Larry Sanders Illustration by João Fazenda

Next month, American expatriates all over the world will vote in the Democrats Abroad primary, which awards delegates to the Democratic National Convention. In 2016, Bernie Sanders won the expat vote handily, snapping up nine delegates to Hillary Clinton’s four. At that year’s convention, in Philadelphia, the last delegate to cast his vote for Bernie was also the candidate’s brother, Larry Sanders, who has lived in England for the past five decades. He travelled back home to pledge his support. “It is with enormous pride that I cast my vote for Bernie Sanders,” Larry announced, choking up, and using the nickname for his little brother, whom he usually calls Bernard.

“In the back of my mind, I knew it was such a long shot,” Larry said, last week, of his brother’s prospects in 2016. “His whole weakness amongst people of color was obvious. He hoped to shift it, but it was going to be very difficult.” Larry was sitting in his kitchen, in Oxford, wearing a navy cardigan, gray slacks, and socks under his sandals. He is six years older than Bernie. (The two look similar and sound almost the same, but Larry’s hair is gray.) Larry is also a socialist politician; for eight years, until he retired, in 2013, he represented East Oxford as a county councillor for the Green Party, which, in 2016, appointed him its health spokesperson.

Larry lives on a quiet side street by the Kidneys, a nature reserve about a mile from Oxford’s city center. Apple and quince trees grow in his back yard, dropping fruit at the foot of a slide that he installed for his grandchildren. Larry was headed to London the next day, to host an event on behalf of his brother’s campaign. “The situation is much different now,” he said. “His odds of winning are so much better.” He had printed out several articles to review, including an op-ed from the Boston Globe praising the “realism” of Bernie’s climate plan. The house was strewn with campaign paraphernalia: a “Join-the-Action” figure, a sticker depicting Bernie as a character from “Sesame Street,” and a poster bearing his slogan, “Not Me. Us.” In the living room were flyers for next month’s Democrats Abroad primary. (Americans can participate if they abstain from sending in state absentee ballots.) “I had no idea this existed until four years ago,” Larry said. Before 2016, he hadn’t voted since leaving the United States, in the sixties, when he followed his first wife abroad.

The Sanders brothers grew up in Brooklyn in the forties and fifties, playing stickball and attending Dodgers games when they could afford it. (A bleacher seat cost sixty cents.) When Bernie was in high school, he ran for student-body president on a platform that promised to raise scholarship funds for orphans of the Korean War. “He finished third, out of three,” Larry said. But his policy was adopted by the school.

Larry describes his brother as a bit of a workaholic. The last time Bernie visited England was a couple of years ago, to promote a book. He wasn’t interested in touring Oxford’s historic sites. When Larry took him to Blenheim Palace, Bernie remarked on the plight of the workers who had built it. “The buildings, they didn’t impress him,” Larry said. “He was impressed by the number of people who must have slogged their guts out digging the pool.” Bernie’s only wish was to see the track on Iffley Road where, in 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile. “Bernard was amazed by that,” Larry said, adding that his brother was a star on the James Madison High School track-and-field team. “Four-thirty-seven,” Larry said, citing Bernie’s mile time.

As a child, Bernie was known for blurting out, at school, details about the family “that we would prefer not to be public,” Larry said. “He had the idea that you really had to tell the truth. I had to have a long talk with him—it’s right not to lie, but you do not have to tell the truth all the time.” This honesty, Larry suggested, has both fortified his brother’s support and stoked his opposition: “He lost elections. He didn’t give up. He took abuse.” Of Trump, Larry added, “Bernard will bash him.”

The brothers are still close. They used to speak on the phone every two weeks, but the rigors of the campaign have reduced their communication mainly to e-mails. In a recent message to Bernie, Larry mentioned an upcoming campaign event in France. “I told him that, because of him, I had to go to Paris,” Larry said. “ ‘See how much I do!’ ”

The next evening, in London, Larry’s Bernie event was sold out. A hundred people gathered in the basement of a trade-union headquarters. Some wore T-shirts with the slogan “Our Revolution Abroad.” The results from the Iowa caucuses were supposed to have been reported that morning, but technical problems had delayed the announcement. Larry chalked it up to “cock-up, rather than conspiracy.” In a gentle voice, he reminded the audience members of their voting power. “We are like a small state,” he said of the Democrats Abroad primary, which, in 2016, elected one delegate fewer than Wyoming. Of the D.N.C. Convention, he said, “I think things will happen on the floor—good things and bad things—but it is going to be nip and tuck.” He plans to attend again this year. “Bernard is not a big crier,” he said. “But I am.” ♦