Bernie Sanders Before the Presidential Runs: Ten Votes and the Burlington Years

Bernie Sanders lost four statewide races in Vermont between 1972 and 1976 and never cleared seven percent in any of them. On March 3, 1981 he won the mayor’s office in Burlington by ten votes, and he kept it for four terms. He has been a United States senator since 2007 and was Vermont’s lone member of the House for sixteen years before that, but the eight years running Burlington are where the politics got built and tested.

Brooklyn, then Chicago

Sanders was born in Brooklyn on September 8, 1941. His father, Eliasz Sanders, was a Jewish immigrant from Słopnice in Poland; his mother, Dorothy Glassberg, was born in New York. He went to P.S. 197 and to James Madison High School, where he captained the track team, spent a year at Brooklyn College, and transferred to the University of Chicago, taking a political science degree in 1964.

He joined the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in the fall of 1961 and was voted its chairman before that school year was out. In January 1962 students had established that the university, whose dormitories were integrated, owned off-campus apartment buildings that were not. Sanders spoke to about two hundred students on the administration building steps and then led a few dozen of them inside to sit down on the fifth floor outside the president’s office. The Associated Press has his line from that afternoon:

We feel it is an intolerable situation, when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments.

The sit-in ran fifteen days. The university ended racial segregation in its private housing by the summer of 1963.

On August 12, 1963, by the Chicago Tribune’s count, police arrested fifty-six people at a protest in Englewood against the Willis wagons, the mobile classroom trailers that schools superintendent Benjamin Willis parked outside crowded Black schools rather than bus the children to better-resourced schools in white neighborhoods. Dick Gregory was one of the fifty-six. So was Sanders, then twenty-one, charged with resisting arrest, found guilty, and fined $25. Sixteen days later he was in the crowd at the March on Washington. The photograph of his arrest sat unidentified in the paper’s archive until reporters dug it out in 2016, during his first presidential campaign.

Four losing campaigns and one record album

Sanders moved to Vermont in 1968 and settled in Stannard. In the 1970s he ran four times for statewide office on the ticket of the Liberty Union Party, and the results were: 1,571 votes in the 1972 special election for Senate, 2.2 percent; 2,175 for governor that November, 1.1 percent; 5,901 for Senate in 1974, 4.1 percent; and 11,317 for governor in 1976, 6.1 percent. Then he stopped running for a while.

What he did next was make a record about a man who lost five presidential elections. Working as director of the American People’s Historical Society, a small operation he ran out of Burlington, Sanders wrote and produced a half-hour documentary on Eugene V. Debs, and Folkways Records released the audio as album FH 5571 in 1979. The Smithsonian, which absorbed the Folkways catalog, still carries it.

Ten votes

Gordon Paquette had been mayor of Burlington for ten years and was running for a sixth term. The Burlington Free Press projected he would win by more than thirty points. Sanders came at him on property taxes:

After 10 years as mayor and 13 years as an alderman, I am rather amazed that the only idea he can come up with for raising revenue is to increase the tax on homeowners.

The coalition behind him was an odd one for a socialist. Sanders has described it as women’s groups, housing advocates, and the Burlington Patrolmen’s Association, which represented the city’s police officers. A third candidate, Richard Bove, drew 1,091 votes after failing to get the Democratic nomination. On election night, March 3, 1981, Sanders led by twenty-two votes out of 9,880 cast. His people woke Superior Court Judge Edwin Amidon at two in the morning to impound the paper ballots. The recount brought the margin down to ten, and Paquette let it stand.

The aldermen fired his secretary

Sanders was sworn in on April 6, 1981 with eleven of the thirteen aldermen against him. They fired the secretary he had brought with him, on the grounds that he had skipped the hiring procedure. They rejected his appointments to city posts outright and rode over his vetoes. John Franco Jr., who served as an assistant city attorney under Sanders, described the first stretch to the Boston Globe in 2015:

It was like Omaha Beach. They kept driving us back into the sea again and again.

He governed anyway. His new treasurer turned up a $1.9 million surplus buried in the existing budget. The city bought a fleet of snowplows and repaved its streets, and one of the administration’s first programs, Operation Snow Shovel, sent young people out to clear snow for elderly and disabled residents.

