“Bernie has been saying this for years,” said Nelson. “Bernie is nothing if not consistent.”
He and others said that Democratic voters in deeply blue Vermont have been electing Sanders, an independent, to various offices for more than 40 years — including a fourth term in the Senate last week —and, while some agree with his broadsides against the Democrats, most seem merely to accept them as Bernie being Bernie.
Though an independent, except when he ran for president, twice, as a Democrat, the 83-year-old senator caucuses with Democrats, and typically votes with them. And he is known for working well with the rest of the congressional delegation, US Senator Peter Welch and Representative Becca Balint, both Democrats, and with Vermont’s popular Republican governor, Phil Scott.
This time, Sanders’ charges come as Republicans gained a bit of ground in Vermont. Scott, who regularly polls as the nation’s most popular governor, crushed his Democratic challenger last week with more than 70 percent of the vote and used his political muscle to flip six seats in the Vermont Senate and 17 seats in the House, ending a Democratic super-majority that had regularly overrode his vetoes.
On the presidential ballot, a slightly higher fraction of Vermont voters went for Trump than they did in 2020, though the state rejected Donald Trump by the widest percentage margins of any state in all three of his presidential elections.
Scott agrees Democrats are not paying enough attention to the concerns of the working class. Welch said in an interview that while he accepted some of Sanders’ “legitimate critique about elites,” and agreed that Democrats “have to be better listeners” to those living paycheck to paycheck, he said the Biden White House has been the most pro-labor, pro-worker administration since FDR, and that Harris ran on that record.
Given that Sanders is a Vermont institution, Nelson said many forget he was an acquired taste in the Green Mountain state: he lost his first five elections here. Running initially as a member of the anti-Vietnam War Liberty Union party, he barely registered with the electorate in campaigns for US Senate and governor in the 1970s.
Sanders broke through in 1981, narrowly winning the mayor’s race in Burlington as an independent, tossing out a Democrat, and learning an important lesson, Nelson said.
“The advantage of being an independent is you don’t have to run in a primary,” Nelson said. “There’s no negative connotation with being an independent. It spares you a contest.”
It also allowed Sanders, a self-described progressive socialist, to snipe at Democrats and Republicans with equal vigor.
“The main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this city is that the Democrats are in insurance,” he said in 1986, “and the Republicans are in banking.”
During his 1986 campaign to challenge Madeleine Kunin, a Democrat and Vermont’s first female governor, he denounced the Democratic Party as “ideologically bankrupt.” He earned only 15 percent of the vote and the enmity of many Vermont Democrats.
Recalling that Sanders claimed he’d be a better feminist than her, Kunin did not write write fondly of Sanders in her memoir, Living a Political Life.
Still, Sanders’ tenure throughout the 1980s as Burlington’s mayor was widely deemed a success, transforming it into one of the most livable American small cities. But taking the mayor’s office of Vermont’s largest city away from Democrats never sat well with leading Democrats.
“I was at a Democratic caucus here in 1988, when he was supporting Jesse Jackson, and a woman hit Bernie with her handbag,” Nelson said. “He’s been a thorn in the side of Democrats. In Vermont, the Democrats figured out he could win, so they put aside their reservations on him.”
After being elected to the US House of Representatives in 1990, Sanders alienated congressional allies by claiming that both Democrats and Republicans worked mostly for the benefit of the wealthy. He was first elected to the Senate in 2006, and continued to criticize Democrats as well as Republicans for becoming beholden to wealthy donors and corporate interests at the expense of working people.
Harry Jaffe, a journalist and author of the 2015 unauthorized biography, “Why Bernie Sanders Matters,” has long argued that Sanders is not a real, dogmatic socialist, but uses the term as a brand to distinguish himself from Democrats, and is actually a Democrat in everything but name.
According to Jaffee, Sanders is a populist in the mold of Louisiana governor Huey Long, not an orthodox socialist like Eugene V. Debs, a former Democrat and labor leader who five times ran for president as a socialist, and whose plaque has a revered spot in Sanders’ Senate office.
Nelson says Sanders has been underestimated, and mischaracterized, for most of his political career.
“People try to characterize him as a 1960s hippie, but he’s really a 1930s labor union guy,” Nelson said.
It’s unclear whether Democrats will adopt Sanders’ recommendations to win back more working-class voters, which include creating a federal minimum wage of at least $17 an hour, guaranteeing health care to all, and adopting a progressive tax system to address wealth and income inequality.
Welch said Democrats, including Harris, already support many of the issues Sanders singled out as being essential to luring back working-class voters.
“Many of the things he advocates for, we advocate for as well,” Welch said.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe reporter and columnist who roams New England. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.
