His campaign was appealing for its unconventional vibe, but it was his message about the economic injustices of modern America that resonated with millions

“He thinks he’s running for mayor of America,” whispered an exasperated campaign aide as Bernie Sanders attempted to slip quietly into a well-known Chicago diner for breakfast.

The morning of the Illinois primary in March was pregnant with anticipation, one of the several moments in the past 14 months when the presidency of the United States was conceivably up for grabs. The night before, thousands of euphoric supporters had shaken the fabric of the city’s Auditorium Theatre with their stomping and cheers. Yet, here the former of mayor of Burlington was doing his best Larry David impersonation, awkwardly curbing the enthusiasm of those around him by trying to make as little fuss as possible about eating an omelette in front of a dozen cameras.

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Gruff and avuncular, Sanders inspires affection and respect among those who work for him – but, occasionally, frustration too. The breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s was intended as a photo opportunity, designed to show their candidate chatting with “ordinary” people and indulging in the sort of retail political theatre that the Clintons, Bushes and Barack Obama have made an indispensable hallmark of power.

When Sanders chose instead to walk briskly to his table and get on with his eggs, it summed up why millions of voters were drawn to him: despite, and often, due to this lack of polish, they were attracted to the campaign of a cranky old man who many had barely heard of previously, who was unafraid to describe himself as a democratic socialist and who, most of all, refused to play by the rules.

Over the course of this unlikely campaign, I covered more than 50 Sanders events for the Guardian. It was a only a fraction of the several hundred rallies that this 74-year-old and his wife Jane clocked up, but it was enough to encounter a remarkably consistent explanation for his ultimate victory in 22 states as he fought Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. Many voters were excited about someone willing to rail against an economic and political system that was rigged against them and unafraid of dreaming big about an alternative vision of America. But all of them, critics included, were agreed that here was a rare breed in public life: an authentic.

Eventually, Sanders himself began to realise there was power in this anti-charisma. During walkabouts in New York and California – like Illinois, two more primaries where expectations of Sanders’ performance briefly ran far ahead of the eventual reality – a political rock star began to look comfortable with his fame. The adulation he received from fans during all those packed rallies helps partly explain why he was reluctant to let it go, long after those around him had privately conceded the delegate arithmetic was insurmountable. But another factor was that he had only just gotten used to the idea that he stood a chance at all.

On a cold February night in Iowa, the unthinkable became thinkable. After a stunning start to a presidential primary season that would soon smash all the conventional rules, Sanders finally began believing he could become the first self-proclaimed socialist in the White House.

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Earlier that evening, the independent senator from Vermont had held Hillary Clinton tantalizingly close to a tie in the Iowa caucuses. As a presidential candidate, she was deemed so inevitable that few serious Democrats even considered running against her for the party’s nomination. Yet the former secretary of state and first lady came within a few votes of losing her first encounter with the unpredictable 2016 electorate. This time it was not the charismatic Barack Obama rewriting the script, but an even more unknown outsider who was promising, and now threatening to deliver, a political revolution.

More election earthquakes were to follow. Within a week, Sanders would win New Hampshire by a record landslide. Soon after that, he would defy a 20-point deficit in opinion polls to take the primary in Michigan too. A string of successive victories in states out west would lead to dreams of even pulling off an upset in California.

There were many more moments where it became clear it was not to be. The loss in California was the last, a similar rout in New York perhaps the most painful, but the most important was Clinton’s sweep of southern states on Super Tuesday, which gave her a delegate lead that was never again seriously challenged.

Nonetheless, Clinton’s 56-point average lead in national opinion polls when they began competing briefly shrunk to a gap of just a single point a year later. A tame finch landed on his podium, and Bernie became “Birdie” to his supporters in a fairytale that beguiled a supposedly jaded generation. Even the pope seemed to be on board.



Sadly for those hoping for a Disney ending, near misses are not the same as wins. Though Sanders heads to July’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia with a thousand delegates more than anyone ever imagined he would when his campaign began, the outcome of his final clash with Clinton is no longer in any doubt. Campaign insiders say he will press instead in Philly for movement on policy: minimum wage increases, family and medical leave, trade deals and student debt.

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But that is just the start. The bigger question is where his movement goes next now its figurehead has made clear he is no longer actively challenging Clinton’s candidacy. What does it mean for the future of Democratic politics that this irascible folk hero won the youth vote by staggering margins? What has gone so wrong with the American dream to draw millions of supporters toward his uncompromising attacks on Wall Street and Washington corruption? Can the high hopes for universal healthcare, access to higher education and economic justice that he gave voice to ever be ignored so easily again?

