Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico. Manu Raju is senior congressional reporter for Politico.

“You don’t change the system from within the Democratic Party.”

“My own feeling is that the Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt.”


“We have to ask ourselves, ‘Why should we work within the Democratic Party if we don’t agree with anything the Democratic Party says?’”

Bernie Sanders, everybody—the same Bernie Sanders who is running to become the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States.

The most surprising thing about the independent Vermont senator’s surprisingly successful campaign so far is not that he’s doing it as a self-described democratic socialist. It’s that he’s seeking the nomination of a party he caucuses with in the Senate but is not a part of, isn’t a registered member of and has never been a registered member of—a party he’s spent his 40-year career beating at the polls and battering in the press.

He started as a politician in the 1970s as a perennial protest candidate with the anti-Vietnam War Liberty Union Party, offering voters an alternative to the two major parties, which he considered ineffective and equally beholden to corporate lords.

To become mayor of Burlington in 1981, he ousted a veteran centrist Democrat. To build power, his progressive allies in subsequent elections wrested away city council seats, relegating local Democrats to diminished, third-party status. In a series of statewide races in the late ’80s and into the early ’90s, he outdid even that—getting Democrats to all but wave a white flag when he ran.

He has never before chosen to run in a Democratic primary, but here he is, challenging Hillary Clinton—and doing it as an independent, technically permissible but highly unusual. How he’s trying to do this is how he always has—a calculated alchemy of outsider edge and insider smarts, provocation plus pragmatism, all learned and honed over what’s become a unique career in modern American politics.

“He plays it both ways,” said former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, a Democrat who once successfully fended off Sanders from the left in a reelection bid. “He wants to be different, and yet he wants to belong—for political purposes.”

Sanders is nipping at Clinton in the polls, for now—but anybody who wants to, like Clinton, her campaign or its associated machinery, can fill fat files with quotes from Sanders in which he denigrates the Democratic Party whose mantle of legitimacy gives him a stature that unaffiliated candidates rarely enjoy.

“Clearly, it’s something he should answer for,” Democratic former Congressman Barney Frank said.

In an interview with Politico on the Senate subway, Sanders didn’t walk away from his criticism of Democrats—although he insisted he has developed over his long career a strong relationship with the party in Vermont, in Washington and the nation. Asked whether he still believed the party is “ideologically bankrupt,” Sanders answered by not answering the question.

“I think what we have today is, I think, a Republican Party which has moved from a center-right party over the last decades to a right-wing extremist party,” he said, the subway whooshing him from the Capitol to his office. “I think you have a Democratic Party which is not as strong as it should be in standing up for the working class of this country and taking on big-money interests. And that’s been my view for a long time.”

Sanders shut down follow-ups.

“That’s about it,” he said.

***

For Sanders in the ’70s, Liberty Union wasn’t a chance to win—it was an opportunity to talk. And he talked a lot. He said to a reporter for United Press International that both major parties were “cowardly.” In an interview with the Valley Voice of Middlebury, Vermont, he said “there essentially is no difference” between them.

In ’81, when he was elected mayor of Burlington—by 10 votes, after a recount—the city’s Democrats tried to stonewall Sanders.

He had “an enormously contentious relationship” with them, said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), then a state senator.

“Back in those days,” said Maurice Mahoney, the head of the Democratic Party in Burlington in the ’80s, “his goal was to destroy Democrats—certainly on the local level.”

“It was a Democratic town that he basically took from them,” said Bill Conroy, who wrote a dissertation on Sanders’ tenure as mayor.

Said Hamilton Davis, a longtime Vermont reporter and Sanders watcher: “They hated him, and he hated them—unreservedly.”

As the so-called “Sanderistas” who made up a left-wing coalition won more council seats in subsequent elections, the city’s Democrats were forced to change their posture. They had to work with him. “The animosity slowed way down,” said Paul Lafayette, a Democrat on the council. Tensions cooled, somewhat—but not the heat of Sanders’ rhetoric.

