The Deeper Dig is a weekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Sen. Bernie Sanders is heading into the New Hampshire primary with key advantages: newly released Iowa caucus results show Sanders won that state’s “popular vote,” and Sanders won the Granite State’s 2016 Democratic contest by a 22% margin.
This year, Sanders is also backed by a significantly more powerful campaign operation. The candidate spent more than $8 million in the last quarter of 2019 on a campaign staff of more than 900, part of a $50 million spending surge.
Those figures may sound surprising compared to the operation that delivered Sanders’ first electoral win.
In 1981, Sanders had already moved on from the Liberty Union, the political party where he’d staged several protest campaigns during the 1970s. When Richard Sugarman, a religion professor at UVM, suggested Sanders consider a run for mayor of Burlington, the young radical tapped into a network of local community organizers that was already building a movement against incumbent Mayor Gordon Paquette.
One of those organizers was Phil Fiermonte. “In each of these neighborhoods, there was an undercurrent. People were frustrated,” Fiermonte remembers. “And of course, we had some organizers on the ground helping people formulate their ideas, putting pressure on the mayor. And Bernie sort of quietly was knocking on doors.”
Fiermonte, who remained a Sanders adviser until 2017, said those neighborhood groups would prove key to Sanders’ success in that first race. The victory helped Sanders understand the power of a strong ground game.
“Everyone who knows Bernie now knows that he believes in grassroots campaigning,” he said.
On this week’s podcast, Phil Fiermonte reflects on his first campaign with Bernie Sanders. Produced by Eliza Giles for Mudseason, a podcast by the UVM Center for Research on Vermont.
**Podcast transcript**
This week: As Bernie Sanders looks ahead to the first primary elections of 2020, the Vermont Senator sees a plausible path to the Democratic nomination and maybe the presidency. How Sanders’ first campaign for public office foreshadowed the sprawling political operation he runs today.
Late Monday night, the results of the Iowa caucuses were still completely unknown. But Senator Bernie Sanders gave sort of a victory speech anyway.
Bernie Sanders: I imagine — I have a strong feeling that at some point the results will be announced. And when those results are announced, I have a good feeling we’re going to be doing very, very well here in Iowa…
Sanders ran through the highlights of his stump speech – income inequality, the dangers of President Trump—
Bernie Sanders: Today marks the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.
But he also acknowledged the people in Iowa that helped get him to a leading position.
So let me conclude by thanking our great staff, our volunteers here in Iowa…
The Sanders 2020 campaign is massive – according to Politico, more than 900 staffers were on the payroll in the last quarter of 2019, when the campaign spent a whopping $50 million dollars. That might seem surprising for Vermonters who remember the scale of Bernie Sanders’ first winning campaign for public office.
This week, we’re looking back at that run. What you’re about to hear was made by the Center for Research on Vermont at UVM, as part of their regular podcast called Mudseason. Producer Eliza Giles takes it from here.
Eliza Giles: 1981. A year full of important ends — and beginnings. Some with lasting impacts, political, cultural, and both.
[News clip]: Put your left hand on the Bible and raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States.
Eliza Giles: There’s something missing from this list — one of the most significant outcomes of 1981. And that’s because in 1981, it didn’t seem so significant.
For starters, this story begins in Burlington, Vermont, which at the time wasn’t really on the radar of mainstream America.
Phil Fiermonte: Burlington was kind of a sleepy college town. You know, back then it wasn’t the progressive Mecca…
Eliza Giles: That’s Phil Fiermonte, a key player in this story.
Phil Fiermonte: I was a community organizer in Burlington, way back in 1980.
Eliza Giles: This position of community organizer comes from the ideology of Saul Alinsky.
[News clip]: Saul Alinsky has become a national byword synonymous with poverty. He is the severest critic of the so-called establishment.
Phil Fiermonte: Saul Alinsky, the founder of community organizing. You know, rather than intellectual left people leading the effort,
Saul Alinsky [in archive clip]: We’re not one of these colonial powers…
Phil Fiermonte: Their job is to organize working people, low and moderate income people.
Saul Alinsky [in archive clip]: We organize them so they can have power. The ability to act. Have a place at the decision making table…
Phil Fiermonte: His notion always was that you know, you meet people where they’re at and organize around local issues, and then, you know, move to larger kind of systemic economic issues.
Eliza Giles: As a community organizer, Phil was heavily involved in local issues. It was around this time that he crossed paths with another young activist in Burlington, a guy who went by the name Bernard Sanders.
Phil Fiermonte: I knew of Bernie. I think I had him sign a petition when I was a student at UVM.
Eliza Giles: Okay, so not the first time their paths crossed. Vermont, after all, is a small place. This second meeting was more than a petition, though. They didn’t know it at the time, but it would change the course of their careers, and the course of American politics. This is the story of Bernie Sanders’ 1981 campaign for mayor of Burlington.
