Nicole Gaudiano

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — Who would have thought, just over a year ago, that a gruff septuagenarian with unruly hair and democratic socialist views would capture the imaginations of young people and support from more than 13 million voters in a long-shot bid for the presidency?

Bernie Sanders was at least 50 points behind Hillary Clinton in some national polls when he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2015. But his call for a "political revolution" quickly gained momentum on social media, igniting a "feel the Bern" fever that ultimately drew nearly 1.5 million people to his rallies and other events across the country.

Clinton’s nomination may indeed have been inevitable, but Sanders’ surprising star power made it seem much less so.

“He got a tiger by the tail,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, which supported Sanders. “All of a sudden, he emerges on the scene and he became an immediate legend. People didn’t know who he was.”

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Nearly a month after the District of Columbia held the final contest of the 2016 primary season, Sanders will campaign on Tuesday with Clinton in New Hampshire, where he is expected to finally endorse her after weeks of pressure to do so. He has held out on his official backing, using his leverage to advance goals he laid out for his legions of supporters in a live, online address last month.

Among those goals: defeating presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, working with Clinton to "transform" the Democratic Party, and encouraging like-minded progressives to run for public office — from school boards to Congress. Within 24 hours of that appeal, nearly 11,000 of his supporters expressed interest on BernieSanders.com.

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"My hope is that when future historians look back and describe how our country moved forward into reversing the drift toward oligarchy, and created a government which represents all the people and not just the few, they will note that, to a significant degree, that effort began with the political revolution of 2016," Sanders said in his address.

Before last year, Sanders' outrage over the “billionaire class” might have been captured only on C-SPAN and left-leaning news shows. But his presidential run changed that.

Sanders won 22 states and 45% of the pledged delegates, and he consistently led Clinton overwhelmingly among 18-29-year-olds. His campaign drew a record 8.2 million individual contributions from about 2.5 million donors, raising about $228 million largely through fundraising emails to supporters.

He railed against a "rigged economy" and a "corrupt" campaign finance system. And he elevated "yuge" ideas — in a thick Brooklyn accent — long important to progressives, including a $15 minimum wage, breaking up big banks, free public college, Medicare for all, an expansion of Social Security and a carbon tax to aggressively tackle climate change.

Sanders' influence became obvious over the past week, when Clinton proposed expanding access to health care and eliminating college tuition for working families. Many of his priorities also were included in what Sanders says is the most progressive platform in the party's history.

“He ran a campaign from the heart,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show on June 9, after endorsing Clinton. “He took these issues and he really thrust them into the spotlight. And he brought millions of people into the political process.”

Sanders’ ascendancy surprised him as much anyone. When his communications director told him in September that a poll showed him leading Clinton by 10 points in Iowa, Sanders stepped away from the table where he had been sitting with a look of shock, caught his breath and whispered “Jesus.”

“We didn’t have a strategy to win this when we started,” said Tad Devine, one of Sanders’ top strategists. “We were just trying to be competitive. We were trying to be taken seriously.”

As the campaign began to gain on Clinton, the focus changed to winning Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Sanders did win New Hampshire — his vote total there set a record — but Clinton edged him out out in Iowa and defeated him in Nevada. And in South Carolina, the senator from mostly white Vermont couldn’t overcome Clinton’s long-standing support among African Americans. He acknowledged being “decimated” in the state.

“Plan B was, ‘How do we stay alive so that we can have a chance to win this thing?’” Devine said.

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Sanders targeted only five of the 11 states with March 1 nominating contests and won four. A surprise win in Michigan on March 8 and a string of seven victories in other states in late March and early April added to the campaign's momentum. But a path to the nomination already looked mathematically impossible.

In hindsight, Devine said the campaign could have staffed early-voting states sooner and more aggressively. But at the time, raising enough money through small donations seemed to some like an “impossible goal.”

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DeMoro said Sanders may have cost himself opportunities. For example, he spent a lot of time campaigning in the South, even though Clinton’s “firewall” of support among African Americans there was widely acknowledged. And Sanders passed on an easy target by telling the nation during an Oct. 13 debate with Clinton that Americans were sick of hearing about her “damn emails,” a reference to her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

“A normal politician would have taken the easy, low-hanging fruit — the email scandal,” DeMoro said. “He wanted to have a debate on policy.”

But Sanders showed he wasn’t afraid to play hardball.

At campaign rallies, he targeted Clinton’s donations from Wall Street and other special interests, and called on her to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other corporations. Ahead of the New York primary, he alleged that Clinton wasn't qualified to be president — a statement he later walked back — after Clinton declined to say whether she thought Sanders was qualified.

Sanders also spent much of the campaign feuding with the Democratic National Committee and its chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. He and the DNC clashed over the Democratic debate schedule, access to a DNC voter database, and a joint fundraising agreement between the DNC and Clinton. Sanders also attacked Wasserman Schultz for appointing “aggressive attack surrogates” for Clinton as co-chairs of key national convention committees.

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Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and a Sanders surrogate, said there’s always been a sense among Sanders' supporters that the “establishment” — whether it’s the DNC, Clinton or her supporters — sees him as “a cute annoyance that they never expected to come this far.”

“Once he did show his strength, it’s, ‘OK, we’ve got to deal with this’ and the way he’s been dealt with has been unfair,” Turner said in May.

After Wasserman Schultz slammed the way Sanders responded to his supporters’ disruptive behavior at the Nevada Democratic Convention in May, Sanders said she wouldn't be reappointed to chair the DNC if he became president. He also raised money for Wasserman Schultz's primary opponent, Tim Canova, a move that Rep. Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, a Clinton supporter, described as a “really big mistake."

Sanders began to shift fundraising efforts in May to help other progressive candidates for Congress and state-level offices, with more than $2.5 million raised for 21 candidates as of June 20.

"The day that he endorsed me, we raised a quarter-of-a-million (dollars) in one day, and in a little over five months, we raised over $2 million," said Canova, a law professor. "It did give us a boost. I get endorsed by Bernie and immediately I’m on MSNBC, and CNN and Fox."

On June 14, the day the District of Columbia held its primary, Sanders called for new leadership at the DNC as part of a "fundamental transformation" of the party. He also called for open primaries in which independents could vote for Democrats and for doing away with superdelegates, the party leaders and elected officials who can vote for the candidate of their choice at the convention — and who backed Clinton by a huge margin.

Senate Democrats gave him a warm welcome and standing ovation that day, when he spoke behind closed doors to his colleagues at their weekly luncheon, according to those who attended.

“Bernie is going to be good for the party,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said after his June 9 meeting with Sanders. “I’m confident he will be a good campaigner for Democratic senators and for the Democratic nominee.”

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