After losing his second presidential campaign in 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was not about to ride off into the sunset.
Instead, he shifted his focus from presidential politics to congressional action — using his national popularity, growing Senate seniority and surprisingly close ties with President Joe Biden to advance his lifelong agenda.
“Look, when you win 23 states, taking on the entire Democratic establishment and many millions of votes, politicians have got to look around and say, ‘I guess we have to deal with some of these issues,’” Sanders told VTDigger in an interview last week, referring to the results of his 2016 presidential primary campaign.
After Democrats took control of the Senate in the 2020 election, they made Sanders — an independent who caucuses with the Democrats — chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee. There, he helped craft expansive, ambitious spending packages, such as the American Rescue Plan Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. In the process, he forged a close relationship with Biden, his principal adversary in the 2020 election, as the senator worked to include his legislative priorities in those bills.
Then, in 2023, Sanders took the helm of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, one of the chamber’s most influential panels, giving him the opportunity to chip away at his long-held and sweeping policy priorities related to health care. Sanders’ goal? To address the fact that, as he put it in the interview, “in America we pay, in some cases, ten times more for the same exact drugs as people in other countries.”
As Sanders, 83, seeks a fourth term in the Senate next week, it’s not his Republican opponent — government contractor and U.S. Army veteran Gerald Malloy — who poses the greatest threat. Indeed, Sanders has the highest home-state approval ratings of any U.S. senator, according to Morning Consult, and Vermont hasn’t elected a Republican to Congress for nearly a quarter-century.
The real threat to Sanders’ influence lies outside the borders of Vermont — in Montana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where Republican Senate victories could cost Democrats the chamber and Sanders his chairmanship. A Republican-controlled Senate could bring a quick stop to the momentum he’s gained over the past decade. And a victory by former President Donald Trump, a Republican, would end his influence in the White House.
If Sanders were to win his bid for reelection, it would likely be his last. At the end of another six-year term, he would be 89 years old and would have served in Congress for close to four decades.
But Sanders isn’t ready to contemplate an end to his career.
“Let’s worry about this election,” he said.
‘Where do you think that came from?’
Sanders first took office in 1981, when Burlington voters made him mayor. Since then, he’s consistently sought to expand government services to help low-income and working-class people. For much of his career, Sanders was a political outsider on Capitol Hill, first in the House, starting in 1991, and later in the Senate, starting in 2007. (He even penned a memoir, in 1998, called, “Outsider in the House.”)
“The political classes have never really — and still don’t, in many ways — understand Bernie Sanders,” said Jeff Weaver, who served as Sanders’ chief-of-staff in the House, managed his 2016 presidential campaign and served as a senior adviser during the 2020 campaign.
Then, Sanders ran for president. He was particularly popular with people the party had trouble wooing, including rural voters and more conservative Democrats, Weaver said, as demonstrated by the fact that Sanders won Wyoming and “every county in West Virginia in the primaries.”
The more ‘Bernie Sanders’ became a household name, the more his policies — once considered radical — inched into the mainstream.
“The perception simply shifted from him being a persistent outsider to him being a leader within the party, that was leading a very significant constituency within the party,” Patricia Siplon, a political science professor at St. Michael’s College, said in an interview. “That had to be acknowledged, in terms of where policy was going,”
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., who has known Sanders for decades and succeeded him in the House in 2007, said Sanders “is not your buttoned-up senator” in the chamber — not a “clubby guy.” Given that, the presidential runs were “stunning to many of his colleagues who had had no idea about how powerful a connection he was able to make with voters across the country.”
“They took note of that,” Welch said, and Sanders became somebody ”that everyone had to listen to.”
Since 2020, Sanders has made strides toward advancing his policy goals in the committees he’s most recently chaired.
In the budget committee, he worked with Biden to craft the American Rescue Plan Act. The Covid-era economic stimulus bill increased the child tax credit, provided stimulus checks to people below specified income thresholds, extended unemployment benefits and lowered health insurance premiums for low- and middle-income people with marketplace plans.
“That was the most progressive piece of legislation passed in a very long time,” Sanders said. “And a lot of the components of that were what progressives had talked about — what I had, and others have, talked about in the presidential campaign.”
Over the past four years, Sanders has become a close, and improbable, ally of Biden, given their differing worldviews and political pedigrees. Sanders was one of the most prominent politicians to call for the president to remain in the 2024 presidential campaign after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June caused Democrats to question his mental acuity. Since then, the two have held events and written op-eds together.
Their partnership has flourished, Sanders said, because many of Biden’s proposals came from Sanders’ own campaigns.
He pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act — which addressed the cost of prescription drugs and made the largest investment in the renewable energy transition “not only in the history of America — (but in the) history of the world,” Sanders said.