• • •

The private jet that propelled Sanders out of Des Moines on the night of the Iowa caucus on 1 February was heading into uncharted territory. On board the ageing Boeing 737, the candidate and his wife, Jane, were joined by euphoric young aides and a crew of more grizzled advisers who were about to rewrite the rules of political battle for the digital age. Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, had come out of retirement, running a comic book store in the DC suburbs, and was fast on his way to becoming the team’s pugnacious attack dog. A once slick advertising consultant called Tad Devine was preparing to flood the airwaves with commercials paid for by a deluge of small campaign contributions. Old-school newspaperman Michael Briggs was picked to manage an incoming onslaught of hostile new media attention.

The half-dozen reporters who had followed the campaign from obscure beginnings 10 months earlier had finally mushroomed into an excited crop of political journalists sensing that history was being made, but they were definitely not “feeling the Bern” like those at the front of the plane. In contrast to the packed supporter rallies and online buzz, the more conservative-minded pundits who make up Washington’s media class had correctly anticipated the myriad flaws in Sanders’ plan. Where were the African American supporters needed to compete with Clinton in the south and secure more diverse cities such as New York or Chicago? What would Sanders do in states that did not allow independent voters to join more skeptical registered Democrats in the selection process? How would a fabulously grumpy septuagenarian cope with the humiliating demands of retail politics or win over allies in a party he had spent his career turning his back on?

Few of the staff on board had time to consider these daunting longer-term practicalities back in February. The pilot who welcomed everyone aboard the “Bernie Express” was rushing to stay ahead of an incoming snowstorm that was due to shut down Des Moines airport for days. The packed plane was also jostling for a position on the runway with aircraft belonging to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Clinton, who were anxious to reach New Hampshire before dawn so they too could begin the next phase of the campaign by declaring victory on breakfast television.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sanders acknowledging the crowd at the Des Moines Holiday Inn on 1 February. Photograph: Joshua Lott/Getty Images

With the blizzard looming, a drawn-out finish in Iowa threatened to wreck all the Sanders campaign’s careful scheduling. Bernie and Jane had been stuck in their hotel suite at the nearby Holiday Inn for several hours, watching the results slowly come in. Early figures initially suggested a narrow but comfortable win for Clinton, so she had already emerged to reassure her supporters across town. “I stand here tonight breathing a big sigh of relief,” Clinton told them.

In a tradition unique among western democracies, the people of the plains gather with their neighbors everywhere from school halls to grain elevators on an evening that marks the first milestone on the long road to the White House. Under the quirky procedures of the Iowa Democratic party, this involves caucus-goers voting in public by raising their hands and seeking to persuade waverers to come over to their side.

But no amount of persuasion could settle the debate between two evenly matched groups of supporters with such diametrically opposing views about what their candidate for president should look like. At one local high school hosting caucuses that night, the confusion was palpable. After several rounds of mostly polite voting, Sanders was ahead by 69 to 68 votes, but the precinct chairman sparked anger by attempting to award an even number of delegates to both candidates rather than the one extra delegate Sanders supporters believed they deserved. After a phone call to party headquarters he relented. Elsewhere a series of straight numeric ties had to be decided by the tossing of coins.

Across the state, Clinton’s ultimate margin of victory – 49.9% to 49.6% – was just wide enough that the coin tosses in her favor were not the only decisive factor. Yet it was a narrow enough win that her celebration party earlier in the evening would quickly look premature. The conspiracy theories among Sanders supporters would run for weeks. Even by the time both camps were boarding their planes and competing for takeoff slots after midnight, the Associated Press news agency was issuing a warning that it could not project a winner because it was still too close to call.

• • •

Iowa ought not to matter. Despite the supposed momentum it confers on candidates hoping for a long journey to larger states, the number of delegates on offer is trivial in the context of the numbers needed to win before the candidates reach the national conventions in the summer. But all the candidates in both parties had been calling this state home for months, criss-crossing its backroads in a dry run for the national campaign that lay ahead. In contrast to its reputation for conservative political monoculture, the run-down industrial towns in the east of the state were to provide a vital nursery bed for Sanders’ radical ideas of social and economic equality. From the back of the senator’s cramped personal tour bus, the view of the cornfields was increasingly blotted out by large, excited crowds.

