jobs with defense contractors, and added autism treatment to the military health program Tricare.

  In mid-December 2009 he added $11 billion for community health centers to the Affordable Care Act, especially rural ones. The provision united left-leaning Democrats with conservative, rural ones, helping secure the 60 votes the bill needed. On the 9th of June 2014, in the wake of the Veterans Health Administration scandal, he sponsored a bill to reform the Department of Veterans Affairs, with John McCain as co-sponsor. Congress passed it on the 31st of July, and President Obama signed it on the 7th of August 2014.

  In 2018, Sanders joined Chris Murphy and Mike Lee to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution and end US support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. After the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, the Senate passed the bill 56-41. The House passed it 247-175 in February 2019, and in March President Trump vetoed it. In June 2017 Sanders and Rand Paul were the only senators to oppose new sanctions on Russia and Iran. Sanders supported the Russia sanctions but feared the bill could endanger the Iran nuclear deal.

  Some of his bills show the ambitions of the movement behind him. In April 2017 he proposed a $15 hourly minimum wage for federal contract workers. In September 2017 he and 15 Senate co-sponsors submitted the Medicare for All bill, a single-payer plan that also covers vision and dental care. Some Republicans labeled it "Berniecare". In May 2018 he introduced the Workplace Democracy Act to make union organizing easier and ban right-to-work laws. In September 2018 he and Ro Khanna introduced the Stop BEZOS Act, making large corporations cover food stamps and Medicaid costs for their own employees. In August 2022 he voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which he called only a small step forward. It capped insulin at $35 a month for Medicare seniors and let Medicare negotiate lower drug prices.

  On immigration his position moved. In 2007 he helped kill a comprehensive reform bill, arguing its guest-worker program would depress wages. In 2013 he supported the Gang of Eight bill after winning a $1.5 billion youth jobs program. He voted against Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and for Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022.

  He has held several chairs, and in 2021 he became chair of the Budget Committee. There he named economist Stephanie Kelton, a scholar of modern monetary theory, as chief economic adviser to the committee's Democratic minority.

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• 7. Small Donors and Overflow Crowds

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  On the 30th of April 2015, Sanders announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for president. He had flirted with a primary challenge to Barack Obama in 2012, and Harry Reid had to intervene to stop him. In November 2013 he said Elizabeth Warren could be president, and that if no progressive ran he might feel compelled to. In December 2014 Warren said she was not running. Sanders launched his campaign on the 26th of May in Burlington. He said he did not believe that those who defended American democracy fought "to create a situation where billionaires own the political process."

  The campaign raised $1.5 million within 24 hours of the announcement. By the end of 2015 it had collected $73 million from more than one million people, across 2.5 million donations averaging $27.16. January 2016 alone brought in $20 million. He refused a Super PAC and donations from corporations and the financial industry. A meetup organized online on the 29th of July 2015 brought 100,000 supporters to more than 3,500 events. In July his Madison, Wisconsin, stop drew an estimated 10,000 people, the largest crowd of any 2016 candidate to that date. Crowds of 11,000 in Phoenix, 15,000 in Seattle and 28,000 in Portland, Oregon, followed.

  Critics said the Democratic National Committee set only six debates, with half on weekend nights, to shield Hillary Clinton. Coverage drew complaints too. The New York Times ombudsman found the paper's tone toward Sanders sometimes dismissive, and counted 63 articles on Donald Trump against 14 on Sanders. A December 2015 report found the three major networks gave Trump 234 minutes and Sanders 10. Later studies found that his coverage tracked his polling, except in 2015, when it exceeded his standing. Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses and about 46 percent of pledged delegates to Clinton's 54 percent.

  In July 2016, leaked DNC emails appeared to show officials favoring Clinton and discussing his irreligion as a possible issue in southern states. Sanders told CNN it was "an outrage and sad" but not a shock to him. On the 12th of July he endorsed Clinton. At the convention on the 25th of July, some supporters booed him, and he answered, "It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency." He then held 39 rallies in 13 states for Clinton. In November, he received almost 6 percent in Vermont as a write-in, the highest statewide share ever for a write-in draft campaign.

