Bernie Sanders bested Hillary Clinton Tuesday night in the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire.
In doing so, he became the first Jewish candidate and first self-described “democratic socialist” to win a major-party presidential nominating contest.
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Sanders overcame a 40-percentage-point deficit when he entered the race in the spring to take a lead in the polls in the Granite State.
In the intervening months, the 74-year-old Vermont senator grew from something of a cult figure among liberals to the standard-bearer of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Along the way, Sanders hardly broke from a narrow message that blamed Wall Street and unchecked campaign donations for much of the nation’s woes. He also did little to change his image of unkempt white hair and rumpled suits — despite being a disciplined veteran politician.
From ’60s activist to Vermont institution
Sanders has been working on liberal causes for almost six decades, starting from his time as a student activist at the University of Chicago, where he worked to desegregate student housing as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality. As a college student, he also participated in the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr.
Four years after graduating college, Sanders moved with his first wife to Vermont as part of a migration of liberal activists to the state. He later joined the fledgling Liberty Union Party in 1971 and volunteered to run for the U.S. Senate — beginning a string of crushing statewide losses that lasted through the ’70s.
During his decade-long losing streak, Sanders started a company making educational films and narrated a video about Eugene Debs, the last major socialist candidate to seek the White House, roughly a century ago.
It was not until he left the Liberty Union Party that Sanders found success, running as a socialist for mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He spent the following decade leading the biggest city in Vermont and developing his name as something of an oddity in American politics: a successful socialist.
In 1990 he ran for Congress and began a career in Washington, spending 16 years in the House of Representatives and close to a decade in the Senate.
Family life
Sanders hasn’t traditionally talked much about his family on the campaign trail, but he slowly began referring to them increasingly at the urging of his second wife, Jane Sanders.
Sanders was born in Brooklyn in 1941 to a father who left Poland to seek work in the U.S. and a mother who was the daughter of Polish immigrants. Despite his potential to become the first Jewish president, Sanders has been circumspect about his feelings on organized religion and instead takes a view that all humans are connected.
His religious views sound very much like his political views.
“I believe that, as a human being, the pain that one person feels, if we have children who are hungry in America, if we have elderly people who can’t afford their prescription drugs, you know what, that impacts you, that impacts me,” Sanders told CNN’s Anderson Cooper at a Democratic town hall in New Hampshire a week before for the primary.
“So my spirituality is that we are all in this together and that when children go hungry, when veterans sleep out on the street, it impacts me,” he said. “That’s my very strong spiritual feeling.”
Sanders married his first wife and then moved to Vermont after college. His first son, Levi, was born in 1969, after Sanders’ first marriage ended. Sanders married his second wife, Jane O’Meara, in 1988. She was a fan who saw him debate during his Burlington mayoral race in 1981. According to a People magazine article, he proposed to her in the parking lot of a Friendly’s.
Unexpected ascent
Clinton entered the Democratic contest as the prohibitive favorite last spring — easily outpacing all serious possible contenders, with the exception of Vice President Joe Biden, had he entered the race.
The least likely challenger seemed to be an aging socialist activist from Vermont.
In reality, however, Sanders spent much of 2014 steadily laying the groundwork for a serious White House bid — meeting with liberal leaders in Washington and headlining Democratic events in Iowa and New Hampshire.
He formally announced his bid for the White House on a small patch of the Capitol lawn in April 2015 attended by a handful of reporters — although he later held a more spirited kickoff in his hometown of Burlington a month later.
But over the summer he drew surprisingly large crowds to rallies, driven by an almost rock star-like fervor among fans who online said they could #FeelTheBern. By September, Sanders had overtaken Clinton in most New Hampshire polling and was closing a double-digit gap in Iowa.
Comedian Larry David’s dead-on impersonation of Sanders on “Saturday Night Live” in the fall led to some unexpected celebrity for Sanders and was followed-up in February with David playing Sanders on SNL in “Bern Your Enthusiasm.”
Meanwhile, the Vermont senator’s amplified digital fundraising operation, led by veterans of President Barack Obama’s campaigns, drew in surprising cash hauls — more than enough to keep pace with Clinton. By February, Sanders announced he had outraised Clinton in the previous month by $5 million.
Sanders drew to within a hair of winning the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and had yet to concede defeat to Clinton there as of the start of February.
But Sanders faces serious challenges in the Democratic nominating contests throughout the rest of the nation, most markedly a deficit of support among minority voters. He has also staffed up much later than Clinton, forcing him to play catch-up in the other two early-nominating states: South Carolina and Nevada.
