Bernie Sanders

Bernard Sanders is an American politician and activist who is the senior United States senator from the state of Vermont. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, but maintains a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career and sought the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. Sanders has been viewed as one of the main leaders of the modern American progressive movement.
Born into a working-class Jewish family and raised in New York, Sanders attended Brooklyn College before graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964. While a student, he was a protest organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. After settling in Vermont in 1968, he ran unsuccessful third-party political campaigns in the 1970s. He was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 as an independent and was reelected three times.
Sanders was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, representing Vermont's at-large congressional district.