Sanders Is Back As Left’s Kingmaker

BY ELIZA COLLINS

STANFORD, Calif.—A decade after his first bid for the White House ended in failure, Bernie Sanders is still trying to take over the Democratic Party.

The Vermont senator has pulled his colleagues dramatically leftward and is trying to position himself as the party’s kingmaker.

He speaks at least once a week to Zohran Mamdani, an acolyte who pulled off a major upset to become mayor of New York City, where progressive policies will now be tested on a population of roughly 8.5 million people.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), another protégée, is considering a run for the White House or a bid to take Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat when he is up for re-election in 2028. On whether she should challenge Schumer, Sanders said it’s her decision but added, “I’m a big fan of Alexandria’s.”

Sanders, who is 84, has said he doesn’t think he will run

for president again. But as Democrats trip over themselves to come up with a cohesive strategy to win back congressional majorities and effectively take on President Trump, Sanders has built a formidable political machine to spread progressive policies and support likeminded candidates, many of whom are young and new to politics.

He has assembled an email list with more than five million contacts he can tap for fundraising and organizing. In the wake of Trump 2.0, more than 8,500 people have expressed interest in running for office by signing up through his organization. It is one of, if not the, largest initiatives of its kind, far surpassing efforts by national Democratic organizations. He raised hundreds of millions in small dollar donations for his own presidential campaigns. Other progressives, such as Ocasio-Cortez, are also raking in cash.

During a recent nationwide rally tour, Sanders drew hundreds of thousands of people, the biggest crowds of his career, who listened to him pitch his prescription for how Democrats can start winning again. And on Capitol Hill, the party sounds more and more like him—even moderates in the Senate now complain about billionaires and income inequality.

“You know what? Maybe Bernie was not so crazy,” Sanders said in an interview after a Stanford University event. The Democratic Party, he said, has learned some of what he has spent decades trying to teach it, but “as much as I would like? No.”

The self-described Democratic socialist has gained a remarkable foothold in a party he technically isn’t a part of. (Sanders is an independent who caucuses with Democrats; he was re-elected to his Senate seat in 2024.) But the question remains: Can Sanders’s version of the party actually beat Republicans?

While the progressive roster has grown dramatically since 2016, the group’s success has largely come from taking out other Democrats in primaries and then cruising to victory in general elections that aren’t competitive.

Trump returned to the White House in 2024 by increasing his margins with nearly every demographic group. Afterward, Democratic elites argued party leaders had become too focused on social issues or had offered unrealistic solutions to voters’ problems.

Liberals, on the other hand, said the party didn’t go far enough left. Without anything to excite them, many voters stayed at home or gave Trump another chance, they said.

The debate is far from settled, though the party as a whole has begun to zero in on affordability as a winning issue— which the liberal wing sees as a sign of their ascendancy.

Mamdani, a little-known New York state assemblyman, shocked the establishment last year when he beat former governor Andrew Cuomo to become mayor of New York City in a campaign focused on the city’s high cost of living.

In an interview, Mamdani said he has always seen Sanders as a political North Star. When he ran for the New York State Assembly in 2020, his first campaign event collected signatures at a Sanders presidential rally, and he used other Sanders events to increase turnout and support for his candidacy.

On Sunday, the senator joined Mamdani at his first 100 days rally. The crowd chanted “Bernie! Bernie!” as he walked on stage to flashing lights and blaring AC/DC.

Schumer clash

This year, Sanders is pushing his candidates in a handful of the most important races in the country. In some cases, he is clashing with Democratic leadership, who see their preferred candidates as the party’s best chance to win seats held by Republicans.

Democrats are favored to win back the House in November and are seen as long shots to take a majority in the Senate. At the same time, polls indicate the Democratic brand remains badly tarnished.

Schumer is facing growing frustration throughout his conference. Recruits running in Alaska, Ohio and North Carolina have found broad party support. However, Schumer and progressives, including Sanders, have found themselves at odds over several must-win races.

“Chuck and I disagree on almost everything,” Sanders said. He said in addition to policy and leadership issues, Schumer was choosing candidates who don’t excite voters.

Schumer, in a statement, said he was focused on winning a Senate majority this year.

In Maine and Michigan, the party’s picks, people familiar with their thinking said, are people who have already won competitive races and will be better prepared in difficult general elections.

In Maine, Schumer and the Senate’s Democratic campaign committee have been public in supporting Gov. Janet Mills in her bid for the Senate. Running against her in the Democratic primary is oyster farmer Graham Platner, who has been building support among progressives and is currently seen as the favorite.

Despite negative revelations about Platner—among them that he had an apparent Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest before covering it—Sanders and other senators have continued to support him, arguing that the Iraq war veteran has owned up to his mistakes and can deliver liberal messages in an authentic working-class voice.

Schumer and his allies say Mills can win crossover voters, a requirement if they want to take out Republican Sen. Susan Collins, whom Democrats have been trying to unseat for years.

