Bernie Announces Run for President #SenSanders #BernieSanders #VT

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The official statement has been made, the Independent Senator from Vermont is running for President! I've had the great pleasure of crossing paths with Bernie Sanders over the years and I look forward to seeing him on the 2016 campaign trail.

Campaigning in NH for Obama in 2008
More images: http://photosbynanci.smugmug.com/Vermont-Politics/Obama-2008

Some Bernie facts:
Bernie Sanders was born on September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants, Dorothy (née Glassberg) and Eli Sanders. He attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn, where he ran for his school's track team and from which he graduated in 1959.

Sanders spent a year studying psychology at Brooklyn College before transferring to the University of Chicago. While a student in 1963, Sanders was active in the Civil Rights Movement, becoming a student organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was one of several thousand students who traveled on buses to Washington, D.C., for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Sanders graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts in political science.

After graduating, Sanders spent time on an Israeli kibbutz. In 1964, he moved to Vermont, where he worked as a carpenter, filmmaker, writer, and researcher, among other jobs.

In 1981, at the suggestion of his friend Richard Sugarman, a professor of religion at the University of Vermont, Sanders ran for Mayor of Burlington and defeated six-term Democratic incumbent Gordon Paquette by 10 votes in a four-way contest. Sanders won three more terms, defeating both Democratic and Republican candidates. In his final run for Mayor in 1987, Sanders defeated a candidate endorsed by both major parties.

In 1988, incumbent Republican Congressman Jim Jeffords decided to run for the U.S. Senate, vacating Vermont's at-large congressional district. Republican Lieutenant Governor Peter Smith won the House election with a plurality of 41% of the vote. Sanders, who ran as an independent, placed second with 38% of the vote, while Democrat State Representative Paul N. Poirier placed third with 19% of the vote. In 1990, Sanders ran for the seat again and defeated Smith in a rematch, 56%–40%. Sanders became the first independent elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 40 years, since Frazier Reams of Ohio. Thereafter Sanders continually won reelection with high margins, with his closest bid in 1994 during the Republican Revolution, when he won just 50% of the vote.

Campaigning in Woodstock VT 2012

Sanders runs for office as an independent but caucuses with the Democratic Party and is counted as a Democrat for purposes of committee assignments. He was the only independent member of the House during most of his service and is the longest-serving independent in U.S. Congressional history.

Sanders with his wife, Jane and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Dem-MA)
At The VDP Curtis Awards 2014
VDP Curtis Awards Dinner 20014


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