“Where do you think that came from? Components of the Green New Deal were in there,” Sanders said, referring to legislation he has repeatedly sponsored. “In Vermont, we’re going to get $62 million to help working class people put rooftop solar panels on their rooftops. Where do you think that came from?”
‘Putting public pressure’ on CEOs
When Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., retired in 2022, the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, took Leahy’s seat as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Sanders, in turn, succeeded her at the helm of the HELP committee.
Leading the panel gave him a platform to work on one of his major goals: lowering the cost of health care.
An investigation into four pharmaceutical companies — AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline and Teva — over the high price of asthma inhalers resulted in several of those companies reducing the price of inhalers to $35, down from between $200 to $600, according to a press release the committee issued in January.
Then followed insulin. After holding a hearing with CEOs of the leading insulin manufacturers and putting “very significant pressure on these companies,” Sanders said, they announced they would lower the price of their products by 60%.
“So we’re seeing not only insulin available to seniors on Medicare for $35 a month, but a general lowering, a significant lowering, of the prices of insulin in this country,” Sanders said.
In a VTDigger and Vermont Public debate last week between Sanders and Malloy, the latter criticized what he called Sanders’ record of inaction. During a heated exchange in which Sanders called Trump a pathological liar, Malloy responded: “How about somebody who’s been making the same promises for 40 years and never delivers on them? That’s a pathological liar.”
Sanders sees it differently. In the interview with VTDigger, he called the most recent session of the HELP committee “the most productive two-year session, probably, of any health committee in a very long time.” The body passed 32 bills, according to his office.
But it wasn’t necessarily laws that moved the needle.
“In terms of hearings and investigations, you can use the committee to raise issues that the corporate world would prefer not (be) discussed,” Sanders said. “So in terms of insulin, we were able to substantially lower the cost of insulin in America, not by legislation, actually by just putting public pressure on the major drug manufacturers.”
He’s used that tactic to put pressure on Novo Nordisk, which manufactures the diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. At a hearing on Sept. 24, Sanders sat before Lars Jørgensen, the company’s CEO and the hearing’s sole witness, and listed the profits the company has made from selling the drug to Americans.
While Novo Nordisk sells Ozempic for $59 in Germany and $155 in Canada, it sells the drug to Americans for more than $900 and Wegovy for about $1,350. “All we are saying, Mr. Jørgensen, is treat the American people the same way that you treat people all over the world,” he said. “Stop ripping us off.”
While the company hasn’t announced any plans to change its pricing structure, Sanders believes the strategy will work again.
“When you put that kind of pressure on a company that wants to do business and wants to be popular and wants to have respect, it has an impact,” he said. “It has in the past, and I believe it will with Novo Nordisk.”
The committee voted unanimously to pursue criminal charges against Ralph de la Torre, CEO of Steward Health Care, which operates 30 hospitals across the country, after he failed to show up for a hearing that focused on the millions in profits he made while the company filed for bankruptcy.
“The committee has various resources,” Sanders said. “We’ve got legislation, you’ve got investigations, you have high-profile hearings, you get around the country a bit, raising attention to issues. That’s what the committee can do. And I’m proud of the success that we’ve had.”
A strategy for Dems in the minority
Headed into the Nov. 5 election, the margins of several Senate races appear increasingly tight. If Republicans take control of the chamber, Sanders would lose his perch atop the committee.
Sanders has frequently sounded the alarm about a potential Trump presidency, often using the term “pathological liar” to describe the former president. Moreover, Sanders and his agenda would be handicapped with Trump in office — which helps explain why he’s currently “running around the country for Kamala Harris,” he said, referring to the vice president and Democratic presidential nominee. (Sanders has barely campaigned for reelection in Vermont, spending most of his time instead in battleground states.)
“If I want to lower the cost of prescription drugs, we’ve had a real ally in President Biden and Vice President Harris,” Sander said.
Plus, if Harris wins, her vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, could break a Senate tie if the chamber were evenly split.
But those who know Sanders best think he could still make headway in a Republican Senate.
Weaver, Sanders’ former campaign manager, said he could envision the senator strategizing as soon as the election was over.
“He’ll look at the layout of the Senate,” Weaver said. “He’ll call his staff together, and he’ll sit there with his yellow pad, and they will strategize and plot and scheme” about how to “advance as much of his agenda as possible.”
He sees ways Sanders could collaborate with Republicans if he loses his leadership position. Republicans are “going to be under a lot of pressure if they are successful in the election to produce results” related to inflation and price gouging, Weaver said — all issues that interest Sanders.
Welch thinks there’s overlap between Sanders and Republicans who are concerned about childcare and rural health, “even if their approach to how to address them is significantly different.”
More Republicans, too, are beginning to talk about “the abuse of corporate power,” Welch said, “so I could see Bernie continuing to make some progress there, even if he’s in the minority.”
Correction: Due to inaccurate information provided by Sanders, an earlier version of this story undercounted the number of bills approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee under his chairmanship.
