Business software (or a business application) is any software
or set of computer programs used by business users to perform various
business functions. These business applications are used to increase
productivity, to measure productivity and to perform other business
functions accurately.
By and large, business software is likely to be developed to meet
the needs of a specific business, and therefore is not easily
transferable to a different business environment, unless its nature and
operation is identical. Due to the unique requirements of each
business, off-the-shelf software is unlikely to completely address a
company's needs. However, where an on-the-shelf solution is necessary,
due to time or monetary considerations, some level of customization is
likely to be required. Exceptions do exist, depending on the business in
question, and thorough research is always required before committing to
bespoke or off-the-shelf solutions.
Some business applications are interactive, i.e., they have a graphical user interface
or user interface and users can query/modify/input data and view
results instantaneously. They can also run reports instantaneously. Some
business applications run in batch mode: they are set up to run based
on a predetermined event/time and a business user does not need to
initiate them or monitor them.
Some business applications are built in-house and some are bought
from vendors (off the shelf software products). These business
applications are installed on either desktops or big servers. Prior to
the introduction of COBOL (a universal compiler) in 1965, businesses
developed their own unique machine language. RCA's language consisted
of a 12-position instruction. For example, to read a record into memory,
the first two digits would be the instruction (action) code. The next
four positions of the instruction (an 'A' address) would be the exact
leftmost memory location where you want the readable character to be
placed. Four positions (a 'B' address) of the instruction would note the
very rightmost memory location where you want the last character of the
record to be located. A two digit 'B' address also allows a
modification of any instruction. Instruction codes and memory
designations excluded the use of 8's or 9's. The first RCA business
application was implemented in 1962 on a 4k RCA 301. The RCA 301, mid
frame 501, and large frame 601 began their marketing in early 1960.
Many kinds of users are found within the business environment, and can be categorized by using a small, medium and large matrix:
Technologies that previously only existed in peer-to-peer software applications, like Kazaa and Napster, are starting to appear within business applications.
Digital dashboards, also known as business intelligence
dashboards, enterprise dashboards, or executive dashboards. These are
visually based summaries of business data that show at-a-glance
understanding of conditions through metrics and key performance
indicators (KPIs). Dashboards are a very popular tools that have arisen
in the last few years.
Online analytical processing (OLAP), (which include HOLAP, ROLAP and MOLAP)
- are a capability of some management, decision support, and executive
information systems that support interactive examination of large
amounts of data from many perspectives.
Reporting software generates aggregated views of data to keep the management informed about the state of their business.
Procurement software is business software that helps to automate the purchasing function of organizations.
Data mining
is the extraction of consumer information from a database by utilizing
software that can isolate and identify previously unknown patterns or
trends in large amounts of data. There is a variety of data mining
techniques that reveal different types of patterns. Some of the techniques that belong here are statistical methods (particularly business statistics) and neural networks, as very advanced means of analyzing data.
Document management software is made for organizing and managing multiple documents of various types. Some of them have storage functions for security and back-up of valuable business information.
Employee scheduling software- used for creating and distributing employee schedules, as well as for tracking employee hours.
Brief history
The essential motivation for business software is to increase profits by cutting costs or speeding the productive cycle. In the earliest days of white-collar business automation, large mainframe computers were used to tackle the most tedious jobs, like bank cheque clearing and factory accounting.
Factory accounting software was among the most popular of early business software tools, and included the automation of general ledgers,
fixed assets inventory ledgers, cost accounting ledgers, accounts
receivable ledgers, and accounts payable ledgers (including payroll,
life insurance, health insurance, federal and state insurance and
retirement).
The early use of software to replace manual white-collar labor
was extremely profitable, and caused a radical shift in white-collar
labor. One computer might easily replace 100 white-collar 'pencil
pushers', and the computer would not require any health or retirement
benefits.
Building on these early successes with IBM, Hewlett-Packard and
other early suppliers of business software solutions, corporate
consumers demanded business software to replace the old-fashioned
drafting board. CAD-CAM software (or computer-aided drafting for computer-aided manufacturing) arrived in the early 1980s. Also, project management software
was so valued in the early 1980s that it might cost as much as $500,000
per copy (although such software typically had far fewer capabilities
than modern project management software such as Microsoft Project, which one might purchase today for under $500 per copy.)
In the early days, perhaps the most noticeable, widespread change
in business software was the word processor. Because of its rapid rise,
the ubiquitous IBM typewriter suddenly vanished in the 1980s as
millions of companies worldwide shifted to the use of Word Perfect business software, and later, Microsoft Word software. Another vastly popular computer program for business were mathematical spreadsheet programs such as Lotus 1-2-3, and later Microsoft Excel.
In the 1990s business shifted massively towards globalism with the appearance of SAP
software which coordinates a supply-chain of vendors, potentially
worldwide, for the most efficient, streamlined operation of factory
manufacture.
Yet nothing in the history of business software has had the global impact of the Internet, with its email
and websites that now serve commercial interests worldwide. Globalism
in business fully arrived when the Internet became a household word.
The next phase in the evolution of business software is being led
by the emergance of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which involves
identifying and automating highly repetitive tasks and processes, with
an aim to drive operational efficiency, reduce costs and limit human error. Industries that have been in the forefront of RPA adoption include the insurance industry, banking and financial services, the legal industry, and the healthcare industry.
Application support
Business
applications are built based on the requirements from the business
users. Also, these business applications are built to use certain kind
of Business transactions or data items. These business applications run
flawlessly until there are no new business requirements or there is no
change in underlying Business transactions. Also, the business
applications run flawlessly if there are no issues with computer
hardware, computer networks (Internet/intranet), computer disks, power
supplies, and various software components (middleware, database,
computer programs, etc.).
Business applications can fail when an unexpected error occurs.
This error could occur due to a data error (an unexpected data input or a
wrong data input), an environment error (an in frastructure related
error), a programming error, a human error or a work flow error. When a
business application fails one needs to fix the business application
error as soon as possible so that the business users can resume their
work. This work of resolving business application errors is known as
business application support.
Reporting errors
The
Business User calls the business application support team phone number
or sends an e-mail to the business application support team. The
business application support team gets all the details of the error from
the business user on the phone or from the e-mail. These details are
then entered in a tracking software. The tracking software creates a
request number and this request number is given to the business user.
This request number is used to track the progress on the support issue.
The request is assigned to a support team member.
Notification of errors
For
critical business application errors (such as an application not
available or an application not working correctly), an e-mail is sent to
the entire organization or impacted teams so that they are aware of the
issue. They are also provided with an estimated time for application
availability.
Investigation or analysis of application errors
The
business application support team member collects all the necessary
information about the business software error. This information is then
recorded in the support request. All of the data used by the business
user is also used in the investigation. The application program is
reviewed for any possible programming errors.
Error resolution
If
any similar business application errors occurred in the past then the
issue resolution steps are retrieved from the support knowledge base and
the error is resolved using those steps. If it is a new support error,
then new issue resolution steps are created and the error is resolved.
The new support error resolution steps are recorded in the knowledge
base for future use. For major business application errors (critical
infrastructure or application failures), a phone conference call is
initiated and all required support persons/teams join the call and they
all work together to resolve the error.
Code correction
If
the business application error occurred due to programming errors, then
a request is created for the application development team to correct
programming errors. If the business user needs new features or functions
in the business application, then the required
analysis/design/programming/testing/release is planned and a new version
of the business software is deployed.
Business process correction
If
the business application error occurred due to a work flow issue or
human errors during data input, then the business users are notified.
Business users then review their work flow and revise it if necessary.
They also modify the user guide or user instructions to avoid such an
error in the future.
Infrastructure issue correction
If
the business application error occurred due to infrastructure issues,
then the specific infrastructure team is notified. The infrastructure
team then implements permanent fixes for the issue and monitors the
infrastructure to avoid the re-occurrence of the same error.
Support follow up and internal reporting
The
business application error tracking system is used to review all issues
periodically (daily, weekly and monthly) and reports are generated to
monitor the resolved issues, repeating issues, and pending issues.
Reports are also generated for the IT/IS management for improvement and
management of business applications.
The COVID-19 pandemic
has affected many science, space and technology institutions and
government agencies worldwide, leading to reduced productivity on a
number of fields and programs. It has also opened several new funding
research lines in several governmental agencies around the world.
Science
The
pandemic may have improved scientific communication or established new
forms of it. For instance, a lot of data is being released on preprint servers and is getting dissected on social Internet platforms and sometimes in the media before entering formal peer review.
Scientists are reviewing, editing, analyzing and publishing manuscripts
and data at record speeds and in large numbers. This intense
communication may have allowed an unusual level of collaboration and
efficiency among scientists. Francis Collins
notes that while he hasn't seen research move faster, the pace of
research "can still feel slow" during a pandemic. The typical model for
research has been considered too slow for the "urgency of the
coronavirus threat". A number of factors shape how much and which scientific knowledge can be established timely.
