How Bernie Sanders went from a small-city mayor to a progressive hero

• Bernie Sanders has become a towering figure in American politics. It wasn’t always that way.
• He got his start in government as a small-town mayor, decades before his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
• Here’s everything to know about the Democratic socialist senator.

Bernie Sanders is known today as perhaps the most important leader on the American left. It wasn’t always that way.

Long before his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns helped steer the Democratic Party leftward, the Vermont senator was a lonely voice in American politics — the rare politician willing to call himself a “socialist” in a country defined heavily by its opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Sanders was born on September 8, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York to a . “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

The 82-year-old Vermont senator, the second-oldest US senator behind the 90-year-old Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, announced in May that he would seek reelection, saying that the 2024 election is “the most consequential election in our lifetimes.”

That puts him on a glide path to a fourth term. If he serves a full six year, he will be 89 at the end of his next term in 2031.