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- Bernie Sanders has become a towering figure in American politics. It wasn't always that way.
- He got his start in government as a small-town mayor, decades before his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
- Here's everything to know about the Democratic socialist senator.
Bernie Sanders is known today as perhaps the most important leader on the American left. It wasn't always that way.
Long before his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns helped steer the Democratic Party leftward, the Vermont senator was a lonely voice in American politics — the rare politician willing to call himself a "socialist" in a country defined heavily by its opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.