World Health Organization
On 4May 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) organized a telethon to raise US$8 billion from forty countries to support rapid development of vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infections,
also announcing deployment of an international "Solidarity trial" for
simultaneous evaluation of several vaccine candidates reaching Phase II-III clinical trials. The "Solidarity trial for treatments" is a multinational Phase III-IV clinical trial organized by the WHO and partners to compare four untested treatments for hospitalized people with severe COVID-19 illness. The trial was announced 18 March 2020, and as of 21 April, over 100 countries were participating. The WHO is also coordinating a multiple-site, international randomized controlled trial – the "Solidarity trial for vaccines"
– to enable simultaneous evaluation of the benefits and risks of
different vaccine candidates under clinical trials in countries where
there are high rates of COVID-19 disease, ensuring fast interpretation
and sharing of results around the world.
The WHO vaccine coalition will prioritize which vaccines should go into
Phase II and III clinical trials, and determine harmonized Phase III
protocols for all vaccines achieving the pivotal trial stage.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) – which is organizing a US$2 billion worldwide fund for rapid investment and development of vaccine candidates – indicated in April that a vaccine may be available under emergency use protocols in less than 12 months or by early 2021.
National and intergovernmental laboratories
United States Department of Energy federal scientific laboratories such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
have closed all its doors to all visitors and many employees, and
non-essential staff and scientists are required to work from home if
possible. Contractors also are strongly advised to isolate their
facilities and staff unless necessary. The overall operation of the ORNL
remains somewhat unaffected.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been tasked by the White House Coronavirus Task Force
to utilize most of its supercomputing capability for further research
of the virus stream, possible mutations and other factors; while
temporary reducing other projects or delaying them indefinitely.
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory
has closed all six sites across Europe (Barcelona, Grenoble, Hamburg,
Heidelberg, Hinxton and Rome). All of EMBL's host governments have
introduced strict controls in response to the coronavirus. EMBL staff
have been instructed to follow local government advice. A small number
of staff have been authorized to attend the sites to provide an
essential service such as maintenance of animal facilities or data
services. All other staff have been instructed to stay at home. EMBL has
also cancelled all visits to sites by non-staff groups. This includes
physical participation in the Courses and Conferences programme at
Heidelberg, the EMBL-EBI Training courses, and all other seminars,
courses and public visits at all sites. Meanwhile, the European Bioinformatics Institute
is creating a European COVID-19 Data Platform for data/information
exchange. The goal is to collect and share rapidly available research
data to enable synergies, cross-fertilisation and use of diverse data
sets with different degrees of aggregation, validation and/or
completeness. The platform is envisaged to consist of two connected
components, the SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs organising the flow of SARS-CoV-2
outbreak sequence data and providing comprehensive open data sharing for
the European and global research communities, and one broader COVID-19
Portal.
The World Meteorological Organization expressed concern about the observation system. Observations from the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay
programme, which uses in-flight measurements from the fleets of 43
airlines, were reduced by 50% to 80% depending on region. Data from
other automated systems was largely unaffected, though the WMO expressed
fears that repairs and maintenance may be affected. Manual
observations, mostly from developing countries, also saw a significant
decrease.
Open science
The need for accelerating open scientific research made several civil society organizations to create an Open COVID Pledge
asking to different industries to release their intellectual property
rights during the pandemic to help find a cure for the disease. Several
tech giants joined the pledge. The pledge includes the release of an Open COVID license. Organizations that have been longtime advocates for Open Access, such as Creative Commons, implemented a myriad of calls and actions to promote open access in science as a key element to combat the disease. These include a public call for more open access policies, and a call to scientists to adopt zero embargo periods for their publications, implementing a CC BY to their articles, and a CC0 waiver for the research data. Other organizations questioned the current scientific culture, making a call for more open, public science.
Computing research and citizen science
In March 2020, the United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, NASA, industry, and nine universities pooled resources to access supercomputers from IBM, combined with cloud computing resources from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, for drug discovery.
The COVID‑19 High Performance Computing Consortium is also being used
to forecast disease spread, model possible vaccines, and screen
thousands of chemical compounds to design a COVID‑19 vaccine or therapy.
The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, an additional consortium of Microsoft, six universities (including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the first consortium), and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Illinois, working under the auspices of C3.ai, a company founded by Thomas Siebel,
are pooling supercomputer resources toward drug discovery, medical
protocol development and public health strategy improvement, as well as
awarding large grants to researchers who propose to use AI to carry out
similar tasks by May.
In March 2020, the distributed computing project Folding@home
launched a program to assist medical researchers around the world. The
initial wave of projects are meant to simulate potentially protein
targets from SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the related SARS-CoV virus, which has
been studied previously.
Resources for computer science and scientific crowdsourcing projects concerning COVID-19 can be found on the internet or as apps. Examples of such projects are listed below:
The Eterna OpenVaccine project enables video game players to
"design an mRNA encoding a potential vaccine against the novel
coronavirus."
The EU-Citizen.Science project has "a selection of resources related
to the current COVID19 pandemic. It contains links to citizen science
and crowdsourcing projects"
The COVID-19 Citizen Science project is "a new initiative by University of California, San Francisco
physician-scientists" that "will allow anyone in the world age 18 or
over to become a citizen scientist advancing understanding of the
disease."
The CoronaReport digital journalism project is "a citizen science
project which democratizes the reporting on the Coronavirus, and makes
these reports accessible to other citizens."
The COVID Symptom Tracker is a crowdsourced study of the symptoms of the virus. It has had two million downloads by April 2020.
The Covid Near You epidemiology tool "uses crowdsourced data to
visualize maps to help citizens and public health agencies identify
current and potential hotspots for the recent pandemic coronavirus,
COVID-19."
Space
NASA
The James Webb Space Telescope's launch has been delayed
NASA
announced the temporary closure of all its field center visitor
complexes until further notice, as well as requiring all non-critical
personnel to work from home if possible. Production and manufacture of
the Space Launch System at the Michoud Assembly Facility was stopped, and further delays to the James Webb Space Telescope are expected.
The majority of personnel at the Johnson Space Center transitioned to teleworking, and International Space Station mission critical personnel were instructed to reside in the mission control room
until further notice. Station operations are relatively unaffected, but
new expedition astronauts face longer and stricter quarantines before
flight.
NASA's emergency response framework has varied depending on local
virus cases around its agency field centers. As of March 24, 2020, the
following space centers had been escalated to stage 4:
Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who also reported its first case of an employee testing positive for COVID-19.
Two facilities were held at stage 4 after reporting new coronavirus cases: the Michoud Assembly Facility reporting its first employee testing positive for COVID-19, and the Stennis Space Center recording a second case of a member of the NASA community with the virus. The Kennedy Space Center
was held at stage 3, after one member of the workforce tested positive.
Due to mandatory telework policy already in effect, the individual had
not been on site for over a week prior to symptoms. On May 18, the Michoud facility began to resume SLS work operations, but so far remains in a state of level 3.
At stage 4, mandatory telework is in effect for all personnel,
with the exception of limited personnel required for mission-essential
work and to care-take and maintain the safety and security of the
facility.
ESA
The European Space Agency has ordered many of its science and technology facilities' workforce to also telework as much as possible.
Recent developments, including strengthened restrictions by
national, regional and local authorities across Europe and the first
positive test result for COVID-19 within the workforce at the European Space Operations Centre, have led the agency to restrict on-site personnel at its mission control centres even further.
ESA's Director of Operations - Rolf Densing, has strongly
recommended mission personnel to reduce activity of scientific missions,
especially on interplanetary spacecraft.
The affected spacecraft are currently in stable orbits and long
mission durations, so turning off their science instruments and placing
them into a largely unattended safe configuration for a certain period
will have a negligible impact on their overall mission performance.
Among the affected missions are:
Cluster
– A four-spacecraft mission launched in 2000, orbiting Earth to
investigate our planet's magnetic environment and how it is forged by
the solar wind, the stream of charged particles constantly released by
the Sun;
ExoMars
Trace Gas Orbiter – Launched in 2016, the spacecraft is in orbit around
Mars, where it has been investigating the planet's atmosphere and
providing data relay for landers on the surface;
Mars Express
– Launched in 2003, the workhorse orbiter has been imaging the Martian
surface and sampling the planet's atmosphere for over one and a half
decades;
Solar Orbiter
– ESA's newest science mission, launched in February 2020 and currently
en route to its science operations orbit around the Sun.
ESA's Director of Science - Günther Hasinger, commented: "It was a
difficult decision, but the right one to take. Our greatest
responsibility is the safety of people, and I know all of us in the
science community understand why this is necessary".
The temporary reduction in personnel on site will also allow the
ESOC teams to concentrate on maintaining spacecraft safety for all other
missions involved, in particular, the Mercury explorer BepiColombo, which is on its way to the innermost planet in the Solar System and will require some on-site support around its scheduled Earth flyby on 10 April.
