Who is Bernie Sanders? Bio, age, family, and key positions

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren is also popular among those who’d be satisfied with Sanders. Indeed, Warren is in the unique position of being the only contender as or more popular among Sanders supporters than she is among Democratic primary voters as a whole. Of those who’d be satisfied with Sanders as nominee, just under half said they’d also be satisfied with Warren as nominee.
• Much like Biden supporters, the people who would be satisfied with Sanders as nominee are unique in that they areverycool on other Democrats. Let’s compare people who like Sanders as nominee with the general set of Democratic primary voters. The percentage who would be satisfied with Kamala Harris as nominee is 15 percentage points lower than the overall set of Democrats. We see numbers that are nearly as bad for O’Rourke, Booker and Castro. This was worse earlier in the cycle, so we’ll potentially see Sanders fans warm up to other people in the field.

INSIDER has been conducting a recurring poll through SurveyMonkey Audience on a national sample to find out how different candidate’s constituencies overlap. We ask people whether they are familiar with a candidate, whether they would be satisfied or unsatisfied with that candidate as nominee, and sometimes we also ask whether they think that person would win or lose in a general election against President Donald Trump.

Read more about how we’re polling this here.

What are Bernie Sanders’ political positions?

• On healthcare:
  • Sanders is leading the charge for universal healthcare, which has become popularly known as “Medicare-for-all” and is being embraced by most 2020 Democrats. He sponsored a bill pushing for this in 2017. Under Sanders’ plan, every American would be provided with health insurance through Medicare and private insurers would be eliminated.
  • “The goal of health care must be to provide quality care to all in a cost effective way, not tens of billions in profits for the insurance companies and outrageous compensation packages for CEOs,” Sanders said in a campaign speech in California in late March.
  • Sanders reintroduced the Medicare for All bill in April. “The American people are increasingly clear. They want a health care system which guarantees health care to all Americans as a right,” Sanders said in a statement. “In other words, they want Medicare for All, and that’s what we will deliver to them.”
• On immigration:
• On climate change:
• On campaign finance:
  • Sanders has zeroed-in on campaign finance reform for years.
  • Sanders gained popularity in 2016 by refusing corporate donations and looking to small donors to fund his presidential campaign. He’s continuing with this policy in 2020.
  • He’s pushed for a constitutional amendment that would “effectively prevent corporations from bankrolling election campaigns, and would give Congress and the states explicit authority to regulate campaign finances.”
  • Sanders has referred to Citizens United as “one of the worst decisions ever brought about by the Supreme Court of this country.”
• On abortion:
• On LGBTQ rights:
• On education:
  • Sanders supports making public college and universities tuition-free for undergraduate students.
  • Unders Sanders’ College for All Act, the federal government would cover 67% of this cost, while the states would be responsible for the remaining 33% of the cost.
  • Sanders has also pushed for drastically lowering student loan interest rates, stating it’s “revolting” the federal government makes “billions in profits off of student loans each year.”
• On Supreme Court and congressional issues:
  • While other 2020 Democrats have expressed support for increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court, Sanders has not been particularly outspoken about this.
  • “My worry is that the next time the Republicans are in power they will do the same thing,” Sanders said on court packing. “So I think that is not the ultimate solution.”
  • Sanders said he’s open to some form of term limits for Supreme Court justices.
  • “What may make sense is, if not term limits, then rotating judges to the appeals court as well,” Sanders said in early April 2019. “Letting them get out of the Supreme Court and bringing in new blood.”
  • Sanders biggest concern with the Supreme Court is appointing a justice who would support overturning Citizens United.
  • Sanders has expressed reservations about eliminating the legislative filibuster, which other 2020 Democrats have said they’re open to discussion. “I’m not crazy about getting rid of the filibuster,” Sanders said in February.
  • Sanders in early April shifted somewhat on the issue of the filibuster. “In the Senate we must enact real filibuster reform, including the return to requiring a talking filibuster,” he said. “It is not right that one Senate can grind the entire process to a halt.”
• On guns:
• On criminal justice reform:
• On trade:
  • Sanders opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump withdrew the US from in 2017.
  • Sanders has pushed for trade policy that “is fair to American workers, not just large multi-national corporations.”
  • He routinely speaks out against the exploitation of low-wage workers in foreign countries, and the impact this has on the job market in the US.
  • Sanders is against Trump’s tariffs against Canada and the European Union, but has expressed support for imposing “stiff penalties on countries like China, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam to prevent them from illegally dumping steel and aluminum into the US and throughout the world.”
  • Sanders has said Trump is right about the problem with trade with countries like China but has called for a more “comprehensive approach.”
  • “We need to fundamentally rethink our trade policies and move to fair trade rather than just unfettered free trade,” Sanders said in March 2018.
  • Sanders in May introduced a plan to break up agriculture monopolies.
• On foreign policy:
  • Sanders voted against the 2003 Iraq War, which he often points to as a defining moment in his career. He’s generally against US intervention, and only supports war as a last resort.
  • Sanders is strongly in favor of a foreign policy that involves working with the international community to solve global crises. He also wants to drastically cut US defense spending.
  • He opposed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
  • Sanders led the charge in the Senate for the US to end support the Saudi Arabia in the Yemen conflict.
  • Sanders has been critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but still supports the historic US-Israel partnership.
  • Sanders has faced criticism for praising dictatorial socialist regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
  • More recently, he has caught flak for not being more forceful in condemning Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
  • Sanders opposes “endless” wars and wants to see conflicts like the Afghanistan War come to a conclusion.
  • Sanders wants to drastically decrease defense spending. He was one of 10 senators who voted against a $716 billion defense budget for 2019.
  • “I think we have to get our priorities right, and our priorities should include not spending more than the 10 next nations on earth. As president, I would certainly look at a very different military budget,” Sanders told Vox in May.
  • “As a young person, long before I ever held any position, I was active in opposition to the war in Vietnam,” Sanders told The New York Times in May. “As a mayor, I did my best to stop American foreign policy, which for years was overthrowing governments in Latin America and installing puppet regimes.”
• On taxes:
  • Sanders is strongly in favor of taxing the wealthy to address inequality, calling on millionaires and billionaires to “pay their fair share.”
  • He’s proposed a plan that would implement a 77 percent rate on billionaires’ estates. Sanders would tax the estates of those who inherit more than $3.5 million,
  • Sanders has railed against major companies like Amazon, Netflix, and GM paying “nothing” in federal income taxes.
  • Sanders has also pledged to target offshore tax havens.

