For part two of our series on Democratic presidential candidates, we told the story of how Bernie Sanders learned to wield political power — not in the Senate or on the national stage, but in the town of Burlington, Vermont, all the way back in 1981.

He was a candidate for mayor, and, until then, had been a political failure in every race he’d run. But this time, he struck upon a winning strategy: finding people who had written off politics, talking to them in new ways and inspiring them to create a movement.

It’s the same strategy he has used ever since, with remarkable success.

To tell the story, we turned to our colleague Alex Burns, a “Daily” regular, who spent months investigating Sanders’s mayoral run. As with all our candidate profiles — including the one you heard last week with Pete Buttigieg and the episodes to come — the process began in our studio with a reporter interview that created the journalistic scaffolding for the episode.

At that point, we had no idea whether Sanders would agree to let us interview him, so we made sure Alex told us the entire story from start to finish.