The challenging manoeuvre, which will use Earth's gravity to
adjust BepiColombo's trajectory as it cruises towards Mercury, will be
performed by a very small number of engineers and in full respect of
social distancing and other health and hygiene measures required by the
current situation. Commissioning and first check-out operations of
scientific instruments on the recently launched Solar Orbiter, which had
begun last month, have been temporarily suspended.
ESA expects to resume these operations in the near future, in
line with the development of the coronavirus situation. Meanwhile, Solar
Orbiter will continue its journey towards the Sun, with the first Venus
flyby to take place in December.
JAXA
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
space and science operations largely remain unaffected. However all
visitors to their numerous field centers have been suspended until April
30 to reduce contamination.
Commercial aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace
announced on March 23, 2020, that it was laying off all 88 of its
employees. It has said it would hire workers back when restrictions
imposed by the pandemic. World View based in Tucson, Arizona
announced on April 17, 2020 that it had halted new business initiatives
and furloughed an unstated number of employee in order to reduce cash
outflow. The company had also received rent deferments from Pima County, Arizona.
OneWeb filed for bankruptcy on 27 March 2020, following a cash crunch
amidst difficulties raising capital to complete the build and
deployment of the remaining 90% of the network. The company had already
laid off approximately 85% of its 531 employees, but said it will
maintain satellite operational capabilities while the court restructures
it and new owners for the constellation are sought.
Larger companies such as SpaceX and Boeing
remain somewhat economically unaffected, apart from extra safety
precautions and measures for their employees to limit the spread of the
virus in their workplaces. As of April 16, Blue Origin stated that it was continuing with its hiring of staff, growing by around 20 each week. ULA
implemented an internal pandemic plan. Whilst some aspects of launch
related outreach were scaled back, the company made clear the intention
to maintain its launch schedule.
Telecommunications
The coronavirus caused a huge strain on internet traffic, with an increase of 60% and 50% in broadband usage of BT Group and Vodafone respectively. In the meantime, Netflix, Disney+, Google, Amazon and YouTube considered the notion to reduce their video quality to prevent the overload. Meanwhile, Sony started slowing down PlayStation game downloads in Europe and the United States to maintain the traffic level.
Cellular service providers in mainland China have reported significant drops in subscriber numbers, partially due to migrant workers being unable to return to work as a result of quarantine lockdowns; China Mobile saw a reduction of 8 million subscribers, while China Unicom had 7.8 million fewer subscribers, and China Telecom lost 5.6 million users.
Teleconferencing has served as a replacement for cancelled events as well as daily business meetings and social contacts. Teleconference companies such as Zoom Video Communications
have seen a sharp increase in usage, accompanied by attendant technical
problems like bandwidth overcrowding and social problems like Zoombombing.
Virtual happy hours for "quarantinis" have been held using the technology, and even virtual dance parties.
In April 2015, Sanders announced his campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Despite initially low expectations, he went on to win 23 primaries and caucuses and around 43% of pledged delegates, to Hillary Clinton's 55%. His campaign generated grassroots enthusiasm, rejecting large donations and Super PAC funds, relying mostly on small-dollar donations. In July 2016, he formally endorsed Clinton in her general election bid against RepublicanDonald Trump. In February 2019, Sanders announced a second presidential campaign, joining a large field of Democratic candidates pursuing the party nomination. Despite a strong showing in early primaries that briefly made him the front-runner, Sanders suspended his campaign on April 8, 2020 after a string of primary losses to Democratic rival Joe Biden. He remains on the ballot in states that have not yet voted in an effort to influence the Democratic Party's platform. On April 13, Sanders formally endorsed Biden for the Democratic nomination.
Early life
Sanders as a senior in high school, 1959
Bernard Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, was born in Słopnice, Galicia, in Austria-Hungary (now part of Poland), to a Jewish working-class family. In 1921, Elias immigrated to the United States, where he became a paint salesman. Bernard's mother, Dorothy Sanders (née Glassberg), was born in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents from Radzyń Podlaski, in modern-day eastern Poland.
Sanders became interested in politics at an early age. He said, "A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932.
He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that
election in World War II, including six million Jews. So what I learned
as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important." In the 1940s, many of his relatives in German-occupied Poland were murdered in the Holocaust.
Sanders lived in Midwood, Brooklyn. He attended elementary school at P.S. 197, where he won a borough championship on the basketball team. He attended Hebrew school in the afternoons, and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1954. His older brother, Larry,
said that during their childhood, the family never lacked for food or
clothing, but major purchases, "like curtains or a rug," were not
affordable.
Sanders attended James Madison High School, where he was captain of the track team and took third place in the New York City indoor one-mile race.
In high school, he lost his first election, finishing last out of three
candidates for the student body presidency. Not long after his high
school graduation, his mother died at the age of 46. His father died a few years later in 1962, at the age of 57.
Sanders studied at Brooklyn College for a year in 1959–1960 before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1964.
He has described himself as a mediocre college student because the
classroom was "boring and irrelevant," while the community was more
important to his education.
Early career
Political activism
Sanders later described his time in Chicago as "the major period of intellectual ferment in my life." While there, he joined the Young People's Socialist League (the youth affiliate of the Socialist Party of America) and was active in the civil rights movement as a student for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Under his chairmanship, the university chapter of CORE merged with the university chapter of the SNCC. In January 1962, he went to a rally at the University of Chicago administration building to protest university president George Wells Beadle's segregated campus housing policy.
At the protest, Sanders said, "We feel it is an intolerable situation
when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in
university-owned apartments". He and 32 other students then entered the
building and camped outside the president's office. After weeks of sit-ins, Beadle and the university formed a commission to investigate discrimination. After further protests, the University of Chicago ended racial segregation in private university housing in the summer of 1963.
Joan Mahoney,
a member of the University of Chicago CORE chapter at the time and a
fellow participant in the sit-ins, described Sanders in a 2016 interview
as "a swell guy, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, but he wasn't
terribly charismatic. One of his strengths, though, was his ability to
work with a wide group of people, even those he didn't agree with." He once spent a day putting up fliers protesting police brutality, only to notice later that Chicago police had shadowed him and taken them all down. He attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. That summer, Sanders was fined $25 (equivalent to $209 in 2019) for resisting arrest during a demonstration in Englewood against segregation in Chicago's public schools.
After graduating from college, Sanders returned to New York City, where he worked various jobs, including Head Start teacher, psychiatric aide, and carpenter. In 1968, he moved to Stannard, Vermont, a town small in both area and population (88 residents at the 1970 census) within Vermont's rural Northeast Kingdom region, because he had been "captivated by rural life." While there, he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, and writer who created and sold "radical film strips" and other educational materials to schools. He also wrote several articles for the alternative publication The Vermont Freeman. He lived in the area for several years before moving to the more populous Chittenden County in the mid-1970s. During his 2018 reelection campaign, he returned to the town to hold an event with voters and other candidates.
Liberty Union campaigns
Sanders began his electoral political career in 1971 as a member of the Liberty Union Party, which originated in the anti-war movement and the People's Party.
He ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor of Vermont in 1972
and 1976 and as a candidate for U.S. senator in 1972 and 1974. In the 1974 senatorial race, he finished third (5,901 votes; 4%), behind 33-year-old Chittenden County state's attorney Patrick Leahy (D; 70,629 votes; 49%) and two-term incumbent U.S. Representative Dick Mallary (R; 66,223 votes; 46%).
The 1976 campaign was the zenith of the Liberty Union's
influence, with Sanders collecting 11,317 votes for governor and the
party. His strong performance forced the down-ballot races for
lieutenant governor and secretary of state to be decided by the state
legislature when its vote total prevented either the Republican or Democratic candidate for those offices from garnering a majority of votes.
The campaign drained the finances and energy of the Liberty Union,
however, and in October 1977, less than a year after the 1976 campaign
concluded, he and the Liberty Union candidate for attorney general,
Nancy Kaufman, announced their retirement from the party.
After his resignation from the Liberty Union Party in 1977,
Sanders worked as a writer and as the director of the nonprofit American
People's Historical Society (APHS). While with the APHS, he produced a 30-minute documentary about American labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president five times as the Socialist Party candidate.
Mayor of Burlington, Vermont (1981–1989)
Burlington City Hall
Campaigns
Urged by his close friend and political confidant Richard Sugarman, Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980, at age 39. He ran against incumbent Democratic mayor Gordon "Gordie" Paquette,
a five-term mayor who had served as a member of the Burlington City
Council for 13 years before that, building extensive community ties and a
willingness to cooperate with Republican leaders in controlling
appointments to various commissions. Republicans had found Paquette so
unobjectionable that they failed to field a candidate in the March 1981
race against him, leaving Sanders as his principal opponent. Sanders's
effort was further aided by Citizens Party
candidate Greg Guma's decision to exit the race so as not to split the
progressive vote. Two other candidates in the race, independents Richard
Bove and Joe McGrath, were non-factors in the campaign, with the battle
coming down to Paquette and Sanders.
