“My politics are not tied to Bernie Sanders and they are not tied to Joe Biden,” Sanders tells me when I asked her about this seeming contradiction. “I have great respect for Senator Sanders and I have great respect and admiration for Vice President Biden. If I didn’t, I would not be working for him right now. But he does not define me.”

This is a striking statement from a young staffer in a town where status is generally determined by how important your boss is—and your standing with your boss depends on how unquestioned your loyalty is.

It points to Sanders’ unusual status in Washington. It’s common for Democrats to build a career as a political operative and then transition to a role as a political commentator—perhaps while maintaining their work in politics. It’s much rarer to see someone rise through both spheres concurrently.

That might explain why Sanders seeks to separate her politics from her own candidate. “I’ve never agreed 100 percent with anybody I’ve gone to work for,” Sanders says. “Obviously I've disagreed with Vice President Biden.”

There’s also the possibility that this is a kind of loyalty: She’s sending a pro-Biden message to her fellow skeptical progressives, reminding them that ideological purity may, in this case, be less important than waging the most competitive challenge to Trump. Sanders, like the rest of the Biden campaign, is insistent that her candidate is the best one, not because of any single policy issue or a vision of America, but because of Biden’s ability to appeal to two constituencies that the next Democratic nominee is going to need: black voters and the Rust Belt workers who went for Trump in 2016.

After the Bernie Sanders campaign, Symone Sanders carved out a job as a CNN analyst and political commentator. She still appears on TV occasionally, but now the chyron no longer calls her a political analyst.

“When my niece and nephew ask me what I was doing to get Trump out of office, I'm not going to say, 'I was sitting in a fucking studio pontificating about what people are doing on the campaign trail,'” she says. “I'm going to say, 'I was actively out there working.'”

Sanders’ job, in part, is to weave her boss’ decades of shifting political positions and comments into something that feels coherent, and palatable, to Democratic primary voters in the America of 2020. This is not always easy. Before a rally in Philadelphia around the start of Biden’s presidential campaign, Sanders was pressed by CNN’s Victor Blackwell over Biden’s defense of the 1994 crime bill, legislation that progressives say contributed to mass incarceration. Sanders couldn’t directly answer whether Biden now believed the bill contributed to mass incarceration. It was an uncomfortable position for someone who, before serving as Bernie Sanders’ campaign press secretary, was a volunteer for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, a criminal justice reform organization in Washington.

“I am not going to sit here and tell you the crime bill was perfect,” Symone Sanders said, clearly taken aback. “At the end of the day, no one is suggesting what has ravaged communities over the last 20 years does not need to be fixed.”

In backing Biden, Sanders hopes to woo her old ideological confederates—but she has alienated them, too.

For the grassroots Bernie supporters she was aligned with in 2016, Sanders is a textbook example of a political operative who started out in a party’s activist wing only to move away from those roots through advancement. Usually, the enmity is relatively minor.

In the case of Sanders vs. Sanders—Symone and the disciples of Bernie—it’s more extreme. “Bernie acolytes”—as distinguished from what she called mere “Bernie supporters”—have “a particular vitriol” when someone leaves the flock, the Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen tells me.

During the 2016 campaign, Symone was regarded by some Bernie Sanders staffers as more of a hired gun than a true believer. That’s been on public display this cycle. After the second Democratic presidential debate, the one during which Harris body slammed Biden over his past opposition to using busing for school desegregation, Justice Democrats, a group born out of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, spliced together a clip of Symone Sanders tying herself into knots trying to explain Biden’s position with one of Jesse Jackson criticizing Biden for being on the “wrong” side of history.

Co-workers friendly with her on the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign say she was pushed out and was a target of communication director Michael Briggs’ wrath. Briggs declined to talk about Symone Sanders on the record. A top adviser on the 2016 campaign says she was “sidelined” by some other operatives on the campaign. But some Sanders campaign operatives speak highly of Symone Sanders, and she regards the Vermont senator positively now, even as he competes with Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“I think Senator Sanders [and I] had a rapport but we didn’t have a relationship. But perhaps my time wouldn't have been so tough the last go around if in addition to having a relation to [campaign manager] Jeff Weaver I had an actual relationship to Senator Sanders,” she says. “I've built a real relationship with Vice President Biden, and I feel as though if anything were to happen, he would have my back.”

After 2016, Symone Sanders moved over to a number of more establishment roles within the Democratic Party, including working for Priorities USA, the party’s flagship super PAC, an unheard of move for a true Bernie Sanders apostle. It was the equivalent of being born Amish and opting to leave the faith to help run Microsoft.

Still, she acknowledges the allure of the Vermont senator and his policies.

“Why did I go to work for Senator Sanders? Because I liked what he was talking about,” she says.

That’s a notable contrast to her explanation of how she decided to work for Biden—that he seemed like the best candidate to beat Trump.

Even so, it was clear to Guy Cecil, the president of Priorities USA who hired her, that she never quite fit into the Bernie campaign. “She was too Bernie for the Hillary people; she was too Hillary for the Bernie people,” Cecil says. “Frankly, I think one of the biggest mistakes Clinton campaign did was not bringing Symone on. I think she could have been helpful to them in a lot of ways.”