Ignore the man behind the curtain.
Via NRO:
The Vermont senator’s history of taxing hospitals, getting slapped, and IRA meetings, and his “honorary woman” status
1) Longtime friend and supporter Garrison Nelson, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, told The New Yorker in 2015, “Bernie’s the last person you’d want to be stuck on a desert island with. Two weeks of lectures about health care, and you’d look for a shark and dive in.”
2) In 2016, he probably received more write-in votes for president, without running in the general election, than anyone else in American history. Only eight states count write-in votes for candidates who did not file paperwork to run in the general election.
In 2016, 18,218 Vermont voters wrote in his name in the presidential general election, which was 5.8 percent of the total vote. That was more than libertarian Gary Johnson and Green-party nominee Jill Stein — combined. In California, Sanders got 79,341, which was more than Evan McMullin; in Pennsylvania, Sanders had 6,060; in New Hampshire, Sanders won 4,493; and in Rhode Island, 3,497 (again ahead of McMullin). Among the states that counted write-in votes, Sanders had 111,609 votes.
In 1996, Green-party nominee Ralph Nader received 685,297 votes, but he was a write-in candidate in some states and listed on the ballot in others.
3) His first campaign for public office started because he simply showed up and volunteered. In 1971, Vermont Republican senator Winston Prouty died, setting up a special election. A young Bernie Sanders chose to attend the meeting of the newly formed Liberty Union party, which he described in his memoir as “a small peace-oriented third party.” (The party called for “nonviolent revolutionary socialism” and compared the draft to slavery.)
In Sanders’s account, he became the candidate for Senate because at the meeting the party needed a candidate; he raised his hand and volunteered. He won 2 percent statewide. In the subsequent decade, Sanders twice ran as the Liberty Union party’s candidate for Senate and twice for governor, never winning more than 6 percent of the vote. During this time, he declared on the campaign trail that the Central Intelligence Agency was “a dangerous institution that has got to go,” and that “right-wing lunatics use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
By the time Sanders was elected to Congress, the Liberty Union party saw him as a sellout, calling him “Bernie the Bomber,” charging “Bernie became an imperialist to get elected in 1990” and declaring, “Bernie’s selling out says clearly to working people and those unable to find work that even leftists become mainstream politicians, when and if they win office.” The group also observed that, at the time, Sanders had “no person of color on his staff.”