Terri Hallenbeck is a staff writer for the Vermont newsweekly Seven Days, which provides historical coverage and current analysis of Sanders at Berniebeat.com.

As the sun sets Tuesday over Lake Champlain, Bernie Sanders plans to join Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential race during a rally at Burlington’s Waterfront Park filled with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and music from Vermont’s best Cajun band, Mango Jam. It’s an unlikely, long-shot bid for the nation’s highest office—but it’s not entirely Quixotic. “Bernie,” as everyone in this state knows him, has after all made a career out of unlikely, long-shot bids for public office.

And, if Sanders’ presidential bid is going to go anywhere, he’s going to have to do it the way he’s always done it: as the outside candidate, winning over voters one town hall meeting at a time.


Over a forty-year political career, he’s gotten pretty good at it. Bernie Sanders wasn’t even up for reelection in 2014, but at a late October campaign rally last year in small-town Bristol, Vermont, he was clearly the headline act. The incumbent governor and Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and state legislative seats filled the front of the room. But who was the biggest draw to the town hall brunch? Sanders. “Oh god, yeah,” said Bristol resident Suzanne Boyle, who enthusiastically supported his push for universal health care.

The wild-haired, filled-with-outrage Sanders has long had a rock-star status in Vermont that is envy of fellow politicians. And it follows him to the polls. He won 71 percent of the vote in 2012, his most recent election. That’s better than President Barack Obama fared in the state.

In 2006, his first election to the Senate after 16 years in the House, Sanders won every county in the state despite facing off against a self-financed millionaire Republican. He did better than the incumbent governor that year.

The self-described democratic socialist polls well in relatively populous, left-leaning Burlington, where he got his political start as mayor in 1981. But he also does surprisingly well in the so-called Northeast Kingdom, one of the most rural and conservative corners of the state. He’s big with liberals but also with seniors and veterans, farmers and postal workers.

During four decades of politics in Vermont, Sanders has managed to win over a wide array of voters with his unique style. If the presidential campaign he is kicking off Tuesday in Burlington is to gain traction, he will likely have to do it the same way.

“Bernie has really been able to speak for the underdog,” says Garrison Nelson, a political science professor at the University of Vermont who has followed Sanders’ entire career. “They see Bernie as a person who can be their champion.”

Though Sanders was headlining a Democratic campaign rally last fall in Bristol, he has never been elected to office as a Democrat. Congress’ longest-serving independent caucuses in Washington with Democrats, runs in Democratic primaries and campaigns with Vermont Democrats, but he is not one of them.

That showed clearly last week, as Gov. Peter Shumlin, a three-term incumbent Democrat, announced he’s supporting Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. Shumlin joins a long list of the state’s top Democrats to do so: former Govs. Howard Dean and Madeleine Kunin, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger. Only the state’s sole at-large congressman, Democrat Peter Welch, has remained uncommitted.

“Bernie and I are great friends,” Shumlin said last week. “But my belief is that the most qualified candidate running for president who’s going to fight for the middle class and who understands the challenge of foreign policy is Hillary Clinton.”

Sanders is used to being the outsider. Other than a few early unsuccessful elections in which he was part of the liberal, anti-war Liberty Union Party, Sanders has always run his own party. He’s become a master at hosting town hall-style meetings, where his staff serves up a free brunch, lunch or dinner and he adds a heaping spoonful of political theater.

He wins over voters, but not with charm. The gruff 73-year-old, who has never lost his blustery Brooklyn accent, is not the sort of politician who remembers your name, or your kids’ names. He does not linger for idle chatter. He seems far too busy with weighty matters.

Instead, he leaves voters believing they can count on him to bully their bullies, whoever they might be. He stands up for almost everybody but the rich.

It’s been that way from the beginning. Sanders was the underdog running against establishment Democrats in 1981, when he squeezed out a 10-vote win to become mayor of Burlington. One of his tickets to success that year, Nelson said, was that he came out in support of raises for city firefighters and police officers.

“Bernie played the class-conflict card and it paid off,” Nelson says. “That legitimized Bernie as the champion of the working class.”

During eight years as Burlington mayor, Sanders won credit for development projects, including turning the city’s industrial waterfront into a park and Burlington’s pedestrian-friendly downtown shopping district.

Despite success at the Vermont ballot box in recent years, Sanders has had plenty of failures. In the 1970s, Sanders made four feeble attempts at running for governor and Senate. While serving as mayor, he made an unsuccessful bid for governor in 1986, against incumbent Democrat Madeleine Kunin.

In 1988, he fell short again in a run for the state’s lone House seat, finishing second to Republican Peter Smith.

Two years later, persistence paid off. Sanders found support from an unexpected ally after Smith called for an assault weapons ban and lost the backing of the state’s strong gun-rights activists. “They switched to voting for Bernie,” Nelson said.

Sanders went on to vote against the Brady Bill, but has since had a mixed record on gun control and gets an F grade from the National Rifle Association. Still, he maintains strong support in the rural hunting grounds of Vermont.

Despite being an anti-war liberal, Sanders has long received support from Vermont veterans who see him as a champion for their benefits. He can fill rooms with devoted senior citizens who might otherwise never consider voting for a left-winger. The reason: his bulldog defense of Social Security.

At the election rally last fall at which Sanders was both the opening and closing act, he delivered what Americans are now learning is a classic Sanders stump speech. He railed against the Koch brothers, the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and Republicans’ purported attack on the middle class.

“The middle class is struggling. It’s true nationally. It’s true here in Vermont,” Sanders told the crowd. “The Koch brothers have their vision and I have my vision.”

Sanders’ job that day was to get out the vote for a slate of Democratic candidates headed into a low-turnout election. Among those he stumped for was Gov. Shumlin. “Peter Shumlin has stood up time and again and helped make Vermont a leader,” Sanders said as the two stood side by side.

A couple weeks later on Election Day, Shumlin barely eked out a victory over a politically untested and unknown Republican challenger. Without Sanders’ help, Shumlin might not be governor today.

Yet Shumlin—and other top Vermont Democrats—will be noticeably absent from Tuesday’s campaign kickoff for Bernie Sanders. As strong as the support for his presidential run may be among rank-and-file Vermont Democrats, the state’s establishment is unwilling to go out on that limb.

Not even the man who now holds the job with which Sanders began his political career and who runs the city where Sanders will officially start his presidential bid will be standing at Sanders’ side through this new campaign. “Bernie was one of the most effective mayors to serve Burlington,” says Weinberger, the Burlington mayor Sanders also helped get elected in 2012. But Weinberger explains, “I carefully considered the candidates for president, both announced and unannounced, and decided that Hillary Clinton is the right person at the right time to effectively lead our country forward.”