Sanders castigated the pro-development incumbent as an ally of
prominent shopping center developer Antonio Pomerleau, while Paquette
warned of ruin for Burlington if Sanders were elected. The Sanders
campaign was bolstered by a wave of optimistic volunteers as well as by a
series of endorsements from university professors, social welfare
agencies, and the police union. The final result came as a shock to the
local political establishment when Sanders won by just ten votes.
Sanders was reelected three times, defeating both Democratic and
Republican candidates. He received 53% of the vote in 1983 and 55% in
1985. In his final run for mayor in 1987, Sanders defeated Paul Lafayette, a Democrat endorsed by both major parties. In 1986, he unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Governor Madeleine Kunin
(D) in her run for reelection. Running as an independent, he finished
third with 14% of the vote, while Kunin won with 47%, followed by Lt.
Governor Peter P. Smith (R) with 38%.
During his mayoralty, Sanders called himself a socialist and was so described in the press. During his first term, his supporters, including the first Citizens Party city councilor Terry Bouricius, formed the Progressive Coalition, the forerunner of the Vermont Progressive Party.
The Progressives never held more than six seats on the 13-member city
council, but they had enough to keep the council from overriding
Sanders's vetoes. Under his leadership, Burlington balanced its city
budget; attracted a minor league baseball team, the Vermont Reds, then the Double-A affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds; became the first U.S. city to fund community-trust housing; and successfully sued the local cable television franchise, thereby winning reduced rates for customers.
As mayor, Sanders also led extensive downtown revitalization projects. One of his primary achievements was improving Burlington's Lake Champlain waterfront. In 1981, he campaigned against the unpopular plans by Burlington developer Tony Pomerleau to convert the then-industrial waterfront property owned by the Central Vermont Railway into expensive condominiums, hotels, and offices.
He ran under the slogan "Burlington is not for sale" and successfully
supported a plan that redeveloped the waterfront area into a mixed-use district featuring housing, parks, and public spaces.
Sanders was a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America throughout the 1980s. In 1985, Burlington City Hall hosted a foreign policy speech by Noam Chomsky.
In his introduction, he praised Chomsky as "a very vocal and important
voice in the wilderness of intellectual life in America" and said that
he was "delighted to welcome a person who I think we're all very proud
of."
Sanders hosted and produced a public-access television program, Bernie Speaks with the Community, from 1986 to 1988. He collaborated with 30 Vermont musicians to record a folk album, We Shall Overcome, in 1987. That same year, U.S. News & World Report ranked Sanders one of America's best mayors. As of 2013, Burlington was regarded as one of the most livable cities in the United States.
U.S. House of Representatives (1991–2007)
Representative Sanders in 1991
Sanders meeting in 1993 with Hillary Clinton (his future rival in the 2016 Democratic primaries) to discuss her plan to reform the healthcare system
Elections
In 1988, incumbent Republican congressman Jim Jeffords decided to run for the U.S. Senate, vacating the House seat representing Vermont's at-large congressional district. Former Lieutenant GovernorPeter P. Smith
(R) won the House election with a plurality, securing 41% of the vote.
Sanders, who ran as an independent, placed second with 38% of the vote,
while Democratic State Representative Paul N. Poirier placed third with 19%. Two years later, he ran for the seat again and defeated Smith by a margin of 56% to 39%.
Sanders was the first independent elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Frazier Reams of Ohio, as well as the first socialist elected to the House in decades.
He served as a representative from 1991 until he became a senator in
2007, winning reelection by large margins except during the 1994 Republican Revolution, when he won by 3%, with 50% of the vote.
Legislation
Sanders meeting with students at Milton High School in Milton, Vermont, 2004
During his first year in the House, Sanders often alienated allies
and colleagues with his criticism of both political parties as working primarily on behalf of the wealthy. In 1991, he co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group of mostly liberal Democrats that he chaired for its first eight years, while still refusing to join the Democratic Party or caucus.
In 2005, Rolling Stone
called Sanders the "amendment king" for his ability to get more roll
call amendments passed than any other congressman during the period
since 1995, when Congress was entirely under Republican control. Being
an independent allowed him to form coalitions across party lines.
Banking reform
In 1999, Sanders voted and advocated against rolling back the Glass–Steagall legislation provisions that kept investment banks and commercial banks separate entities. He was a vocal critic of Federal Reserve ChairAlan Greenspan;
in June 2003, during a question-and-answer discussion, Sanders told him
he was concerned that Greenspan was "way out of touch" and "that you
see your major function in your position as the need to represent the
wealthy and large corporations."
Cancer registries
Concerned by high breast cancer rates in Vermont, on February 7,
1992, Sanders sponsored the Cancer Registries Amendment Act to establish
cancer registries to collect data on cancer.
Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a companion bill in the Senate on
October 2, 1992. The Senate bill was passed by the House on October 6
and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush on October 24, 1992.
Firearms and criminal justice
In 1993, Sanders voted against the Brady Bill,
which mandated federal background checks when buying guns and imposed a
waiting period on firearm purchasers in the United States; the bill
passed by a vote of 238–187.
He voted against the bill four more times in the 1990s, explaining his
Vermont constituents saw waiting-period mandates as more appropriately a
state than federal matter.
Sanders did vote for other gun-control measures. For example, in 1994, he voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act "because it included the Violence Against Women Act and the ban on certain assault weapons." He was nevertheless critical of the other parts of the bill. Although he acknowledged that "clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic,
and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect
society from them," he maintained that governmental policies played a
large part in "dooming tens of millions of young people to a future of
bitterness, misery, hopelessness, drugs, crime, and violence" and argued
that the repressive policies introduced by the bill were not addressing
the causes of violence, saying, "we can create meaningful jobs,
rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails."
Sanders has at times favored stronger law enforcement and
sentencing. In 1996, he voted against a bill that would have prohibited
police from purchasing tanks and armored carriers.
In 1998, he voted for a bill that would have increased minimum
sentencing for possessing a gun while committing a federal crime to ten
years in prison, including nonviolent crimes such as marijuana possession.
In 2005, Sanders voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.
The purpose of the act was to prevent firearms manufacturers and
dealers from being held liable for negligence when crimes have been
committed with their products. As of 2016, he said that he has since changed his position and would vote for legislation to defeat this bill.
Opposition to the Patriot Act
Sanders was a consistent critic of the Patriot Act. As a member of Congress, he voted against the original Patriot Act legislation.
After its 357–66 passage in the House, he sponsored and voted for
several subsequent amendments and acts attempting to curtail its effects and voted against each reauthorization.
In June 2005, he proposed an amendment to limit Patriot Act provisions
that allow the government to obtain individuals' library and book-buying
records. The amendment passed the House by a bipartisan majority, but
was removed on November4 of that year in House–Senate negotiations and never became law.
Opposition to the War in Iraq
Sanders voted against the resolutions authorizing the use of force against Iraq in 1991 and 2002, and he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He voted for the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists that has been cited as the legal justification for controversial military actions since the September 11 attacks. He voted for a non-binding resolution
expressing support for troops at the outset of the invasion of Iraq,
but gave a floor speech criticizing the partisan nature of the vote and
the Bush administration's actions in the run-up to the war. Regarding the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's
identity by a State Department official, he stated: "The revelation
that the President authorized the release of classified information in
order to discredit an Iraq war critic should tell every member of
Congress that the time is now for a serious investigation of how we got
into the war in Iraq and why Congress can no longer act as a rubber
stamp for the President."
Trade policy
In February 2005, Sanders introduced a bill that would have withdrawn the permanent normal trade relations
(PNTR) status that had been extended to China in October 2000. He said
to the House, "Anyone who takes an objective look at our trade policy
with China must conclude that it is an absolute failure and needs to be
fundamentally overhauled", citing the American jobs being lost to
overseas competitors. His bill received 71 co-sponsors but was not sent
to the floor for a vote.
U.S. Senate (2007–present)
Senate portrait, 2007
Elections
Sanders entered the race for the U.S. Senate on April 21, 2005, after
Senator Jim Jeffords announced that he would not seek a fourth term. Chuck Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee,
endorsed Sanders, a critical move as it meant that no Democrat running
against him could expect to receive financial help from the party. He
was also endorsed by Senate Minority LeaderHarry Reid and Democratic National Committee chairman and former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Dean said in May 2005 that he considered Sanders an ally who "votes with the Democrats 98% of the time." Then-Senator Barack Obama also campaigned for him in Vermont in March 2006.
Sanders entered into an agreement with the Democratic Party, much as he
had as a congressman, to be listed in their primary but to decline the
nomination should he win, which he did.
In the most expensive political campaign in Vermont's history, he defeated businessman Rich Tarrant
by an almost 2-to-1 margin. Many national media outlets projected
Sanders as the winner just after the polls closed, before any returns
came in. He was reelected in 2012 with 71% of the vote, and in 2018 with 67% of the vote.