  The movement kept building. His book Our Revolution reached number three on the New York Times list in November 2016, and its audiobook earned a Grammy nomination. Former staffers formed Brand New Congress, and in August 2016 he formed Our Revolution. A 2018 opinion piece in The Week claimed that the party was quietly admitting that Sanders was right. In July 2016, Slate had called the Democratic platform draft "a monument to his campaign".

  On the 19th of February 2019, he declared for 2020. On the 5th of March he signed a loyalty pledge affirming Democratic membership, though the day before he had signed papers to run as an independent for Senate in 2024. Faiz Shakir managed the campaign. Within weeks, the email list from 2016 helped recruit more than one million volunteers. In September 2019 the campaign became the fastest in US history to reach one million donors, and in the third quarter it raised $25.3 million with an average gift of $18.

  He took risks to reach new audiences. His town hall on Fox News on the 6th of April 2019 drew more than 2.55 million viewers. On the 6th of August 2019 he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Rogan said afterward that Sanders "made a ton of sense" to him. After his heart attack, he returned for the debate on the 15th of October, and one debate coach gave him an A. By mid-February 2020 he led the polls and was called the front-runner.

  He suspended the campaign on the 8th of April 2020 and endorsed Joe Biden on the 14th. Biden replied that he would need him "not just to win the campaign, but to govern."

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• 8. Defining Democratic Socialism

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  In November 2015, at Georgetown University, Sanders gave a speech to explain what democratic socialism meant to him. He said he did not believe "government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production". Instead, he argued that working families who produce America's wealth deserve a decent standard of living and rising incomes. He placed such ideas inside the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

  Observers still argue about the label. Many commentators say his platform centers on tax-funded social benefits inspired by the Nordic model, not on social ownership. Some socialists have called him a democratic socialist, a market socialist or a reformist socialist, while others call him a reformist social democrat. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara called his approach "class struggle social democracy". Sunkara argued that Sanders treats social democratic demands as a way to sharpen class confrontation and raise class consciousness.

  Sanders attacks what he calls "uber-capitalism", blaming it for declining life expectancy and rising diseases of despair. He supports paid parental leave, sick leave and vacation time, noting that nearly all other developed countries require them. He wants tuition-free public colleges, financed by taxing financial transactions, and the cancellation of all student debt. He also backs a 32-hour work week and lifting the Social Security payroll tax cap on incomes above $250,000.

  His banking ideas are specific. He wants to break up "too big to fail" institutions, restore Glass-Steagall, reform the Federal Reserve and let the Post Office offer basic financial services in marginalized communities. He voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008 and 2009, though on the 4th of February 2009 he won an amendment to keep its funds from displacing US workers. On trade, he voted against and long opposed NAFTA, CAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China, calling them a "disaster for the American worker".

  He treats climate change as a serious problem and the greatest threat to national security. He wants major investment in infrastructure, with energy efficiency, sustainability and job creation as goals. He opposed both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. In 2019 he joined Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer in proposing a declaration of climate emergency, and he backed Green New Deal legislation.

  The public response has been strong, especially at home. In August 2011, Public Policy Polling found his approval at 67 percent with 28 percent disapproving, making him the third-most popular senator. The NAACP and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda have both given him 100 percent voting scores. In November 2015 a Morning Consult poll put his approval at 83 percent in Vermont, and in 2026 the same pollster found 68 percent. In April 2017 a Harvard-Harris poll rated him the most favorable political figure it tested. His campaigns also revived interest in social democracy and democratic socialism among millennials.

  Since Donald Trump's reelection in 2024, Sanders has attacked what he calls a right-wing oligarchy. He has led a tour against Trump and his allies, especially Elon Musk, aiming to reshape the Democratic Party.

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