Bernie Sanders

His father sold paint and had come in 1921 from a Polish town whose Jewish families were later murdered, relatives among them. His mother died at 47, when Sanders was 19. Midwood in the 1950s meant a rent-controlled apartment where curtains or a rug counted as a decision, and he has been giving the same account of that arithmetic ever since. He captained the track team at James Madison High School, took third in a citywide indoor mile, and lost his first election, for student body president. At the University of Chicago he joined the Young People's Socialist League, sat in against segregated campus housing in January 1962, went to the March on Washington, and was fined 25 dollars for resisting arrest at a Chicago protest in 1963.

Vermont took him in 1968, a town of 88 people in the Northeast Kingdom, and he did carpentry, wrote, and made filmstrips for schools while losing statewide races on the Liberty Union ticket through the 1970s, once finishing third with four percent. In 1981 Burlington elected him mayor by 10 votes and he held the office eight years. He won Vermont's House seat in 1990, the first independent elected to that chamber since 1952, co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, moved to the Senate in 2006 and has been returned three times. He spoke for eight hours and 34 minutes against extending the Bush tax rates in December 2010. He has chaired the veterans, budget and health committees, and introduced a single-payer Medicare for All bill in 2017.

He has caucused with the Democrats since 1991 without joining them, and in March 2019 he signed a party loyalty pledge affirming that he was a Democrat one day after filing to run again as an independent for his Senate seat. In 2016 he carried 23 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates, and leaked emails then showed Democratic National Committee officials working against him, one of them weighing whether his lack of religion could be used in the South. He endorsed Hillary Clinton anyway and held 39 rallies for her. The scourge of billionaires owns three houses. On October 1, 2019, at 78, he had chest pain in Las Vegas and two stents put in, and his campaign waited two more days to call it a heart attack.

None of this is settled, and he is still in the Senate. What can be measured is the movement of the argument. Single-payer health care was a fringe position in Democratic politics in 2015 and by 2020 most of the primary field carried some version of it, along with a 15-dollar minimum wage and free public college, and analysts credit his first campaign with pulling the party platform toward him. He was reelected in 2024 and has said this term is likely his last. He spent 2025 and 2026 touring against what he calls oligarchy, and Vermont still polls him as the most popular senator in the country.

Bernie Sanders's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Eugene V. Debs film
  A 30-minute documentary he produced for the American People's Historical Society 1979
• We Shall Overcome album
  A folk record cut with 30 Vermont musicians while he was mayor of Burlington 1987
• Congressional Progressive Caucus company
  Co-founded in his first House term and chaired for eight years 1991
• Veterans' Access to Care Act law
  Written with John McCain and signed in August 2014 2014
• Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In book
  The campaign memoir, a New York Times bestseller 2016
• Medicare for All Act other
  The single-payer bill, introduced with 15 Senate co-sponsors 2017

• September 8, 1941 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn to a Polish-Jewish paint salesman
• January 1962 aged 20 Sits in against segregated housing at the University of Chicago The university ended racial segregation in its private housing by the summer of 1963.
• 1968 aged ~27 Moves to Stannard, Vermont, population 88 He worked as a carpenter, writer and filmstrip maker.
• 1974 aged ~33 Finishes third in a Senate race with 5,901 votes Four percent, on the Liberty Union ticket.
• March 1981 aged 39 Elected mayor of Burlington by 10 votes He spent about 4,000 dollars on the campaign.
• November 1990 aged 49 Wins Vermont's seat in the House of Representatives The first independent elected to the House since 1952.
• November 2006 aged 65 Elected to the United States Senate
• December 10, 2010 aged 69 Holds the Senate floor for eight hours and 34 minutes Against extending the Bush-era tax rates. The bill passed anyway.
• April 30, 2015 aged 73 Announces his first run for president The average donation to that campaign was 27.16 dollars.
• October 1, 2019 aged 78 Has a heart attack while campaigning in Las Vegas Two stents. He said afterward that he had felt it coming for a month or two.
• 2024 aged ~83 Reelected to a fourth Senate term, which he has said is likely his last

• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. made a documentary about him
• Hillary Clinton b. 1947
  First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State, and first woman to win a major party's presidential nomination. lost the 2016 nomination to
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. campaigned for him in 2006
• Joe Biden b. 1942
  46th president who enacted major infrastructure and climate legislation after decades in the Senate and vice presidency. rival turned ally after 2020
• Noam Chomsky b. 1928
  Linguist and political activist whose theories revolutionized the study of language and cognitive science. hosted him in Burlington in 1985
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. opposed