Bernie Sanders has been in elected office since 1981. He was mayor of Burlington, Vermont for eight years, then a congressman for 16, then a senator since 2007. He ran for president twice — in 2016 and 2020 — and both times changed what was considered politically possible to say out loud in American politics.
He is 84 years old. He is not slowing down.
The Committees
Sanders is Ranking Member of the Senate HELP Committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) in the 119th Congress — the top Democrat on a committee with jurisdiction over healthcare, education policy, minimum wage, and labor rights. He uses the role aggressively: holding hearings on pharmaceutical pricing, CEO pay, and healthcare costs that generate attention disproportionate to his minority status.
He also serves on the Finance Committee (tax, trade, healthcare financing), the Budget Committee, and the Environment and Public Works Committee — a portfolio that covers nearly every major domestic policy domain he’s spent his career on.
The Record
His congressional record is the most consistent in modern American politics. He has held the same positions — Medicare for All, $15 minimum wage, free public college, wealth taxes — for 40 years. The country gradually moved toward him on several of them.
His biggest legislative win came through the democratic process in an unexpected way: the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included significant climate investments and drug pricing reforms he had pushed for decades. He still called it insufficient.
The Presidential Campaigns
2016: Won 23 states in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton, who had every institutional advantage. He popularized the term “democratic socialist” as something other than a political liability.
2020: Won the Nevada caucuses and was the frontrunner before a coordinated consolidation of moderate candidates behind Biden. He endorsed Biden quickly and used his leverage to move the party platform on healthcare, climate, and education.
The Money
He doesn’t take corporate PAC money. He never has. His 2024 Vermont re-election raised $18.4M — astronomical for a small state — almost entirely from small-dollar donors who followed him from the presidential campaigns. The average contribution is consistently under $30.
What They’re Watching
Whether Sanders’s influence on the Democratic Party persists after he leaves — and whether the next generation of progressives can hold the institutional gains he helped establish. He has spent his career building a movement. The question is whether the movement can survive without the candidate who built it.