Legislation
While a member of Congress, Sanders sponsored 15 concurrent resolutions and 15 Senate resolutions. Of those he co-sponsored, 218 became law. While he has consistently advocated for progressive causes, Politico wrote that he has "rarely forged actual legislation or left a significant imprint on it." According to The New York Times,
"Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are
usually far to the left of the majority of the Senate… Mr. Sanders has
largely found ways to press his agenda through appending small
provisions to the larger bills of others."
During his time in the Senate, he had lower legislative effectiveness
than the average senator, as measured by the number of sponsored bills
that passed and successful amendments made. Nevertheless, he has sponsored over 500 amendments to bills,
many of which became law. The results of these amendments include a ban
on imported goods made by child labor; $100 million in funding for
community health centers; $10 million for an outreach program for
servicemembers suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, depression, panic attacks, and other mental disorders; a public database of senior Department of Defense officials seeking employment with defense contractors; and including autism treatment in the military healthcare program.
Finance and monetary policy
In 2008 and 2009, Sanders voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program
(TARP, also known as the Wall Street bailout), a program to purchase
toxic banking assets and provide loans to banks that were in free-fall.
On February 4, 2009, he sponsored an amendment to ensure that TARP
funds would not displace US workers. The amendment passed and was added
to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Among his proposed financial reforms is auditing the Federal Reserve,
which would reduce its independence in monetary policy deliberations;
Federal Reserve officials say that "Audit the Fed" legislation would
expose the Federal Reserve to undue political pressure from lawmakers
who do not like its decisions.
In 2016, Sanders voted for the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, which included proposals for a reformed audit of the Federal Reserve System.
Foreign policy
On June 12, 2017, U.S. senators agreed to legislation imposing new sanctions on Russia and Iran. The bill was opposed only by Sanders and Republican Rand Paul. He supported the sanctions on Russia, but voted against the bill because he believed the sanctions could endanger the Iran nuclear deal.
In 2018, Sanders sponsored a bill and was joined by Senators Chris Murphy (D–CT) and Mike Lee (R–UT) to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and "millions more suffering from starvation and disease". After the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 (which was ordered by Saudi Arabian Crown PrinceMohammad bin Salman, according to multiple intelligence agencies), his bill attracted bipartisan co-sponsors and support, and the Senate passed it by a vote of 56–41.
The bill passed the House in February 2019 by a 247–175 vote and
President Trump vetoed it in March, saying: "This resolution is an
unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities,
endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members,
both today and in the future."
Health care
Don't Take Our Health Care rally in Columbus, Ohio, June 2017
In mid-December 2009, Sanders successfully added a provision to the Affordable Care Act to fund $11 billion to community health centers,
especially those in rural areas. The provision brought together
Democrats on the left with Democrats from conservative, rural areas,
helping to secure the 60 votes needed for passage. On May 4, 2017, in response to the House vote to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, he predicted "thousands of Americans would die" from no longer having access to health care. PolitiFact rated his statement "mostly true."
In September 2017, Sanders along with 15 Senate co-sponsors submitted the Medicare for All bill, a single-payer healthcare
plan. The bill covers vision and dental care, unlike Medicare. Some
Republicans have called the bill "Berniecare" and "the latest Democratic
push for socialized medicine and higher taxes." He responded that the
Republican Party has no credibility on the issue of health care after
voting for legislation that would take health insurance away from 32
million Americans under the Affordable Care Act.
As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and
Aging, Sanders has introduced legislation to reauthorize and strengthen
the Older Americans Act, which supports Meals on Wheels and other programs for seniors.
Immigration policy
In 2007, Sanders helped kill a bill introducing comprehensive
immigration reform, arguing that its guest-worker program would depress
wages for American workers. In 2010, he supported the DREAM Act,
which would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented
immigrants who had been brought to the United States as minors. In 2013, he supported the Gang of Eight's
comprehensive immigration reform bill after securing a $1.5 billion
youth jobs program provision, which he argued would offset the harm of
labor market competition with immigrants.
Income and wealth distribution
Sanders introduced legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, April 2017
In April 2017, Sanders introduced a bill that would raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour, an increase over an earlier Democratic $12 an hour proposal. On May 9, 2018, he introduced the Workplace Democracy Act,
a bill that would expand labor rights by making it easier for workers
to join a union, ban right-to-work laws and some anti-union provisions
of the Taft–Hartley Act,
and outlaw some union-busting tactics. Announcing the legislation, he
said, "If we are serious about reducing income and wealth inequality and
rebuilding the middle class, we have got to substantially increase the
number of union jobs in this country."
Sanders opposed the 2018 United States federal budget proposed by the Trump administration,
calling it "a budget for the billionaire class, for Wall Street, for
corporate CEOs, and for the wealthiest people in this country… nothing
less than a massive transfer of wealth from working families, the
elderly, children, the sick and the poor to the top 1%."
After the November 2017 revelations from the Paradise Papers and a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies which says just three people (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) own more wealth than the bottom half of the U.S. population, Sanders stated that "we must end global oligarchy" and that "we need, in the United States and throughout the world, a tax system which is fair, progressive and transparent."
On September 5, 2018, Sanders partnered with Ro Khanna to introduce the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (Stop BEZOS)
Act, which would require large corporations to pay for the food stamps
and Medicaid benefits that their employees receive, relieving the burden
on taxpayers.
On March 17, 2016, Sanders said he would support Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court, though he added, "there are some more progressive judges out there." He opposed Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the Court, saying that Gorsuch had "refused to answer legitimate questions." He also objected to Senate Republicans using the nuclear option to "choke off debate and ram the nomination through the Senate." He voted against Gorsuch's confirmation as an associate justice.
Committee assignments
As an independent, Sanders worked out a deal with the Senate
Democratic leadership in which he agreed to vote with the Democrats on
all procedural matters unless the Democratic whip, Dick Durbin,
agreed that he need not (a request rarely made or granted). In return
he was allowed to keep his seniority and received the committee seats
that would have been available to him as a Democrat; in 2013–14 he was
chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs (during the Veterans Health Administration scandal).
Sanders was only the third senator from Vermont to caucus with the
Democrats, after Jeffords and Leahy. His caucusing with the Democrats
gave them a 51–49 majority in the Senate during the 110th Congress in 2007–08. The Democrats needed 51 seats to control the Senate because Vice PresidentDick Cheney would likely have broken any tie in favor of the Republicans. He is a member of the following caucuses:
Polling conducted in August 2011 by Public Policy Polling
found that Sanders's approval rating was 67% and his disapproval rating
28%, making him then the third-most popular U.S. senator. Both the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the NHLA (National Hispanic Leadership Agenda) have given him 100% voting scores during his tenure in the Senate. In 2015, he was named one of the Top5 of The Forward 50. In a November 2015 Morning Consult poll, he reached an 83% approval rating among his constituents, making him the most popular U.S. senator. Fox News found him to have the highest net favorability at +28 points of any prominent politician included in its March 2017 poll. He ranked third in 2014 and first in both 2015 and 2016.
In April 2017, a nationwide Harvard-Harris Poll found that
Sanders had the highest favorability rating among the political figures
included in the poll, a standing confirmed by subsequent polling.
During the 2012 Democratic presidential primaries, Sanders—dissatisfied with President Obama's "attempts to trade Social Security
cuts for tax hikes"—reportedly considered running against him in the
primaries. Sanders had previously suggested in 2011 that it was "a good
idea" for someone to challenge Obama, and "got so close to running a
primary challenge… that Senator Harry Reid had to intervene to stop him." In November 2013, Sanders suggested that Senator Elizabeth Warren
could be president and that she might earn his backing if she ran. He
added that if no progressive candidate ran, he might feel compelled to
do so himself. In December 2014, Warren said she was not running.
Sanders announced his intention to seek the Democratic Party's nomination for president on April 30, 2015, and his campaign was officially launched on May 26, 2015 in Burlington.
In his announcement, Sanders said, "I don't believe that the men and
women who defended American democracy fought to create a situation where
billionaires own the political process," and made this a central idea
throughout his campaign.
Warren welcomed Sanders's entry into the race, saying, "I'm glad
to see him get out there and give his version of what leadership in this
country should be," but never endorsed him.
Initially considered a long shot, Sanders won 23 primaries and caucuses and around 46% of pledged delegates to Hillary Clinton's
54%. His campaign was noted for its supporters' enthusiasm, as well as
for rejecting large donations from corporations, the financial industry,
and any associated Super PAC. Some of the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) emails leaked to the public in June and July 2016 showed that the
committee leadership had favored Clinton over him and had worked to
help Clinton win the nomination.
Unlike the other major candidates, Sanders did not pursue funding through a Super PAC or by wealthy donors, instead focusing on small-dollar donations. His presidential campaign raised $1.5 million within 24 hours of his official announcement.
At the end of the year, the campaign had raised a total of $73 million
from more than one million people, making 2.5 million donations, with an
average donation of $27.16. The campaign reached 3.25 million donations by the end of January 2016, raising $20 million in that month alone.
Sanders used social media to help his campaign gain momentum, posting content to online platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and answering questions on Reddit.