The message that drew these supporters to Sanders was not a new one. He had been making the case for political revolution in Washington for decades. The difference was that as a young activist in Chicago, then as mayor of Burlington, US congressman and eventually the junior senator for Vermont, no one had paid the blindest bit of attention.

When he first started hinting he might run for president, it was met with much the same response. Progressives on the left of the party had been holding out for a declaration from the more promising Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. But as the “draft Warren” movement hit the unavoidable truth that she was not interested in taking on the seemingly unbeatable Clinton machine, Sanders defied the skepticism of those around him to propose what looked like an even wilder moonshot of his own.

Just how forlorn this effort appeared at the time was made clear at a hastily arranged press conference on Capitol Hill to announce the Sanders candidacy on 30 April 2015. He had been driven outside to a patch of grass known as the Senate swamp by rules banning election campaigning on congressional property. A small group of reporters turned up, but few took the outdoor remarks seriously.

One of the first questions was from a foreign journalist. It was about Sanders’ older brother, Larry, who was about to run in Oxford as a fringe candidate for the Green party in the forthcoming British parliamentary elections. A flustered Bernie forgot to mention he was actually standing for the US presidency at all before striding off, alone, back to his Senate office. Despite subsequently holding a more successful “official” campaign launch on the shores of Lake Champlain in Vermont a few days later, the fumbled Senate swamp announcement was to prove only a taste of the chaos to come.

The political philosophy that he did outline, however, was soon to become a constant refrain not just of his surprisingly successful insurgency but for Clinton too, who saw her centrist platform increasingly pulled to the left in a bid to match the enthusiasm of frustrated liberals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students put up their hands when Bernie Sanders asks them how many have student debt. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

First came the students. In a series of low-key rallies that began in the spring, Sanders started treating the college towns of eastern Iowa to a midwest morality play. Why was it fair that his generation of baby boomers enjoyed relatively low-cost access to higher education but today’s students were saddled with crippling loans? Over time, this evolved into a call-and-response pantomime routine: Sanders would ask audience members to shout out how much college debt they had, and the well-trained crowd would respond with ever more terrifying numbers. Clinton was proposing limited measures to increase affordability, but the Sanders promise to make all public colleges and universities tuition-free proved to be the rallying cry that a hard-pressed generation was waiting for.

A similar resonance emerged when the campaign turned to healthcare. While Barack Obama’s reforms had reduced the number of uninsured in the US, many more remained underinsured: stuck with unaffordable co-payments and deductibles, which meant that medicine and visits to the doctor that fell below a certain threshold would not be reimbursed. Just how debilitating this could be became clear when audience members at rallies would reveal, sometimes in tears, the level of their deductible.

Critics would scoff that the Sanders campaign’s proposal to introduce a Canadian-style system of universal health insurance instead was unworkable and unaffordable in a US context. Nonetheless, the simplicity of his message was to prove a powerful stimulant to voters looking for something more inspiring than the incrementalism of Clinton’s healthcare policy.

Above all, the early Sanders stump speech caught fire by setting out the extent to which the American dream had turned into a nightmare for many middle-class families. With a slew of statistics unheard of in a standard political pep talk, the professorial Sanders would lecture his audience on the extent to which the “millionaires and billionaires” had captured almost all the new income and wealth in the country. Ordinary workers were forced to take on two, sometimes three jobs just to make ends meet, he claimed, while the ruling class had become a virtual oligarchy thanks to a corrupt campaign finance system which discouraged politicians from fixing the problem.

At first, it seemed a shockingly Marxist interpretation to deliver in the spiritual homeland of free-market capitalism. While Sanders and his supporters were often at pains to distance themselves from communism – pointedly describing their political philosophy as “democratic” socialism – here was a remarkably simple message of class warfare that would not have sounded out of place on the barricades of the Bastille.

Nevertheless, in perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the campaign, such language was to become almost commonplace in 2016 American politics. Not only would Sanders go on to repeat this diagnosis to ever larger and angrier audiences, but his rivals began to employ similar language. First the former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley and then Clinton herself would go on to adopt much of the same rhetoric about the “rigged economy” in response to the success of Sanders.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The magnetism of Sanders’ message has been undeniable. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Even Republicans joined in. Though the policy responses offered by Trump and Cruz could not have differed more wildly, their diagnosis of the problem would come to sound eerily familiar. To hear a second-generation real estate billionaire rail against the inequities of an unjust economy might not be as convincing to Democrats as the utterances of someone who grew up in a Brooklyn tenement building, but few could deny the parallels in their message.