“The establishment strategy is you’ve got to be moderate,” Sanders said. “I think the way you win elections is by increasing voter turnout, by getting people who have given up on politics excited and involved.”

In Michigan, Schumer hasn’t publicly aired his preferred candidate, but his allies see moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, who has previously flipped a Republican seat, as their best bet to keep the seat in Democrat hands, after current Democratic Sen. Gary Peters decided not to run for re-election.

Sanders is backing physician Abdul El-Sayed, a former publichealth official, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018.

A third candidate, State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, has the endorsement of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and several other senators. The race has become a referendum on Israel’s actions in the Middle East, --with El-Sayed, a Muslim, being highly critical in line with the views of many progressives. Mc-Morrow has also criticized Israel, while Stevens has aligned herself closely with the country.

The Democrats’ pick will face likely Republican candidate Mike Rogers, a former congressman who lost a bid for the state’s other Senate seat in 2024 by less than 1 percentage point.

Overall, Sanders has endorsed around 20 congressional candidates and candidates for state and local races during Trump’s second term, making him one of the more active lawmakers in issuing his support. He is expected to announce more endorsements in the coming weeks, his aides said.

Sanders’s organization funnels political aspirants through progressive training. Julio Salinas was 15 years old when he knocked on doors for Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Now, the former Texas House of Representatives staffer is running for a state representative seat.

Salinas, now 26, saw Sanders during a rally last summer in McAllen, Texas, and started to think about running for office. He realized people were looking for a new kind of Democrat to take on the establishment. When the Sanders campaign sent out a missive asking for people to run, he signed up. Then he was offered resources on running a campaign, including how to fundraise from one of the training organizations.

“If the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were not run, I don’t think that someone like me would be quite as successful in getting to this point,” he said in an interview.

Analilia Mejia, a former Sanders staffer, won her New Jersey primary for a House seat in February in part thanks to Sanders’s email lists, which the senator used to help her fundraise and turn out voters. Her victory was seen as a surprise in the wealthy suburban district previously represented by Mikie Sherrill, a moderate Democrat elected last November to be the state’s governor. Even in races where Sanders hasn’t weighed in, candidates in his mold are challenging the establishment. In Denver, Rep. Diana De- Gette, who has been in office for nearly three decades, is facing a surprisingly competitive challenge in the June primary from Melat Kiros, a 28-year-old Democratic socialist who campaigns on Medicare for All, free child care and criticizing billionaires.

Mixed record

Still, Sanders’ support isn’t a guarantee in a primary, and his critics say it is a liability in a general election. Three candidates Sanders backed in North Carolina and Illinois lost their primaries in March.

Matt Bennett, the co-founder of the centrist group Third Way, said the voters who decide elections don’t want an upheaval of the economy as progressives have proposed. He said the candidates who have actually won competitive races over the past year, such as the Virginia and New Jersey governor races, had a different prescription: “What they are offering is a return to competent and sensible governance… they are not seeking to turn all the tables over.”

Sanders sees no allegiance to the Democratic Party—nearly half of the people who signed up to run for office through his organization said they wanted to be independents. “It is very clear to me, and I think most Americans, that for many years, the Democratic Party has not stood up for the working class of this country,” Sanders said.

The strained relationship peaked after his bid for the White House in 2016 was quashed. His supporters felt the nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party didn’t take his movement seriously.

When he ran again in 2020, he had a real chance to win the nomination before several centrist candidates dropped out of the race and consolidated around Joe Biden, boxing Sanders out. Biden, aware of the power of Sanders’s liberal supporters, included Sanders in the remainder of his campaign and sought his advice while in the White House.

But by the 2024 campaign, many of the top Democrats felt that the left had become a liability, and that to beat Trump they needed to focus on the center of the electorate.

After Trump’s victory, much of the Democratic establishment became immobilized trying to make sense of how they had misunderstood the electorate so badly. Sanders charged ahead, holding rallies across the country that were swarmed with Democrats, furious at their party’s leadership over the botched challenge to Trump.

Sanders’s long frustration with the wealthy had ripe new targets in Elon Musk and in Trump’s family, whose slew of business ventures capitalized on their father’s presidency.

Sanders said when he talks to candidates to consider an endorsement he asks about what he calls the usual topics: Are the candidates “going to stand up to the oligarchs? Going to demand that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes? Believe in healthcare as a human right and Medicare for all?”

He also asks how they would address the rise of AI, robotics and the data centers ballooning in their wake, which Sanders warns will unravel society.

“No one has done more on the issue of income inequality in my lifetime—he’s been a prophet on that issue,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), another protégé. “And AI risks significantly exacerbating it.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, shown at Stanford University in February.

FROM TOP: JASON HENRY FOR WSJ; JAE C. HONG/ ASSOCIATED PRESS

Left, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez greeted supporters at a Los Angeles event in 2025.

Sanders swore in Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor in January.

SPENCER PLATT/ GETTY IMAGES