What are Bernie Sanders’ political successes?

How much money has Bernie Sanders raised?

• Just 10 hours after he announced, Sanders had already raised more than $4 million from nearly 150,000 individual donors.
• He raised $6 million in the 24 hours after joining the 2020 presidential race.
• Less than a week after announcing, Sanders is estimated to have collected $10 million from nearly 360,000 donors.
• Sanders’ campaign said it raised $18.2 million from roughly 900,000 contributions and 525,000 individual donors in first 41 days of the senator’s campaign.
• On April 12, Sanders’ campaign said it had reached one million donations overall.
• Sanders’ 2020 campaign raised $18 million in the second quarter of 2019.
• Sanders’ campaign said it raked in nearly one million contributions and their average donation for quarter two was $18.
• In addition to the $18 million from grassroots fundraising Sanders’ campaign said it pulled $6 million from other accounts and has roughly $30 million in cash on hand.

How is Bernie Sanders viewed by voters compared to the competition?

INSIDER has conducted a number of other polls to check in on how these candidates are perceived in comparison to one another. When we asked respondents to one poll to rank how far to the left or to the right they considered the candidates, Bernie Sanders was by a long shot viewed as the single most left-leaning candidate in the field. Sanders is the second-most experienced candidate in the field after only Biden when we asked respondents to rank the candidates based on how prepared they are for the rigors of the presidency given what they knew about their history of public service and experience with government. And when asked how likable or personable respondents perceived the candidates to be, Sanders was found to be the third-most likeable in the field, though was considered more likable by men than women.

Could Bernie Sanders beat President Trump?

Referring back to INSIDER’s recurring poll, Bernie Sanders overall is believed to be a strong candidate in a general election against Donald Trump compared to your typical Democrat. For a typical candidate, the majority of respondents are undecided about how they think they’d perform, but not Sanders: just shy of half of people who say they’ll vote in the Democratic primary think he’d beat Trump, and about a quarter think he’d lose. That winning percentage is more than ten points points higher than typical, which is rather good among the 2020 contenders.

How do Democratic voters feel about Bernie Sanders’s qualifications?

INSIDER has conducted polling about how voters feel about candidate attributes or qualifications. We asked respondents about a list of possible qualifications and if they made them more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate for president.

For example, among respondents who said they’d vote in the Democratic primary, 19% said a candidate being a college professor made them likelier to support them, while 4% said it made them less likely to, for a +15% net favorability. We can then see how different candidates’ resumes stack up compared to those preferences.

Attributes perceived as most valuable include released tax returns (+43%), status as a Senator (+40%), that he grew up poor (+28%), history as an activist (+28%), his 20+ years of government service (+21%), status as a child of immigrants (+21%), and identity as a Democratic socialist (+18%).

Attributes considered to be a liability based on the preferences of self-reported Democratic voters include vote for 1994 crime bill (-8%), and his age of 70 or over (-24%).

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