Sanders is not a natural storyteller; his great political gift is his relentlessness. Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

Bernie Sanders’s Presidential race ended a year ago, but his campaign never did. Since the election, he has staged events in Michigan, Mississippi, Maine, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Montana, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, and Illinois. At every one, he speaks about the suffering of small-town Americans, and his belief that the Democrats can help them. When I caught up with him recently, his shirt was a little untucked, his head hung down, and he carried a printed copy of his remarks. Sanders was catching a late-night flight to Chicago, and was taking a moment to record a message for Snapchat. The central illusion of a Presidential campaign is that a candidate can, through constant motion and boundless energy, meet countless people and, in the end, give voice to the experience of the country. After the election, Sanders seemed to adopt the illusion as an ethos.

Hillary Clinton’s loss gave his efforts a new urgency. The electoral map, with its imposing swaths of red, pointed to a crisis confronting American liberalism. Donald Trump may have lost the popular vote, but, as he likes to point out, he won 2,626 counties to Clinton’s four hundred and eighty-seven. Many of these counties are in states that Sanders won last year, campaigning on a platform of economic populism—Medicare for all, tuition-free college, and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage. Sanders told me that Trump was smart enough to understand that the Democratic Party had turned its back on millions of people: “He said, ‘Hey, I hear you. I’m going to do something for you.’ And he lied.” Sanders, who is seventy-five, may be too old to run again in 2020, but his barnstorming has a purpose—to deepen the connection to progressive ideas in rural America, to develop an attachment that might outlast him. At recent events, one of his biggest applause lines was that the “Republicans did not win the election so much as Democrats lost it.” Progressives do not have much of a foothold in this country. What they have is Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, who has represented Vermont in the Senate for the past decade, and served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 2007, has always had a complicated relationship with the Democrats. He caucuses with them and ran for their Presidential nomination, but he is an Independent. His insistence on separation from the Party may be partly temperamental—though born in Brooklyn, Sanders has the demeanor of a prickly Yankee—but it also reflects his underlying commitments. The word “oligarchy” is important to Sanders, and it gives his statements a messianic tone. Sanders told me, “The message has got to be that we can’t move along towards an oligarchy. We’ve got to revitalize American democracy.”

For decades, Sanders has argued for a single-payer health-care system, and he is getting ready to introduce a “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate. This summer, however, he assigned himself the task of leading the campaign against efforts, by Republicans in the House and the Senate, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On the Sunday after the Fourth of July, as Senate Republicans prepared to release their bill, Sanders took a charter flight from Burlington to West Virginia and Kentucky, for a pair of hastily arranged rallies. He and his staff had chosen states whose Republican senators were pivotal in the health-care debate. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, was shepherding the bill toward a vote without any public hearings. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, and Shelley Moore Capito, of West Virginia, were indicating that they might vote against it.

Sanders talked about the Senate bill’s likely effects in McConnell’s home state. “How do you throw two hundred and thirty thousand people off the health care they have without hesitation?” he asked. “It happens because the Democratic Party is incredibly weak in states like Kentucky. And so he doesn’t have to face the wrath of the voters.” But it wasn’t just the Democrats who were absent in Kentucky, he said; it was also a balanced press. “In many of these conservative states, you get a media that is all right wing.” One purpose of his visit, he said, was to generate local coverage, so that he could explain to ordinary people “what’s in the bloody legislation.”

Sanders’s first stop was in Morgantown, West Virginia; he had been in the state just two weeks earlier. He remembered a tattoo artist who had spoken then, a man who’d had to fight for emergency insurance after he developed testicular cancer, and had become an advocate for single-payer health care. Now an aide asked Sanders backstage if he wanted to speak with Reggie. “Rusty,” Sanders said, correcting the aide. Rusty Williams approached, and Sanders asked him how he was doing. Williams said that he was working less but that the cancer was in remission. Sanders put his hands on Williams’s shoulders and gave him a pep talk: “At least you are healthy. That’s something.”

Morgantown, the home of West Virginia’s largest state university, is a progressive enclave. But classes were not in session, and the room where Sanders’s event was being held, at a Marriott, was small. Before he spoke, Sanders kept asking aides for the crowd count, and how many people were watching the live stream.

Sanders is not a storyteller. His speeches, blunt and workmanlike, depend upon dramatizing social statistics. Before an audience of more than seven hundred people, Sanders said that, if the Republican bill passed, a hundred and twenty-two thousand West Virginians would lose their Medicaid coverage, insurance premiums would double, and seven thousand senior citizens would be unable to pay for their care facilities. “How many seniors now in nursing homes will get thrown out on the street or be forced to live in their children’s basement?” Sanders said. What would happen to the tens of thousands of West Virginians who lost health insurance if they were to get sick? “The horrible and unspeakable answer is that, if this legislation were to pass, many thousands of our fellow-Americans will die.”

Death and despair have been Sanders’s themes since he launched his Presidential campaign. From West Virginia, he headed to Covington, Kentucky, in an area where the opioid epidemic has been particularly devastating. What had gone so badly in people’s lives that they were turning to heroin and opioids? “There is something going on in West Virginia and Kentucky which is unbelievable, which is what sociologists call the illnesses of despair,” Sanders told me. He had been to parts of West Virginia where there were very few jobs, “fewer that pay a living wage,” and there was a steep psychic cost. “There is a lot of pain. And we’ve got to understand that reality. And then tell these people that their problems are not caused by some Mexican making eight dollars an hour picking strawberries.”

Three weeks earlier, a man named James Hodgkinson, who had volunteered on Sanders’s Presidential campaign in Iowa, had tried to assassinate Republican members of Congress as they practiced for an annual baseball game. Sanders, who was in his Senate office that morning, rushed to the floor to condemn the shooting. He believed that it had something to do with what he had been seeing in his travels. “I think there is an enormous amount of anger out there,” he told me in Kentucky. “I think there is an enormous amount of despair. We have got to address that issue, and if we don’t I worry about the future of this country.”

“Don’t stop. I don’t want to talk to you.” Facebook

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Since the election, the Democratic Party has tried to move closer to Sanders’s views. Last week, in a small town in northern Virginia, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, announced the Party’s platform for 2018, “A Better Deal,” which is aimed at winning back working-class voters. The platform includes a fifteen-dollar minimum wage and a trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure, plans that Sanders has long promoted, often with little support. Many people in the Democratic Party believe that, when it comes to policy, Sanders has prevailed. Sanders does not see it that way. He told me, “Do not underestimate the resistance of the Democratic establishment.”