He gained a large grassroots organizational following online. A July
29, 2015 meetup organized online brought 100,000 supporters to more than
3,500 simultaneous events nationwide.
To his surprise, Sanders's June 2015 campaign events drew overflow crowds across the country. When Clinton and Sanders made public appearances within days of each other in Des Moines, Iowa, he drew larger crowds, even though he had already made many stops around the state and Clinton's visit was her first in 2015. On July 1, 2015, his campaign stop in Madison, Wisconsin, drew the largest crowd of any 2016 presidential candidate to that date, with an estimated turnout of 10,000. Over the following weeks, he drew even larger crowds: 11,000 in Phoenix; 15,000 in Seattle; and 28,000 in Portland, Oregon.
Presidential debates
The Democratic National Committee
(DNC) announced in May 2015 that there would be six debates. Critics
alleged that the small number of debates and the schedule, with half of
the debates on Saturday or Sunday nights, were part of the DNC's
deliberate attempt to protect Clinton, who was perceived as the
front-runner. In February 2016, both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns agreed in principle to holding four more debates for a total of ten. Clinton dropped out of the tenth debate, scheduled to take place just before the California primary, citing a need to devote her time to making direct contact with California voters and preparing for the general election.
Sanders expressed disappointment that Clinton canceled the debate
"before the largest and most important primary in the presidential
nominating process."
Polls and news coverage
Some supporters raised concerns that publications such as The New York Times minimized coverage of the Sanders campaign in favor of other candidates, especially Trump and Clinton. The Timess ombudsman reviewed her paper's coverage of the Sanders campaign and found that as of September 2015 the Times
"hasn't always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is
regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times. Some of that is focused
on the candidate's age, appearance and style, rather than what he has to
say." She also found that the Times's coverage of Sanders's
campaign was much scanter than its coverage of Trump's, though Trump's
was also initially considered a long shot at that time, with 63 articles
covering the Trump campaign and 14 covering Sanders's. A December 2015 report found that the three major networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—had
spent 234 minutes reporting on Trump and 10 minutes on Sanders, despite
their similar polling results. The report noted that ABC World News Tonight had spent 81 minutes on Trump and less than one minute on Sanders during 2015.
A study of media coverage in the 2016 election concluded that
while Sanders received less coverage than his rival Hillary Clinton, the
amount of coverage of Sanders during the election was largely
consistent with his polling performance, except during 2015 when Sanders
received coverage that far exceeded his standing in the polls.
Studies concluded that the tone of media coverage of Sanders was more
favorable than that of any other candidate, whereas his main opponent in
the democratic primary, Hillary Clinton, received the most negative
coverage of any candidate.
All 2016 candidates received vastly less media coverage than Donald
Trump, and the Democratic primary received substantially less coverage
than the Republican primary.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted that on March 15, Super Tuesday III, the speeches of Trump, Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz
were broadcast in full. Sanders was in Phoenix, Arizona, on that date,
speaking to a rally larger than any of the others, yet his speech was
not mentioned, let alone broadcast.
However, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer wrote in her 2018 book
about the 2016 election that the Democratic primary was effectively over
in terms of delegate count by mid-March 2016, but that the media
promoted the narrative that the contest between Sanders and Clinton was
"heating up" at that time.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in May 2016 found
Clinton and Trump (by then the presumptive Republican nominee) in a
"dead heat," but the same poll found that if Sanders were the Democratic
nominee, 53% of voters would support him to 39% for Trump.
Clinton and Trump were the least popular likely candidates ever polled,
while Sanders received a 43% positive, 36% negative rating.
Polls showed that Democratic voters older than 50 preferred Clinton by a
large margin but that those under 50 overwhelmingly favored Sanders. A 2017 analysis in Newsweek
found that 12% of those who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary
voted for Trump in the general election, enough to swing the election
in his favor.
DNC email leak
In July 2016, a leak of the Democratic National Committee's emails
appeared to show DNC officials favoring Clinton over Sanders. Staff
repeatedly discussed making his irreligious tendencies a potential
campaign issue in southern states and questioned his party loyalty. DNC
chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called his campaign manager "an ASS" and "a damn liar." Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN,
Sanders responded to the leak, saying, "it is an outrage and sad that
you would have people in important positions in the DNC trying to
undermine my campaign. It goes without saying: the function of the DNC
is to represent all of the candidates—to be fair and even-minded. But
again, we discussed this many, many months ago, on this show, so what is
revealed now is not a shock to me."
After the final primary election, Clinton became the presumptive Democratic nominee. On July 12, Sanders formally endorsed Clinton.
He said he would continue to work with the Democratic National
Convention organizers to implement progressive positions. Sanders
refused to formally concede before the convention. He spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention
on July 25, during which he gave Clinton his full support. Some of his
supporters attempted to protest Clinton's nomination and booed when
Sanders called for party unity. He responded, "Our job is to do two
things: to defeat Donald Trump and to elect Hillary Clinton… It is easy to boo, but it is harder to look your kids in the face if we are living under a Trump presidency."
On November 8, in the general election, Sanders received almost 6% of the vote in Vermont, even though he was no longer a candidate. This was the highest share of a statewide presidential vote for a write-indraft campaign in American history. He also received more votes in Vermont than Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, and Jill Stein, the Green candidate, combined. It was possible to vote for Sanders as a write-in candidate in 12 states, and exact totals of write-in votes for him were published in three of them: California, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
In those three states, he received 111,850 write-in votes, about 15% of
the write-in votes nationwide, and less than 1% of total nationwide
vote.
In February 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections
concluded that Russians had communicated false information during the
primary campaigns to help Sanders and Stein and harm Clinton. Sanders rejected the investigation's conclusion, saying that he had seen no evidence that Russians had helped his campaign. Furthermore, he blamed the Clinton campaign for not doing more to prevent Russian interference.
He later said that his campaign had taken action to prevent Russian
meddling in the election and that a campaign staffer had alerted the
Clinton campaign. Politico noted that a Sanders campaign volunteer contacted a political action committee
(PAC) that supported the Clinton campaign to report suspicious
activities but that the Sanders campaign did not contact the Clinton
campaign as such.
In November 2018, the Sanders Institute and Yanis Varoufakis, co-founder of DiEM25, launched Progressive International, an international organization uniting progressive
activists and organizations "to mobilize people around the world to
transform the global order and the institutions that shape it."
Influence on the Democratic Party
Analysts have suggested that Sanders's campaign shifted both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party politically leftward. A new political organization, Brand New Congress,
was formed in April 2016 by former campaign staffers. It works to elect
congressional representatives with platforms in line with Sanders. In August 2016, he formed Our Revolution, a political organization
dedicated to educating voters about issues, getting people involved in
the political process, and electing progressive candidates for local,
state, and national office. Speaking on the PBS Newshour about the upcoming 2018 elections and discussing the main principles of the two major parties, Susan Page
described the Republican Party as "Trump's party" and the Democratic
Party as "Bernie Sanders's party," saying that "Sanders and his more
progressive stance has really taken hold."
Noting the increasing acceptance of his national single-payer
health-care program, his $15-an-hour minimum wage stance, free college
tuition and many of the other campaign platform issues he introduced, an April 2018 opinion article in The Week suggested, "Quietly but steadily, the Democratic Party is admitting that Sanders was right." In July 2016, a Slate
article called the Democratic platform draft "a monument to his
campaign," noting not only his call for a $15 minimum wage, but other
campaign issues, such as Social Security expansion, a carbon tax, Wall
Street reform, opposition to the death penalty, and a "reasoned pathway
for future legalization" of marijuana.
2020 presidential campaign
Sanders campaigning for President in San Jose, California, March 2020
On February 19, 2019, Sanders announced on Vermont Public Radio that he would seek the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States in the 2020 election. On the same day, he announced his campaign in an interview with John Dickerson on CBS This Morning and in an email to his supporters. He had declined the Vermont Democratic Party
nomination for U.S. Senate in 2006, 2012, and 2018, which caused an
unsuccessful legal challenge to his candidacy for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 2016. Along with his 2019 campaign
announcement, he said he would abide by a new Democratic Party rule for
presidential candidates and that he would affirm his membership in that
party.
On March 5, 2019, he signed a formal statement, known as a "loyalty
pledge," that he is a member of the Democratic Party and will serve as a
Democrat if elected. News reports noted that the day before, he had
signed paperwork to run as an independent for reelection to his Senate
seat in 2024.
Given the high national profile that Sanders has maintained since his 2016 campaign, NPR described him as "no longer an underdog" when he announced his 2020 campaign.
Using the large email list it built during the 2016 campaign, the 2020
campaign recruited more than one million volunteers within weeks of its
launch. It enlisted several former NowThis News
employees to produce professional videos for wide social media
distribution, has live-streamed various forums to its millions of social
media followers, and has launched a podcast and smartphone app for grassroots organizing.