“One can argue that the two-party system is a sham,” he said in a talk at Iowa State University during an event called Socialist Week.

“I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal Democrat,” he said in a profile in New England Monthly.

He said that in ’85.

Madeleine Kunin is sworn in by Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Allen at Vermont's Statehouse in Montpelier on Jan 10, 1984. | AP Photo

In ’86, he decided to run for governor, against Kunin, which bothered her—Sanders’ “daily diet consisted of vitriol,” she would write in her memoir—and worried many Vermont Democrats, who thought he might peel away enough votes to foil the reelection bid of the state’s first female governor.

Democrats, Welch recalled, were “extremely upset.”

Sanders responded by intensifying his invective.

“The main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this city,” he said in an interview in Burlington in July with a Cornell student writing a master’s thesis, “is that the Democrats are in insurance and the Republicans are in banking.”

In that summer’s issue of Vermont Affairs magazine, he called the Democratic Party “ideologically bankrupt,” then added: “They have no ideology. Their ideology is opportunism.”

Kunin won. Sanders got only 15 percent of the vote.

From then to the early ’90s, though, as Sanders pushed to become the first independent member of Congress in nearly half a century, his relationship with the Democratic Party in Vermont turned more complicated.

After having reluctantly supported Walter Mondale, the Democrats’ presidential nominee in ’84, because he considered Ronald Reagan’s administration disastrous, he endorsed Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primaries of ’88—even as he, Sanders, ran as an independent. He conceded it was “awkward.” Still, he stressed: “I am not a Democrat, period.” Sanders’ support for Michael Dukakis, the eventual nominee, was so tepid it almost didn’t even qualify. He dubbed Dukakis “the lesser of two evils” as opposed to George H.W. Bush.

In his own race for Congress that year—he was still mayor—Sanders lost, to Republican Peter Smith, but he was emboldened by the fact that he finished second, not third. Sanders, as an independent, got 37 percent of the vote; Paul Poirier, the Democrat, got 19 percent. In any serious analysis of Sanders’ career, this registers as a major moment. It convinced Sanders he didn’t need to become a Democrat to win a statewide election in Vermont. Perhaps more importantly, it convinced Vermont’s voters, too.

Biding time between the ’88 election and the ’90 election, his sights set on another shot at Smith, he lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, taught classes on social democracy and urban sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York—and continued his public bombardment of the Democratic Party.

In an op-ed in the New York Times in January 1989, he called the Democratic and Republican parties “tweedle-dee” and “tweedle-dum,” both adhering in his estimation to an “ideology of greed and vulgarity.”

At the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York City in April 1990, he asked, “Why should we work within the Democratic Party … ?” He said at the gathering he was running for Congress that year again as an independent because it would be “hypocritical” of him to run as a Democrat considering the kinds of things he had said about the party. Also, he pointed out, his self-confidence bordering on braggadocio, “in Vermont now, when you talk about third-party politics, we have a very, very strong third party—it’s called the Democratic Party.” Not that strong—he predicted that his Democratic opponent, Dolores Sandoval, might not get even 5 percent come November.

But he was right. Sandoval couldn’t compete. She had no backing from the state’s Democrats, or organizations that typically would have been on her side—EMILY’s List, the National Organization for Women, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “It was all very odd,” she told Politico. Except it wasn’t. It was practical. Democrats all over the state had reached the point with Sanders that Democrats in Burlington had reached not quite 10 years before. He won them over because he ground them down.

“There was an understanding with the Democrats,” said Hamilton professor Dennis Gilbert, who worked for Sanders’ campaign that year doing polling and writing policy papers. “They realized that if he was running, they couldn’t win.”

“For a lot of Democrats, Bernie was our candidate,” said Poirier, the Democrat who finished behind Sanders in ’88. “By 1990, he had pretty much won the support of most elected Democrats.”

