Path to Power
Born in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, Sanders is the son of a Polish paint salesman who provided his family with a steady but limited income. The financial struggles faced by his family heavily shaped his political views.
Sanders enrolled at Brooklyn College after graduating from high school but transferred to the University of Chicago after a year. He graduated in 1964 and that same year purchased land in Middlesex, Vt., with his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders,.
In between college and moving to Vermont, Sanders spent time living in an Israeli kibbutz, another experience that shaped his political views. "What I learned . . . is that you could have a community in which the people themselves actually owned the community," Sanders said. "Seeing that type of relationship exist, and the fact that these units in the kibbutz were working well economically, made a strong impact on me.”
Sanders worked as a carpenter after he moved to Vermont and made his first run for political office in 1972, when he ran for the U.S. Senate as a member of the socialist Liberty Union Party. He received only 2 percent of the vote. Sanders ran for elective offices three more times as a Liberty Union candidate, never winning more than six percent of the vote.
Running as an Independent
In 1981, Sanders finally found political success as an Independent, when he defeated the Democrat incumbent by 10 votes to become the mayor of Burlington. He won reelection three times. In 1988, Sanders ran for Congress against Republican Peter Smith, who defeated him, 41 percent to 38 percent. Democrat Paul Poirier received 18 percent of the vote. Two years later, Sanders capitalized on Smith’s support for the ban on semiautomatic weapons and, with the help of the National Rifle Association,, defeated the incumbent, becoming only the third Socialist elected to the House.
When he arrived in Congress, Democrats reluctantly accepted him into their caucus after a campaign that saw him liberally lob insults at the party. Sanders’ brusque style earned him the condemnation of such powerful and respected liberal Democrats as Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), who said Sanders “offends just about everyone.” Although he caucused with the Democrats, they ran candidates against him each time he came up for re-election with the exception of 1994. He won every time..
Sanders has amassed a staunchly liberal voting record and gets a 99 percent legislative score from the AFL-CIO. He also formed the House Progressive Caucus, which he chaired for its first eight years. The group has grown to include 75 members and has been led by such progressives as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.).
At two points during his tenure in the House, Sanders considered and then rejected a run for the Senate against then-Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords. In 2001 Jeffords left the Republican party and became an Independent in name and Democrat in practice, making a challenge from Sanders impractical. In 2005 Jeffords announced he would not seek another term in the Senate. That opened the door for Sanders, who said he would neither accept nor seek the Democratic nomination. Still, Democrats listed him on the primary ballot and he ran away with 94 percent of the vote. Sanders declined the nomination and petitioned the state to list him as an independent.
Sanders’ Republican opponent was businessman Richard Tarrant, not Gov. Jim Douglas, who was thought to be the strongest possible challenger. Tarrant,,spent $7.3 million of his own money in the race and sought to portray Sanders as an ineffective radical. The strategy failed as Sanders was elected to the Senate by a 33 percent margin. Upon winning, Sanders pledged to take the fight he’d been waging in the House to the Senate. "The people of Vermont have told America that they are sick and tired of right-wing extremism," he said in his victory speech. "President Bush and Vice President Cheney, this state is going to move America in a very different direction."
Sanders remains a member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate and sits on the Budget, Energy and Natural Resources, Veterans’ Affairs and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees.
