
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
Four key figures in Bernie Sanders’s quest for the White House on what really happened.

Four key figures in Bernie Sanders’s quest for the White House on what really happened.

Bernie Sanders is prepared to fight to win $2,000 survival checks for all. While Senate Democrats were prepared to do nothing to challenge Mitch McConnell, Sanders is pledging to filibuster a Pentagon veto override to provide real help for millions of Americans struggling to survive.

For months, Bernie Sanders has been making a case for the multitrillion-dollar reform bill he’s spearheaded in the Senate. Now, he’s taken that case to Joe Manchin’s home turf in West Virginia — and is facing backlash from the mainstream media for breaching the norms of Beltway etiquette.

The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not guarantee all its citizens health insurance, family leave, childcare, and a college education. The Democratic Party elites opposing Bernie Sanders and these measures aren’t “moderates” — they’re conservatives.

A look at recent bottom-up efforts to win endorsements for Bernie Sanders and mobilize trade unionists against Donald Trump offer insights into how the labor movement can better and more democratically engage its members in politics.

As he campaigns for Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders is laying out a progressive agenda for 2025. It’s a program that a Harris administration could conceivably get behind, but Sanders and his allies need a way to force it to do so.

American workers spend way more time on the clock than their counterparts in other rich countries. A new bill from Bernie Sanders seeks to change that, by shrinking the workweek to 32 hours with no loss in pay.

Bernie Sanders often argues, “Beating Trump is not good enough.” This is an understatement. The world quite literally depends on us winning a political revolution. Only Bernie has a plan for that.

Top leaders in Unite Here Local 226 in Las Vegas have been circulating attacks on Bernie Sanders and his Medicare for All proposal. They should listen to their membership and stop slandering the most pro-worker candidate in the race.

In 2016, union leaders admired Bernie Sanders’s long track record of fighting for the working class but considered him “unfeasible.” That’s no longer the case. Organized labor must back Sanders’s 2020 campaign.

State support for the arts in the United States pales in comparison to arts funding overseas. Bernie Sanders could change that.

Bernie Sanders delivered a major speech on Medicare for All yesterday. He knows who his enemies are: the pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and their friends in elected office — and he's spoiling for a fight with them.

Right now, the best thing Brazil’s far-right president has going for him is Donald Trump. If Bernie Sanders is elected, that all changes.

No other presidential candidate has anywhere near as strong a platform on public education as Bernie Sanders. That’s why America’s teachers’ unions should endorse him for president.
Jacobin contributors on Bernie Sanders' democratic socialism speech and what his candidacy means for the Left.

Bernie Sanders’s campaign was never about simply electing him — it was about a broader commitment to fighting for a better world in elections, workplaces, and the streets. For Students for Bernie alumni like me, the question isn’t whether we continue organizing, but how.

As Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders could do a lot to empower American workers. But the working class might be better served with Bernie pushing for pro-labor legislation outside the Biden administration rather than inside it.

For decades, neoliberal Democrats have chipped away at the gains made through New Deal reforms. Bernie Sanders wants to deepen and defend those gains.

Electing Bernie Sanders president wouldn’t be enough to fight climate change. But his class-struggle politics give us the best chance we have to take on the fossil fuel companies.

The Amazon rainforest is close to an irreversible tipping point. By centering it in his foreign policy, Bernie Sanders can further distinguish himself while pushing his rivals.