While Sanders arguably won the battle of ideas with his relentlessly focused stump speech, the lack of variation and flexibility in deploying this message was a symptom of his manifest handicaps when it came to the battle for votes. Reporters who followed his speeches looking for new lines to freshen up the campaign narrative would come away exasperated at his refusal to introduce even token new soundbites or policies.

For many core supporters, this unwillingness to play by the standard rules of politics and waver from his central message was Sanders’ biggest charm. Yet even campaign staff were driven to distraction by the limitations this placed on his ability to reach out to new voters. Whereas Clinton would carefully tailor each speech to the local audience – talking to supporters in Tampa about the infrastructure needs of their local port, for example – Sanders rarely pandered.

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While the supposedly aloof frontrunner would schedule countless stops at coffee shops and cheesecake stores to shake hands and engage her supporters in small talk for the cameras, the “man of the people” had much more in common with the cantankerous comedy character played by Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

At least the similarities with his fellow misanthrope from Brooklyn provided rare opportunities for self-deprecation. David’s fond mocking of Sanders on Saturday Night Live proved too uncanny an impersonation to ignore. Appearing on the show in a cameo performance just before the New Hampshire primary, Sanders played David playing Sanders with such ease that the characters would blur almost entirely in the minds of many viewers.

This may have helped humanize a candidate whose authenticity was undoubtedly his biggest attraction among voters tired of the overly polished performances from other politicians. While he was eventually persuaded to get a haircut once the media glare intensified, Sanders remained a dishevelled anti-candidate that even his political critics found hard not to like. When Jane would fight her losing battle to brush dandruff from his baggy suits, it would occasionally provoke an irritated glance from her husband, but there was only envy among his opponents at the affection it fostered in the audience.

It was a caricature that Sanders would soon willingly play up to in his speeches too, emphasizing his distinctly New York approach to pronouncing the word “huge”. Yuge, in fact, was to become more than just a catchphrase, but a description that captured much about this larger-than-life phase of the Bernie bubble.

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By the time the campaign reached his birthplace in April, during a New York primary that few had ever expected to still be competitive at this stage of the race, there were signs the Sanders phenomenon had reached its peak.

Audiences of 10,000-20,000 had been commonplace ever since the mega-rallies began taking off over the summer, but in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Sanders was in his element. A record 28,300 people turned up in the sunshine to watch Danny DeVito climb on to a stool to introduce his political hero on 17 April. “I am literally walking away with goosebumps. I feel like I am going to cry,” observed a typical supporter in the crowd, a 36-year-old Long Island makeup artist called Jennifer Wright.

Three days later, the many deficiencies of the campaign caught up and Sanders lost New York by a margin that crushed any remaining hopes of one last turnaround in the race against Clinton for the Democratic nomination. But by then, Sanders was no longer a presidential candidate, rather the leader of a movement.

Whether he could ever have been both will be one of the great “what ifs” of American politics. The established view in Washington is that he never stood a chance, but then this is the same establishment that barely bothered to pay attention at first and has repeatedly misread the anger of the American electorate in 2016 in similarly dismissing Donald Trump’s chances in the Republican primary.

Oddly, its pessimism is shared by those Bernie supporters who blame the system for his loss, arguing that closed primaries and superdelegates were to blame and ignoring his lack of votes in favour of conspiracy theories.

An alternate reading is that victory might have been possible if Sanders had played by the rules. Had he attacked Clinton over her email scandal, for example, rather than dismissing it as irrelevant to the lives of ordinary voters, he might have weakened her sufficiently to tip some of the close contests and build momentum.

Certainly the failure to seriously contest many states in the south, and in particular reach out earlier to African American voters with a specifically tailored message, cost the campaign dozens of delegates that could have made later contests like New York and California look a lot more competitive.

But such strategies could have alienated many voters too. A nakedly partisan attack on Clinton’s emails would have deprived Sanders of the moral high ground he captured on campaign finance, for example. The reason he was slow to focus on race as a campaign theme was that he believed economic inequality was a bigger factor holding back African American voters. Targeting specific racial groups from the start might have been more effective, but it would not have been consistent.

The more realistic hope of Sanders supporters is that he has lit the touchpaper on a political revolution that will be burn slowly but inexorably over several years. By sticking to a very simple but powerful message, Sanders has provided a template for a generation of progressive politicians that suggests it is possible to get elected (and raise millions of dollars) without compromising their beliefs: a truly revolutionary idea.