He fixed the board at the ballot box. In March 1982 a coalition of independents and Citizens Party candidates took three aldermanic seats, giving Sanders five of thirteen, one more than he needed to make a veto stick. A year later he was re-elected with 6,942 votes and 52 percent, running against a Democrat and a Republican at the same time. He won again in 1985 and 1987 and left the office on April 4, 1989.

What eight years in city hall built

After the 1983 re-election Sanders set up the Community and Economic Development Office, which handled housing, small business, jobs, and public access to the waterfront, and Neighborhood Planning Assemblies, ward-level meetings with small budgets and a voice in how federal block grant money got spent.

The durable one is housing. In 1984 the city put $200,000 of surplus money into the new Burlington Community Land Trust, the first municipally funded community land trust in the United States. The mechanism is simple: the trust holds the land permanently, the buyer owns the building, and the resale formula keeps the price within reach of the next buyer instead of handing the appreciation to the last one. It operates today as the Champlain Housing Trust, with roughly 2,800 affordable units by The Nation’s 2015 count. Sanders picks the land trust himself: he has called creating it one of his proudest accomplishments as mayor.

The waterfront, and the part that gets told wrong

In October 1983 the Alden Corporation bought twelve acres of Burlington’s rail waterfront and proposed to fill it with condominiums, offices, retail space, a hotel, and a parking garage. Sanders backed the plan. He argued it was the best deal the city was going to get for a derelict waterfront, and he campaigned for the bond it needed. In December 1985 the bond won a majority of Burlington voters and fell short of the two-thirds it required, beaten by environmentalists including Rick Sharp, Bea Bookchin, and Sandy Baird, and by a school board that came out against it shortly before the vote.

The bike path, the public beach, the community boathouse, and the science center that sit on that ground today were built afterward, by Sanders and by his successor Peter Clavelle, once the private plan was dead. The often-told version, that Sanders saved the waterfront from the developers, compresses two different fights into one. The Nation’s 2015 account credits him with beating back an earlier, larger private plan for the same shoreline; Molly Walsh’s reporting in Seven Days documents that when the Alden plan came, he backed it, campaigned for its bond, and lost. Both are true of different proposals, and the public waterfront got built out of the wreckage of the second one.

A mayor with a foreign policy

Burlington’s mayor also wrote to presidents. In October 1983, with the CIA funding the contras in Nicaragua, Sanders sent Ronald Reagan a letter preserved with his mayoral papers at the University of Vermont:

At a time when your administration has imposed horrendous cutbacks to the American people in such areas as housing, aid to education, environmental protection and health care, I am appalled that you are using taxpayers’ money to destroy the government of a small nation.

The Board of Aldermen approved a sister city arrangement with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, in 1984. In July 1985 Sanders flew to Managua for the sixth anniversary of the Sandinista government and was, according to Seven Days, the only U.S. government official present. On October 14, 1988 he signed a sister city agreement with Alexander Ryabkov, the mayor of Yaroslavl in the Soviet Union. The letters and the trip records sit with his mayoral papers at the University of Vermont.

Washington

Sanders ran for governor of Vermont as an independent in 1986 and took 14.4 percent. He ran for the state’s single House seat in 1988 and lost to Republican Peter Plympton Smith by about three points. He ran again in 1990 and won with 117,522 votes, 56 percent to Smith’s 39.5, then co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus in 1991. Sixteen years in the House, and then the Senate seat in 2006 with 171,638 votes and about 65 percent. He is the longest serving independent in the history of the United States Congress.

On September 13, 2017 he introduced the Medicare for All Act, S. 1804, with sixteen Senate cosponsors. The single-payer bill was referred to the Committee on Finance, and no version of it has become law. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020 and finished second both times, the second campaign under the slogan Not me, us. He describes himself as a democratic socialist. Burlington elected him four times.

The Debs record is still in the Smithsonian Folkways catalog under the name Bernard Sanders: a Vermont man who had just lost four elections in a row, telling the life of a man who lost five. He made it in 1979. Two years later he won one, by ten votes.