When Phil met Bernie, he wasn’t exactly seen throughout Vermont as a winning candidate.
Phil Fiermonte: I think he had run for statewide office about four times, you know. Third party efforts.
Eliza Giles: Bernie had been a member of the Liberty Union Party for most of the 70s.
Phil Fiermonte: I don’t think he ever got more than— maybe he got 6% once. I think 1% one time.
Eliza Giles: By 1977, Bernie was tired. He left the Liberty Union and swore off politics. His new career path would consist of making educational filmstrips.
Bernie Sanders [in archive clip]: Good evening. My name is Bernard Sanders. The purpose of this program is twofold…
Eliza Giles: To be clear, Bernie may have considered himself to be retired from politics. But all the videos he was making at this time were about his political heroes.
Narrator [in archive clip]: It is very probable, especially if you’re a young person, that you have never heard of Eugene Victor Debs. Over and over again, Debs raised the same basic issues as he denounced the capitalist economic system and fought for the socialist revolution.
Why is it working people support the Socialist Party? Because it is the only party unequivocally…
Phil Fiermonte: I think in 1980. Some of the people close to him said, you know, Bernie, take a look at your results in the statewide elections in Burlington. You did really well in the low income, working class wards, and wards two and three. You might want to think about running for mayor. And I think Professor Richard Sugarman here at the university was one of the people taking a look at those numbers.
Eliza Giles: At the time, Bernie was crashing on the couch of Sugarman’s Burlington apartment. Together, in the fall of 1980, they went to the Burlington City Clerk’s office and asked for the 1976 gubernatorial election results.
Phil Fiermonte: And so he finally made the decision to run. At the same time, I had been hired by the King Street Youth Center to be a community organizer for several different neighborhoods in Burlington. And I was hired to start these groups knocking on doors, trying to identify local leaders, low and moderate income people. And we began organizing around local issues.
Eliza Giles: So late 1980, Bernie learns that his policies appeal to low and moderate income Burlingtonians— those who live in the same neighborhoods Phil is simultaneously working to organize.
But we’ll get back to that. First, let’s talk about Burlington in 1980. Because as Phil said, the Burlington in this story is very different from Burlington today, or even the Burlington that I grew up in. It even looked pretty different. For starters, the Church Street Marketplace was still under construction. There was also no public access to the waterfront. It was just a collection of rail yards and storage containers, the surrounding area littered with abandoned petroleum tanks and other remnants of bygone industry.
Politically, Burlington was a bit of an outlier. Vermont had been one of the most reliably Republican states since its admission to the union, but Burlington was majority Democrat.
Phil Fiermonte: Very much tied to the business establishment.
Eliza Giles: The popular Gordon Paquette had served as mayor since 1971 — and had never lost an election.
Phil Fiermonte: It was a pretty comfortable establishment, one-party city back then.
Eliza Giles: Okay, so this is important. Phil’s work in community organizing draws upon Alinsky’s theories regarding social change, also known as his 13 Rules for Radicals. Alinsky writes that society is divided into three class distinctions: the haves, the have nots, and the “have a little want mores.” The latter being the middle class. So the haves and the have nots are perpetually at odds with the haves wanting to keep, and the have nots wanting to get. But the “have a little want mores” are, with a few exceptions, mostly just sheep, according to Alinsky.
So if we apply this ideological framework to Burlington in 1980, Mayor Paquette’s comfortable establishment represents the haves, who have pretty much gone unchallenged for the past decade. And that is where community organizers like Phil come in. Because, and I quote, “the power of the have nots rests only with their numbers.”
Phil Fiermonte: At the same time that we’re doing the organizing in five or six different neighborhoods in Burlington, Bernie Sanders decides to run for mayor. And he put together an interesting group of people running his campaign, including Professor Sugarman here at UVM, and a nutritionist Linda Niedweski and Dick Sartelle, who was a low income guy in Franklin Square who was a strong tenants advocate.
Bernie ran a lot of his campaign out of Franklin Square, which is low income, public housing in Burlington’s New North End.
Eliza Giles: Residents of Franklin Square were happy to help Bernie take on Paquette. In fact, they were organizing independently at around the same time. This includes one famous demonstration that took place in early 1981.
Phil Fiermonte: We kind of checked the mayor’s schedule, knew that he had coffee with his city lieutenants at Nectar’s. I forget what it was, it was like every Tuesday at nine o’clock. So we alerted the local press and we got our tenants from Franklin Square. I don’t know, there are probably 15 people in Nectar’s.
Eliza Giles: And the press loved it. A few days later, the Burlington Free Press published an article which featured a large image of a surprised Mayor Paquette with his muffin and morning coffee, sitting at a table that’s surrounded by standing protesters.
Phil Fiermonte: Didn’t help my relationship with Nectar’s for many years. Took a while to recover from that.
Eliza Giles: Okay, so maybe that was the end of protesting inside Nectar’s. But across Burlington, attitudes were starting to change.