He was their only real option.

Welch endorsed him, he said, “because he had the best chance of winning.”

“He basically expropriated their base of voters,” said Fred Bailey, a Republican city councilman during Sanders’ time as mayor. “They couldn’t out-Bernie Bernie.”

The ’90 race was the beginning of the rest of Sanders’ political life. Smith, the Republican, seeing Sanders’ support swell, got desperate and used debates and ads to hit him for his socialist philosophies and also for his anti-Democratic Party rants. Smith plucked from Vermont Affairs the “ideologically bankrupt” comment. It backfired. People in Vermont recoiled at Smith’s tactics, and Sanders won in a landslide. And Sandoval, the Democrat? She didn’t get 5 percent—she got 3.

It was official. In Vermont, in Sanders’ races, the second major party was … Bernie.

***

“I.”

That letter next to Sanders’ name is more than a political classification. It’s a personal declaration.

He was, when he arrived in Washington, the only one of the 535 members of Congress who didn’t identify as either a Democrat or a Republican.

“I am extremely proud to be an independent,” he told the Associated Press seven months into his congressional career. “The fact that I am not a Democrat gives me the freedom to speak out on the floor of the House, to vote against both the Democratic and Republican proposals.”

The flip side at first was this: “He screams and hollers,” Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) said to the AP at the time, “but he is all alone.” Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) called Sanders “a homeless waif.” Said Rep. Barney Frank, in ’91: “Bernie alienates his natural allies. His holier-than-thou attitude—saying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone else—really undercuts his effectiveness.”

Today, looking back, colleagues in interviews with Politico recalled questions from party elders about whether to allow Sanders to sit on committees. Sanders mentioned as much at a lunch with Senate Democrats last month, telling them it was like wandering around “in the desert” when he first came to the House. While Sanders formally was part of the House Democratic Caucus, said Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who served with Sanders in the House, “he was not really a member of the caucus.”

It eventually worked out when the Democratic speaker, Tom Foley, reached the conclusion that it was better to expand his party’s membership than shrink it. That became even more important in ‘94, when the Newt Gingrich-led Republican takeover meant the Democrats needed every potential vote they could get. Sanders served on committees dealing with financial services issues and government operations, and he was extremely active in pushing amendments on the House floor, periodically teaming up with the likes of libertarian-minded Ron Paul.

“He would often get amendments on the floor—and call them tripartite,” Brown said. “He passed a lot of amendments in a very conservative Congress.”

Sanders spent a decade and a half in the House. He was seldom even challenged by a Democrat in Vermont.

He won the Democratic primary for the 2006 Senate race as a write-in candidate — there was no serious opposition — but he declined to accept the nomination before going on to beat his Republican opponent by 33 percentage points. The Senate was a better fit.

“The Senate,” one of his Democratic friends told Politico, “was the first time he’s ever been part of a Democratic family.”

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, led by New York’s Chuck Schumer, quickly got behind Sanders when he ran, and Nevada’s Harry Reid happily welcomed him to the Senate Democratic Caucus once he won. In December of that year, a month after his election, Ted Kennedy invited Sanders and the rest of the Democrats on the Senate’s Health, Education and Labor and Pensions Committee to an intimate dinner at his Washington home. Also in attendance? Barack Obama. And Hillary Clinton.

This embrace of Sanders was about politics, too: Democrats wanted to increase their numbers, and they needed Sanders to caucus with them to help win back the Senate majority. The move paid off for both sides. Sanders climbed the ladder: In the last Congress, he was the chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee; now, he is the top Democrat on the Budget Committee.

After the 2010 election, Obama cut a deal with the Republicans to extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts, eliciting outrage from the left. Sanders channeled that anger, unleashing an 8½-hour filibuster. He said in the speech many of the things he had been saying since his populist, rusted-Volkswagen Liberty Union days in the ’70s, since political types in Vermont dismissed him as a no-shot gadfly—only now he was doing it on the Senate floor. “This,” he said, his accent immutably Brooklyn, “is a transfer of wealth. It is Robin Hood in reverse. We are taking from the middle class and working families, and we are giving it to the wealthiest people in the country.”

