Bernie Sanders Has an Idea for the Left: Don’t Run as Democrats
The Vermont senator, who has long had a tense relationship with the Democratic Party, suggested in an interview that more progressives should join him in running as independents.
Bernie Sanders Has an Idea for the Left: Don’t Run as Democrats
The Vermont senator, who has long had a tense relationship with the Democratic Party, suggested in an interview that more progressives should join him in running as independents.
March 20, 2025Updated 10:49 a.m. ET
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont talking into microphones and raising his right hand in front of the Capitol.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is beginning a three-day, five-city swing through Western states alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Eric Lee/The New York Times
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Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a message for his fellow progressives: Why don’t you shed the Democratic label and run as an independent, the way he does?
Mr. Sanders’s admonition came in an interview with The New York Times on the eve of a three-day, five-city swing through Western states alongside Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. He predicted that they would draw tens of thousands of people to rally against President Trump, Elon Musk and the influence of billionaires on the American government.
“One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party,” Mr. Sanders said in the interview on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of great leadership all over this country at the grass-roots level. We’ve got to bring that forward. And if we do that, we can defeat Trumpism and we can transform the political situation in America.”
The suggestion that would-be leaders of the left should abandon the Democratic Party picks at a political scab that has never fully healed. Mr. Sanders, 83, a longtime independent, has had a tense yet codependent relationship with the party for decades.
While he has never accepted the Democratic label for himself, he is a member of the Senate Democratic caucus and has run under the party brand when it was politically expedient, including his two bids for its presidential nomination. In 2017, he waged a hard-fought but ultimately futile effort to install an ally to lead the Democratic National Committee.
In 2011, Mr. Sanders said during a radio interview that “it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition” for his 2012 re-election. The Vermont senator said at the time that he could not do it himself because he was not a Democrat.
But that did not stop him from seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, when he emerged from relative obscurity to nearly topple Hillary Clinton, and again in 2020, when he was the last major Democratic primary rival to Joseph R. Biden Jr. In each contest, Mr. Sanders’s lack of party affiliation bubbled beneath the surface and drew pointed pushback from his primary rivals.
Mrs. Clinton, during an interview with Politico in 2016, described Mr. Sanders as “a relatively new Democrat, and, in fact, I’m not even sure he is one.” She added: “He’s running as one. So I don’t know quite how to characterize him.”
Four years later, Mr. Biden, days before his fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, took a similar swipe at Mr. Sanders.
“I’m a Democrat,” Mr. Biden told reporters outside a Dairy Queen in Pella, Iowa. “He says he’s not. He says — you know, he’s not registered as a Democrat, to the best of my knowledge.”
Mr. Sanders’s remarks this week come at a moment of rising anger toward Democratic leaders and a tarnished public image for the party. A CNN poll released this week found that 52 percent of Democrats believed their leaders were steering the party in the wrong direction. Among the public overall, the party’s favorability rating was just 29 percent — the lowest level since the network’s polling firm began asking the question in 1992.
Ken Martin, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, declined to comment on Mr. Sanders’s remarks.
During the interview on Wednesday, Mr. Sanders repeatedly criticized the influence of wealthy donors and Washington consultants on the party. He said that while Democrats had been a force for good on social issues like civil rights, women’s rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, they had failed on the economic concerns he has dedicated his political career to addressing.
“If there’s any hope for the Democratic Party, it is that they’re going to have to reach out — open the doors and let working-class people in, let working-class leadership come into the party,” he said. “If not, people will be running as independents, I think, all over this country.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein
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