Phil Fiermonte: In each of these neighborhoods there was an undercurrent. People were frustrated. I think City Hall, I think the incumbent mayor, had really kind of gotten out of touch around local issues.
And of course, we had some organizers on the ground helping people formulate their ideas, putting pressure on the mayor. And Bernie sort of quietly was knocking on doors.
Eliza Giles: Although he wasn’t a community organizer himself, Bernie was frequently working alongside Phil and others.
Phil Fiermonte: As always, not surprising, everyone who knows Bernie now knows that he believes in grassroots campaigning. I remember he had these ideas written up, demonstrations. I remember Bernie marched with us outside City Hall.
Eliza Giles: Bernie’s lack of experience with community organizing didn’t matter all that much—in part because Phil’s people were already on the ground doing the work for him, but also because he possessed a unique ability, a sort of loophole in the Alinsky ideology.
Saul Alinsky [in archive clip]: I can’t think of anything more fundamental than communication. Because it doesn’t matter what ideas you’ve got, it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do. As long as you cannot communicate to the people, that’s the end of it. You might just as well have stayed in bed.
Phil Fiermonte: Yeah, I would say that, you know, one of Bernie’s, great strengths has been his ability to communicate effectively. And that was certainly evidenced way back then.
Saul Alinsky [in archive clip]: And by communication, I mean communicating within the experience…
Phil Fiermonte: You know, talking to people knocking on doors, about their issues…
Saul Alinsky [in archive clip]: …because that’s the only way people understand. If you go outside of their experience, people are lost, they’re confused, and they’re fearful and they withdraw.
Phil Fiermonte: I remember him knocking on doors with people with a French Canadian background. I don’t know if it was his own immigrant roots. It seemed to have like this incredible kind of connection.
Eliza Giles: These connections proved significant, especially as the March 3 Election Day grew near.
Phil Fiermonte: The neighborhood groups organized a debate at the Unitarian Church in Burlington, maybe a week, a week and a half before the election.
Eliza Giles: It was Democrat Mayor Gordon Paquette, debating three independent candidates, Richard Bove, Joe McGrath and Bernard Sanders.
Phil Fiermonte: And we probably had, I don’t know, 200, 250 people from the different neighborhood groups out at the church. And I think Mayor Gordon Paquette was quite surprised.
Eliza Giles: Up until this point, he didn’t have any reason to think that this wasn’t going to be another easy win for him. He hadn’t even bothered to campaign. And that’s probably why he seemed a little out of touch on the debate stage that night.
Phil Fiermonte: He said in his opening remarks, ‘I never realized there were so many neighborhood groups in Burlington.’ And Bernie jumped on that. ‘You have just embarrassed yourself. You’ve insulted these people. You don’t even know that these neighborhood groups exist.’ You know, of course, everybody started cheering, and so Bernie had a great night.
Eliza Giles: Then came Election Day, March 3, 1981.
Phil Fiermonte: I can remember on Election Day, there were people at intersections with Bernie signs, you know, giving the thumbs up, which I think surprised a lot of people. I think the establishment had no idea that he was being as aggressive as he was in the neighborhoods.
Eliza Giles: And at the end of the day, all of Burlington waited patiently to hear the results.
Phil Fiermonte: I went to the party. It was on Prospect Street. Much to most people’s surprise, it actually was a victory party. And I can remember Bernie coming in, and there’s that very famous photograph of Bernie with his arms raised high, coming in, and the place went wild.
Eliza Giles: Bernie had won by just 22 votes. But at 2 a.m., his team requested a recount. They hadn’t been permitted to observe the ballot counting in some wards. The recount put Bernie in the lead by just 10 votes. It was his first electoral win of his career. For Paquette, it was his first loss in his 23 year political career.
Phil Fiermonte: That was definitely, you know, the most significant political upset in— certainly in modern Vermont history. It was huge, and really shocked the establishment.
[Archive news clip]: Mayor Sanders got a lot of attention recently, not only with his 10 vote victory out of about 9500 votes cast, but mostly because he is a socialist.
Phil Fiermonte: And everybody reading that article said my goodness, how did this happen in good old conservative Vermont?
[Archive news clip]: There are other socialist mayors in America, but none quite like Bernie Sanders…
Eliza Giles: Perhaps the most telling is this blooper tape from right after Bernie won, recently released by Vermont PBS.
[Archive news clip]: …the consistent loser in previous quests for elective office, Bernard Sanders. Mr. Sanders was sworn in as mayor of Burlington on April 6. Tonight, our Vermont report guest is Burlington Mayor Gordon—
[Laughter]
After he became mayor, Bernie Sanders hired Phil Fiermonte to run his neighborhood organizing programs. Phil went on to manage field operations for Bernie’s two U.S. House campaigns, the one he lost in 1988 and the one he won in 1990. Phil worked for Bernie in a variety of roles over the next few decades. He retired in 2017.