Fundraising
Sanders's campaign has employed many of the same methods as its 2016 counterpart, eschewing a Super PAC and relying predominantly on small-dollar contributions. According to Federal Election Commission
filings, the Sanders campaign had raised the most money in the 2020
Democratic field as of June 2019, including money left over from his
2018 Senate and 2016 presidential races. In September 2019, the Sanders campaign became the fastest in U.S. history to reach one million donors.
On October 1, 2019, the campaign announced it had raised $25.3 million
in the year's third quarter, with an average donation of $18. It was the
largest quarterly sum raised by any Democratic candidate. The campaign raised $34.5 million during the fourth quarter of 2019.
Polls and news coverage
Sanders steadily polled between 15–20% on most national surveys between May and September 2019, according to the RealClearPolitics average. This placed him in a decisive second-place behind Joe Biden until Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris caught up in July. From mid-February 2020 to the start of March, Sanders polled in first place in the Democratic primary ahead of Joe Biden and was described by the press as the party's presidential front-runner.
According to a RealClearPolitics analysis, Sanders received the third-most mentions on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC between January and August 2019, trailing only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Biden, however, received twice as many mentions as Sanders and Harris. Mentions of Sanders on ABC World News Tonight
found him in second place, though also trailing Biden by a large
margin. Online mentions "reflect a slightly more balanced picture," with
both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren running "neck-and-neck" with Biden.
Forums and other appearances
On April 6, 2019, Sanders participated in a Fox News town hall that attracted more than 2.55 million viewers. His decision to appear on Fox was controversial given the Democratic National Committee's decision not to allow Fox to host any of its debates.
His appearance saw an increase of Fox News viewers by 24% overall and
40% in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic, surpassing the ratings of all
other Democratic presidential candidate town halls that year. As of
September 2019, the town hall had received more than 1.5 million views
on YouTube.
On August 6, Sanders appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience
podcast. Some praised Rogan for "hosting a pragmatic discussion" while
others "seemed rather stunned by Sanders's decision to appear on the
show at all." After the podcast, Rogan became a top-trending Twitter
topic.
After interviewing him, Rogan said, "I am not right-wing… I've
interviewed right-wing people. I am 100% left-wing… Bernie Sanders made a
ton of sense to me and I would 100% vote for him." As of October 2019, the podcast had received more than ten million views on YouTube.
Presidential debates
In December 2018, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced
the preliminary schedule for 12 official DNC-sanctioned debates, set to
begin in June 2019, with six in 2019 and the remaining six during the
first four months of 2020. During the July and September debates,
commentators described Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as having a "non-aggression pact," staking out similar progressive positions in contrast to the more centrist candidates.
In the October 15 debate, his first appearance since his heart attack,
debate coach Todd Graham gave Sanders's performance an A, his highest
rating of all the candidates.
CNN hosted the first 2020 debate in January with six candidates remaining. Co-moderator Abby Phillip
questioned Sanders and Warren about an allegation Warren had made that
he had privately told her that a woman could not defeat Donald Trump.
Phillip asked Sanders, "Senator Sanders, CNN reported yesterday, and
Senator Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that
you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say
that?" Ignoring Sanders's strong denial, Phillip asked Warren, "What
did you think when Bernie Sanders told you that a woman couldn't become
president?" In an interview after the debate, Sanders called it
ludicrous to believe that he would doubt a woman's ability to win the
presidency and noted that a woman already had won, saying, "After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."
Suspension of campaign
Sanders announced that he was suspending his campaign on April 8, 2020.
He stated that he would remain on the ballot in the remaining states
and continue to accumulate delegates with the goal of influencing the
Democratic Party's platform.
Political positions
A self-described "democratic socialist," Sanders is a progressive who admires the Nordic model of social democracy and has been a proponent of workplace democracy. He advocates for universal and single-payer healthcare, paid parental leave, as well as tuition-free tertiary education. He supports lowering the cost of drugs by reforming patent laws to allow cheaper generic versions to be sold in the U.S. He supported the Affordable Care Act, though he said it did not go far enough.
In November 2015, he gave a speech at Georgetown University about his view of democratic socialism, including its place in the policies of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. In defining what democratic socialism
means to him, Sanders said: "I don't believe government should take
over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production,
but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who
produce the wealth of America deserve a decent standard of living and
that their incomes should go up, not down. I do believe in private
companies that thrive and invest and grow in America, companies that
create jobs here, rather than companies that are shutting down in
America and increasing their profits by exploiting low-wage labor
abroad."
Based on his positions and votes throughout his career, many
commentators consider his political platform based on tax-funded social
benefits and not on social ownership of the means of production. Some have described Sanders's political philosophy as "welfarism" or "social democracy" but not democratic socialism defined as "an attempt to create a property-free, socialist society."
Some members of various U.S. socialist parties and organizations have
said that Sanders is a reformer of capitalism, not a socialist. Others distinguish among socialism, social democracy, and democratic socialism, and describe his philosophy as extending from such existing liberal programs in the U.S. as Social Security and Medicare, and more consistent with the social democracy found in much of Europe, especially the Nordic countries. Noam Chomsky and Thomas Frank have described Sanders as "a New Dealer." Other observers, such as Lane Kenworthy and Bhaskar Sunkara, suggest that his views are more closely related to those of social democrats.
Believing greater emphasis is needed on labor rights and
environmental concerns when negotiating international trade agreements,
Sanders voted against and has long spoken against NAFTA, CAFTA, and PNTR with China.
He has called them a "disaster for the American worker," saying that
they have resulted in American corporations moving abroad. He also
opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he says was "written by corporate America and the pharmaceutical industry and Wall Street." On May 1, 2019, he tweeted: "Since the China trade deal
I voted against, America has lost over three million manufacturing
jobs. It's wrong to pretend that China isn't one of our major economic
competitors."
Sanders supports Palestinians' rights and has criticized Israel on several occasions. In 2020, he described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as a platform for bigotry and said he would not attend its conference. He condemned Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, saying, "It would dramatically undermine the prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, and severely, perhaps irreparably, damage the United States' ability to broker that peace."
Addressing Westminster College
in a September 2017 speech, Sanders laid out a foreign policy plan for
greater international collaboration, adherence to U.S.-led international
agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal framework,
and promoting human rights and democratic ideals. He emphasized the
consequences associated with global economic inequality and climate
change, and urged reining in the use of U.S. military power, saying it
"must always be a last resort." He also criticized U.S. support for "murderous regimes" during the Cold War, such as those in Iran, Chile and El Salvador, and said that those actions continue to make the U.S. less safe. He also spoke critically of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections and the way President Trump has handled the crisis. He does not consider Turkey a U.S. ally, and condemned the Turkish military offensive against U.S.-aligned Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria.
Gun laws
Sanders supports banning assault weapons, universal federal background checks for gun purchases, and closing the gun show loophole. In 1990, he was supported by the National Rifle Association
in his bid to become a U.S. Representative in exchange for opposing
both the competing campaign of Peter Smith, who had reversed his stance
on firearm restrictions, and waiting periods for handgun purchases. In 1993, while a U.S. Representative, he voted against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act
(which established background checks and wait periods), and in 2005
voted for legislation that gave gun manufacturers legal immunity against
claims of negligence, but as of 2016 he has since said that he would support repealing that law. In 1996, he voted against additional funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
for research on issues related to firearms, but in 2016, he called for
an increase in CDC funding for the study of gun violence.
He advocated for LGBT rights as Burlington mayor in 1983 and voted against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.
In 2006, he indicated that the time was not right for legalizing
same-sex marriage nationally, describing the issue as one that should be
handled at the state level; but then in 2009, he supported the legalizing same-sex marriage in Vermont, which was enacted that year.
Trump administration
Sanders criticized President Trump for appointing multiple billionaires to his cabinet. He criticized Trump's rolling back President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, noting the scientifically reported effect on climate change of human activity and citing Trump's calling those reports a hoax. He called for caution on the Syrian Civil War, saying, "it's easier to get into a war than out of one." He has promised to defeat "Trump and Trumpism and the Republican right-wing ideology."
Sanders gave an online reply to Trump's January 2018 State of the
Union address in which he called Trump "compulsively dishonest" and
criticized him for initiating "a looming immigration crisis" by ending
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
program. He voiced concern about Trump's failure to mention the finding
that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and "will likely
interfere in the 2018 midterms we will be holding… Unless you have a
very special relationship with Mr. Putin."
Party affiliations
Born into a Democratic-voting family, Sanders was first introduced to political activism when his brother Larry joined the Young Democrats of America and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson II in 1956. Sanders joined Vermont's Liberty Union Party in 1971 and was a candidate for several offices, never coming close to winning election. He became party chairman, but quit in 1977 to become an independent. In 1980, he served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party.
In 1981, Sanders ran as an independent for mayor of Burlington,
Vermont, and defeated the Democratic incumbent; he was reelected three
times. Although an independent, he endorsed Democratic presidential candidates Walter Mondale in 1984 and Jesse Jackson in 1988.
