Burlington, March 1981: The Calm Before the Storm
After his narrow election as mayor, the fight for Bernie Sanders to carry out a progressive agenda in Burlington, Vermont was just beginning. Sanders and his allies had to fight through a recount, grapple with a looming fiscal crisis, and overcome incessantly hostile opponents in the city who refused to give Bernie an inch.
Bernie Sanders, mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in his office at City Hall on March 1, 1985. (Donna Light / Getty Images)
In early March 1981, Bernie Sanders had gotten, and given Burlingtonians, the shock of a lifetime by narrowly defeating five-term incumbent Gordon Paquette for the mayor’s seat. He faced a looming fiscal crisis, an unfriendly political and business establishment, a host of ambitious promises he had made to city workers and voters, and a board of Democratic aldermen far from eager to cooperate with the man who had just given them a historic routing.
But before he could deal with all that, he still had to win an election.
Sanders’s margin of victory, a mere twenty-two votes, was extremely narrow. Expecting a recount, he and his team had acted quickly, asking Superior Court Judge Edwin Amidon at 2 AM in the morning after the election to impound all paper ballots. They wanted no funny business.
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