Bernie Sanders
Bernard Sanders is an American politician and activist serving as the senior United States senator from Vermont, a seat he has held since 2007. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, but maintains a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career and sought the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. Ideologically a democratic socialist, Sanders is regarded as one of the main leaders of the modern American progressive movement.
Born into a working-class Jewish family and raised in New York, Sanders attended Brooklyn College before graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student, he was a protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. After settling in Vermont in 1968, he ran unsuccessful third-party political campaigns in the 1970s. He was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 as an independent and was reelected three times.
Sanders was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, representing Vermont's at-large congressional district. In 1991, he and five other House members co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Sanders was a U.S. representative for 16 years before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006, becoming the first non-Republican elected to Vermont's Class 1 seat since Solomon Foot, a Whig, in 1850. Sanders was reelected in 2012, 2018, and 2024. He chaired the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee from 2013 to 2015, the Senate Budget Committee from 2021 to 2023, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee from 2023 to 2025. He is the senior senator and dean of the Vermont congressional delegation.
Sanders was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, finishing second both times. His 2016 campaign generated significant grassroots enthusiasm and funding from small-dollar donors, helping him win 23 primaries and caucuses. In 2020, his strong showing in early primaries and caucuses made him the front-runner in a large field of Democratic candidates. He became a close ally of Joe Biden after the 2020 primaries. Since Donald Trump's reelection as president in 2024, Sanders has vocally opposed Trump's administration and perceived corruption as what he calls a right-wing oligarchy, rallying an organization tour against Trump and his allies, especially Elon Musk, in an effort to reshape the Democratic Party.
Sanders is credited with influencing a leftward shift in the Democratic Party after his 2016 campaign. An advocate of progressive policies, he opposes neoliberalism and supports workers' self-management. He supports universal and single-payer healthcare, paid parental leave, tuition-free tertiary education, a Green New Deal, and worker control of production through cooperatives, unions, and democratic public enterprises. On foreign policy, he supports reducing military spending, more diplomacy and international cooperation, and greater emphasis on labor rights and environmental concerns in negotiating international trade agreements. Sanders supports workplace democracy and has praised elements of the Nordic model.
Early life
Bernard Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, was born in Słopnice, a town in Austrian Galicia that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now in Poland. Elias Sanders immigrated to the United States in 1921 and became a paint salesman. Bernie's mother, Dorothy Sanders, was born in New York City. He is the younger brother of Larry Sanders.Sanders says he became interested in politics at an early age due to his family background. In the 1940s, many of his relatives in German-occupied Poland were murdered in the Holocaust.
Sanders lived in Midwood, Brooklyn. He attended elementary school at P.S. 197, where he won a borough championship on the basketball team. He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954. His older brother Larry said that during their childhood, the family never lacked food or clothing, but major purchases, "like curtains or a rug", were not affordable.
Sanders attended James Madison High School, where he was captain of the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race. In high school, he lost his first election, finishing last of three candidates for the student body presidency with a campaign that focused on aiding Korean War orphans. Despite the loss, he became active in his school's fundraising activities for Korean orphans, including organizing a charity basketball game. Sanders attended high school with economist Walter Block. When he was 19, his mother died at age 47. His father died two years later, in 1962, at age 57.
Sanders studied at Brooklyn College for a year in 1959–1960 before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1964. In later interviews, Sanders described himself as a mediocre college student because the classroom was "boring and irrelevant" and said he viewed community activism as more important to his education.
Early career
Political activism
Sanders later described his time in Chicago as "the major period of intellectual ferment in my life." While there, he joined the Young People's Socialist League and was active in the civil rights movement as a student for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Under his chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of the SNCC. In January 1962, he went to a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle's segregated campus housing policy. At the protest, Sanders said, "We feel it is an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments." 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. After further protests, the University of Chicago ended racial segregation in private university housing in the summer of 1963.Joan Mahoney, a member of the University of Chicago CORE chapter at the time and a fellow participant in the sit-ins, described Sanders 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." Sanders once spent a day putting up fliers protesting police brutality, only to notice later that Chicago police had shadowed him and taken them all down. He attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. That summer, Sanders was fined $25 for resisting arrest during a demonstration in Englewood against segregation in Chicago's public schools.
In addition to his civil rights activism during the 1960s and 1970s, Sanders was active in several peace and antiwar movements while attending the University of Chicago, becoming a member of the Student Peace Union. He applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War; his application was eventually turned down, by which point he was too old to be drafted. Although he opposed the war, Sanders never criticized those who fought in it and has strongly supported veterans' benefits throughout his political career. He was briefly an organizer with the United Packinghouse Workers of America while in Chicago. He also worked on the reelection campaign of Leon Despres, a prominent Chicago alderman who opposed then-mayor Richard J. Daley's Democratic Party machine. Sanders said that he spent much of his student years reading history, sociology, psychology, and the works of political authors, from Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Erich Fromm—"reading everything except what I was supposed to read for class the next day."
Professional history and early years in Vermont
After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he worked various jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter. In 1968, he moved to Stannard, Vermont, a town small in both area and population within Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom region, because he had been "captivated by rural life". While there, he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, and writer who created and sold "radical film strips" and other educational materials to schools. He also wrote several articles for the alternative publication The Vermont Freeman. One article later gained considerable notability as Sanders began it with an explicit and fraught sexual fantasy reference, which—45 years later, after he had become famous—was discovered and widely reported. He lived in the area for several years before moving to the more populous Chittenden County in the mid-1970s. During his 2018 reelection campaign, he returned to the town to hold an event with voters and other candidates.Liberty Union campaigns
From 1969 to 1971, Sanders resided in Montpelier. After moving to Burlington, he began his electoral political career as a member of the Liberty Union Party, a national umbrella party for various socialist-oriented state parties, originating in the anti-war movement and the People's Party. He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976 and as a candidate in the special election for U.S. senator in 1972 and in the general election in 1974. In the 1974 senatorial race, he finished third, behind 34-year-old Chittenden County state's attorney Patrick Leahy and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary.In 1971, while researching an article for Liberty Union's newspaper Movement, Sanders stayed at Myrtle Hill Farm, a Vermont back to the land commune. He was asked to leave after three days for failing to contribute physical labor expected of all members. Some residents complained that Sanders spent his time engaging others in political discussions, distracting them from their work, with one member claiming the only way "any work was going to get accomplished" was if people were pulled out of Sanders's orbit.
The 1976 campaign was the zenith of the Liberty Union's influence, with Sanders collecting 11,317 votes for governor and the party. His strong performance forced the down-ballot races for lieutenant governor and secretary of state to be decided by the state legislature when its vote total prevented either the Republican or Democratic candidate for those offices from garnering a majority of votes. But the campaign drained the Liberty Union's finances and energy, and in October 1977, Sanders and the Liberty Union candidate for attorney general, Nancy Kaufman, announced their retirement from the party. During the 1980 presidential election, Sanders was one of three electors for the Socialist Workers Party in Vermont.
After resigning from the Liberty Union Party in 1977, Sanders worked as a writer and as the director of the nonprofit American People's Historical Society. While with the APHS, he produced a 30-minute documentary about American labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president five times as the Socialist Party candidate. On October 25, 2025, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation gave Sanders its namesake award, first given to John L. Lewis in 1965.