His endorsement of Mondale was lukewarm (telling reporters that "if you
go around saying that Mondale would be a great president, you would be a
liar and a hypocrite"), but he supported Jackson enthusiastically. The Washington Post reported that the Jackson campaign helped inspire Sanders to work more closely with the Democratic Party.
Sanders first ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1988 and for the U.S. Senate in 2006,
each time adopting a strategy of winning the Democratic Party primary,
thereby eliminating Democratic challengers, and then running as an
independent in the general election. He continued this strategy through his reelection in the 2018 United States Senate election in Vermont. Throughout his tenure in Congress, he has been listed as an independent. He caucused with Democrats in the House while refusing to join the party, and continues to caucus with Democrats in the Senate.
Some conservative southern House Democrats initially barred him from
the caucus as they believed that allowing a self-described socialist to
join would harm their electoral prospects. He soon came to work constructively with Democrats, voting with the party over 90% of the time during his tenure in Congress.
Starting with his 2016 presidential campaign, Sanders's
announcements suggested that not only was he running as a Democrat, but
that he would run as a Democrat in future elections.
When challenged by Clinton about his party commitment, he said, "Of
course I am a Democrat and running for the Democratic nomination."
Since he remained a Senator elected as an independent, his U.S. Senate
website and press materials continued to refer to him as an independent
during the campaign and upon his return to the Senate. In October 2017, Sanders said he would run for reelection as an independent in 2018 despite pressure to run as a Democrat.
His party status became ambiguous again in March 2019 when he signed a
formal "loyalty pledge" to the Democratic Party stating that he was a
member of the party and would serve as a Democrat if elected president.
He signed the pledge the day after he signed paperwork to run as an
independent for reelection to the Senate in 2024.
After Trump's victory in the 2016 elections, Sanders suggested
the Democratic Party undergo a series of reforms and that it "break
loose from its corporate establishment ties and, once again, become a
grass-roots party of working people, the elderly and the poor." He drew parallels between his campaign and that of the Labour Party in the 2017 UK general election. He wrote in The New York Times
that "the British elections should be a lesson for the Democratic
Party" and urged the Democrats to stop holding on to an "overly
cautious, centrist ideology," arguing that "momentum shifted to Labour
after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much
enthusiasm among young people and workers." He had earlier praised Jeremy Corbyn's stance on class issues.
Personal life
Sanders with his wife Jane O'Meara in Des Moines, Iowa, January 2016
In 1963, Sanders and Deborah Shiling Messing, whom he met in college, volunteered for several months on the Israeli kibbutzSha'ar HaAmakim. They married in 1964 and bought a summer home in Vermont; they had no children and divorced in 1966. His son (and only biological child), Levi Sanders, was born in 1969 to then-girlfriend Susan Campbell Mott.
On May 28, 1988, Sanders married Jane O'Meara Driscoll (née Mary Jane O'Meara), who later became president of Burlington College, in Burlington, Vermont. The day after their wedding, the couple visited the Soviet Union as part of an official delegation in his capacity as mayor. They own a row house in Capitol Hill, a house in Burlington's New North End neighborhood, and a lakefront summer home in North Hero. He considers Jane's three children—Dave Driscoll (born 1975), Carina Driscoll (born 1974), and Heather Titus (née Driscoll; 1971)—to be his own. He also has seven grandchildren, three (including one who was adopted) through his son Levi and four through his stepchildren.
On October 1, 2019, Sanders was hospitalized after experiencing chest pains at a campaign event in Las Vegas. His campaign announced the next day that a blockage had been found in one coronary artery and two stents inserted. Scheduled campaign events and appearances were canceled until further notice. Two days later his campaign released a statement that he had been diagnosed with a heart attack. He was released from the hospital the same day. The statement included the following from Sanders's doctors:
After presenting to an outside facility with chest pain, Sen. Sanders was diagnosed with a myocardial infarction.
He was immediately transferred to Desert Springs Hospital Medical
Center. The senator was stable upon arrival and taken immediately to the
cardiac catheterization laboratory, at which time two stents were
placed in a blocked coronary artery in a timely fashion. All other
arteries were normal. His hospital course was uneventful with good
expected progress. He was discharged with instructions to follow up with
his personal physician.
A few days after returning home, Sanders addressed media outside his
home and said he had experienced fatigue and chest discomfort for a
month or two before the incident; he expressed regret for not seeking
medical assessment sooner: "I was dumb."
Sanders made his first national appearance after his heart attack
on October 15 at the Democratic debate, at which he said, "I'm healthy,
I'm feeling great." When asked how he would reassure voters about his
health and ability to take on the duties of the presidency, he said, "We
are going to be mounting a vigorous campaign all over this country.
That is how I think I can reassure the American people." It was noted
that he was "lively and sharp at the debate."
In December 2019, three months after the heart attack, Sanders released letters from three physicians, Attending Physician of CongressBrian P. Monahan and two cardiologists, who declared Sanders healthy and recovered from his heart condition.
Honors and awards
On December 4, 2015, Sanders won Time's 2015 Person of the Year readers' poll with 10.2% of the vote but did not receive the editorial board's award. On March 20, 2016, he was given an honorary Coast Salish name, dxʷshudičup, by Deborah Parker in Seattle to honor his focus on Native American issues during his presidential campaign.
In December 1987, during his tenure as mayor of Burlington, Sanders recorded a folk album, We Shall Overcome, with 30 Vermont musicians. As he was not a skilled singer, he performed his vocals in a talking blues style. He appeared in a cameo role in the 1988 comedy-drama film Sweet Hearts Dance, playing a man who distributes candy to young trick-or-treaters. In 1999, he acted in the film My X-Girlfriend's Wedding Reception, playing Rabbi Manny Shevitz. In this role he mourned the Brooklyn Dodgers' move to Los Angeles, reflecting Sanders's own upbringing in Brooklyn. On February 6, 2016, he was a guest star alongside Larry David on Saturday Night Live, playing a Polish immigrant on a steamship that was sinking near the Statue of Liberty.
Religion, heritage, and values
As Sanders described his upbringing as an American Jew in a 2016 speech: his father generally attended synagogue only on Yom Kippur; he attended public schools while his mother "chafed" at his yeshiva Sunday schooling at a Hebrew school; and their religious observances were mostly limited to Passoverseders with their neighbors. Larry Sanders said of their parents, "They were very pleased to be Jews, but didn't have a strong belief in God." Bernie had a bar mitzvah at the historic Kingsway Jewish Center in Midwood, Brooklyn, where he grew up.
In 1963, in cooperation with the Labor Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, Sanders and his first wife volunteered at Sha'ar HaAmakim, a kibbutz in northern Israel. His motivation for the trip was as much socialistic as it was Zionistic.
As mayor of Burlington, Sanders allowed a Chabadpublic menorah to be placed at city hall, an action the ACLU contested. He publicly inaugurated the Hanukkahmenorah and performed the Jewish religious ritual of blessing Hanukkah candles. His early and strong support played a significant role in the now widespread public menorah celebrations around the globe. When asked about his Jewish heritage, Sanders has said that he is "proud to be Jewish."
Sanders rarely speaks about religion. He describes himself as "not particularly religious" and "not actively involved" with organized religion. A press package issued by his office states his religion as Jewish.
He has said he believes in God, but not necessarily in a traditional
way: "I think everyone believes in God in their own ways," he said. "To
me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and
that we are all tied together." In October 2015, on the late-night talk showJimmy Kimmel Live!,
Kimmel asked him, "You say you are culturally Jewish and you don't feel
religious; do you believe in God and do you think that's important to
the people of the United States?" Sanders replied:
I am who I am, and what I believe
in and what my spirituality is about is that we're all in this together.
That I think it is not a good thing to believe as human beings we can
turn our backs on the suffering of other people… and this is not
Judaism, this is what Pope Francis is talking about, that we can't just
worship billionaires and the making of more and more money. Life is more
than that.
In 2016, he disclosed that he had "very strong religious and
spiritual feelings," adding, "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."
Sanders does not regularly attend synagogue, and he does not refrain from working on Rosh Hashanah, as observant Jews do. He has attended yahrzeit observances in memory of the deceased, for the father of a friend, and in 2015 attended a Tashlikh, an atonement ceremony, with the mayor of Lynchburg on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah. According to his close friend Richard Sugarman, a professor of religious studies at the University of Vermont, Sanders's Jewish identity is "certainly more ethnic and cultural than religious." Deborah Dash Moore, a Judaic scholar at the University of Michigan, has said that Sanders has a particular type of "ethnic Jewishness that is out of style these days among American Jews." His wife is Roman Catholic, and he has often expressed admiration for Pope Francis, saying that "the leader of the Catholic Church
is raising profound issues. It is important that we listen to what he
has said." He has said he feels very close to Francis's economic
teachings, describing him as "incredibly smart and brave." In April 2016, he accepted an invitation from Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, an aide close to Francis, to speak at a Vatican conference on economic and environmental issues. While at the Vatican, he met briefly with Francis.
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