Sanders speaks to reporters about his position on the tax compromise in December 2010 on Capitol Hill in Washington. | AP Photo

Last year, in the midst of the Veterans Affairs scandal, Sanders worked with House and Senate Republicans to overhaul the agency, showing a dose of bipartisanship—something that hasn’t been a dominant part of his legislative repertoire.

He is better known for being mostly an ideological purist from the left—advocating for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all-type health care system, railing against Obama’s trade agenda.

“I think it was success trumped all,” Welch said. “He’s popular with voters. That’s a reality. His popularity really mended fences.”

Even some of his critics acknowledge how close he’s grown to Senate Democrats.

“We are a tight-knit group—we like one another,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who nonetheless is a Clinton supporter, in part because she isn’t sold on Sanders’ eventual “electability.”

One reason analysts and strategists doubt his long-term viability: “democratic socialist.” Another: his record of bashing Democrats. The longer he runs, the better he does, the more the comments will be used to attack him.

In a second interview with Sanders in the Capitol, he talked more with Politico about his relationship, and his tussles, with Democrats.

“By definition, when I was elected mayor of the city of Burlington, I defeated Democrats,” he said with a chuckle. He talked about the importance of the ’88 race. “Since that time, in Vermont, I’ve had a lot of support from the Democrats.

“I was the first independent elected in 40 years, and that caused some confusion,” he continued. “And there were some conservative Democrats who were not enthusiastic about me being in the Democratic Caucus. But that worked itself out over a couple weeks.

“I’ve supported the Democratic candidates for president,” he added. “I think the relationship is pretty positive.”

“I think in many ways he’s become a Democrat in all but name,” said Eric Davis, a political science professor at Vermont’s Middlebury College.

“Even so," said Judy Stephany, a Burlington Democrat who lost to Sanders in the mayoral election of ‘83, “if you want to go back to 1981, ’85, ’87, even the late ’80s, this was not a man who liked either party—nor did he call himself a progressive. He has been very steadfast in maintaining his independence.”

It remains to be seen if or how much that will hurt him in the coming months.

“I think that probably goes against him,” said Rep. Elliot Engel (D-N.Y.), who served with Sanders in the House—and who back in ’96 even advised a Democrat in Burlington not to run against Sanders. But now? “The nominee of the Democratic Party you would think would be a Democrat.” He paused. “In fairness to Bernie, he always caucused with the Democrats. He’s a socialist in name … but in terms of political affiliation, he’s just like any other Democrat.”

Why then, Politico asked, why not just say so? Why not become a Democrat? Especially now.

Sanders wouldn’t say.

“I’m running for the Democratic nomination,” he said. He assured he would meet “all the regulations and requirements.” “I look forward to doing that,” he said. Another non-answer.

The real answer courses through his career. “Ideologically bankrupt …” “You don’t change the system …” “Why should we work …?” Many people, in Washington and Vermont, Sanders supporters and not, say that since his earliest, more radical start, the tenor of his rhetoric has changed. But the essence of his beliefs, the core of who he’s been and who he is—that unapologetic, almost confrontational “I”—has not.

“In real terms,” he told a reporter doing an interview for Playboy, “what the Democratic campaign program is about is: We’re pretty bad, but they’re worse, vote for us. That’s true: We’re pretty bad, but the Republicans are worse, and that’s the reason you should vote for Democrats.”

“I am not a Democrat,” he told the Progressive, “because the Democratic Party does not represent, and has not for many years, the interests of my constituency, which is primarily working families, middle-class people and low-income people.”

Sanders didn’t say those things in the ’70s or the ’80s. He said those things not even two years ago.