by Steve Early on June 1, 2026 (BeyondChron.org)
The Rise of a Socialist Mayor
Forty-five years ago, a socialist, who previously couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Vermont, walked into his state’s largest city hall and claimed the office of mayor by a landslide margin of ten votes.
Chiasson’s Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician (Knopf) focuses on the eight years after Sanders ran, as an independent, against incumbent Burlington mayor Gordon Paquette. Despite being a college town and new address for a few 60s-influenced “flatlanders,” the city’s politics were very old school in 1981. Just a few months before Sanders won his mayoral squeaker, GOP presidential candidate Ronald Reagan carried Vermont with 44% of the vote, in a three-way race.
For a long time, there weren’t many other lefties following in the footsteps of now U.S. Senator Bernard Sanders, the longest serving independent and socialist in Congress. But Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns helped change the landscape of the U.S. left.
Tens of thousands of Bernie supporters swelled the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group that previously claimed few elected officials in its ranks. Local DSA chapters have since developed the capacity to recruit and run credible candidates for municipal office in cities and towns across the country, inspired by Sander’s personal example.
Nationwide, about half the 250 elected officials affiliated with DSA are members of city councils or commissions. Seven are mayors, including Emma Mulvaney-Stanek, the former teachers’ union organizer who today occupies Sanders’ old office on Church Street in Burlington (population: 44,000). Another recent mayoral campaign winner is Zohran Mamdani, an out-of-state mentee of Bernie who now occupies Gracie Mansion in New York City. (population: eight million).
Newly elected DSA members like these have gained historical perspective on the challenges facing them in public office by consulting Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso). Shelton Stromquist’s book describes the experience of more than 1,200 municipal officials elected as candidates of the Socialist Party during its early 20th century heyday. It includes many still relevant case studies of struggles to improve city services, raise labor standards, make housing affordable, and place local utilities under public ownership—in the face of business-backed opposition from Democrats and Republicans alike.
A Newer Blueprint
Thanks to Burlington native Dan Chiasson, a poet and literary critic who teaches at Wellesley College, DSA “electeds” now have a shorter and more recent blue-print for “municipal socialism” to study. It includes much practical advice about to how avoid being undermined, discredited, and defeated by that same “duopoly” a century later.
Back then, Burlington was a “dowdy, backward” blue dot in a rural state long dominated by Republicans. Municipal affairs were much influenced by French-Canadian, Irish-American, and Italian-American clans, with close ties to the local business community. As Chiasson recalls Mayor Paquette, “Gordy was a jolly Chamber of Commerce type,” who often sat in a pew behind his own equally observant Catholic family at Sunday Mass. A ten-year incumbent, Paquette tightly controlled the city’s elected Board of Alderman and its appointed commissions, by stacking the latter with friends and relatives.
Sanders resume included being Jewish from Brooklyn, then a civil rights activist at the University of Chicago, and then a back-to-land carpenter and video maker in Vermont. He was also a four-time loser as a Liberty Union Party (LUP) candidate for statewide office. (In the interests of full disclosure, I was a volunteer helper of Bernie’s 1976 campaign for governor, which drew 6.1 percent of the vote.)
Like California’s Peace and Freedom Party, then and now, Liberty Union was a product of Sixties’ radicalism. In his own patriotic Burlington family, Chiasson grew up “being told that Liberty Union was the party of the communes, the draft dodgers, and the strung-out runaways.” This was not true of several brave working-class Vermonters who ran for office under its banner initially. But the performative politics of others, plus their “life-style left” orientation, was not a big draw for blue collar voters, even in a state where the United Electrical Workers (UE), a left- wing critic of the AFL-CIO, was then Vermont’s largest industrial union. Sanders believed that UE members and other workers could be won over by his own more effective class-based appeals.
Going Local
As the Reagan era dawned nationally, Bernie decided to go local. He re-invented himself as a champion of low-income tenants, of whom he was one. At the time, two-thirds of Burlington residents rented their housing, which meant that its “mainly Catholic, culturally conservative working poor” often lived “in badly maintained properties” whose owners “were unscrupulous, if not exploitative.”
When renters sough help from city government, its building inspectors sided with landlords, actually “abetting the eviction process” rather than fixing code violations. To further private re-development plans, Paquette also allowed neighborhoods to deteriorate, because “blighted homes and buildings were much cheaper for the city to acquire and raze.”
Sanders started door knocking, heard such complaints, and fine-tuned his pitch that city hall could actually serve the people. At Chiasson’s house, his grandfather, a brooding World War 11 vet named Milford Delorme, told his wife not to open the door if Sanders was outside. But Bernie’s longshot mayoral bid did gain street cred when influential working class-voices like former mill worker Sadie White, a neighbor of Chiasson’s in Burlington’s Old North End, backed his campaign.
Sanders’ surprise victory gave the local political establishment a huge shock. The local Democratic Party machine, backed by the business community, tried to render the new mayor “completely ineffective so voters would turn him out after his two-year tenure.”
Over four terms, Sanders would eventually increase his city council allies from one to a near majority, helping to lay the groundwork not just for a local Progressive third party, but a statewide one. However, any initial implementation of his pro-worker, pro-tenant agenda required the creation of a volunteer-driven “shadow government,” which got things done “outside the official administrative circuitry of city hall.”
The best parts of Bernie for Burlington—the ones worth closest study by embattled municipal reformers today—describe the creative solutions that Sanders, his staff, and supporters developed to address the need for affordable housing, property tax reform, better parks and cultural programs, youth jobs and public service provision, like snow plowing. To meet that seasonal challenge in a new way, Bernie made sure that streets and sidewalks in poor and working-class neighborhoods, with more pedestrians, got cleared first, rather than wealthier sections of town, while a volunteer network also pitched in to help the elderly shovel out.
As Chiasson noted in a recent interview, Burlington also “set up the first community land trust of its kind in the country.” Under Bernie, the city bought up distressed properties, put residents in job training programs to work fixing them up, and then, through their sweat equity, enabled them to own the “four walls,” while the city retained ownership of the land. Homes rebuilt this way could only be sold back to the land trust with the any individual profit capped at 25 percent. According to the author, as city owned properties–selling below market value–proliferated, greater affordability was achieved by “establishing a new market value.”
By the time Sanders was ready to move up and beyond Burlington city hall, he was, like Chiasson, waxing poetic. In one of his final speeches as mayor, Bernie cited the many accomplishments of his administration as proof that, in a better civic environment, “men, women, and children can come together in relationships that are not based on greed, exploitation, and domination — but on love, cooperation, and mutual respect.” That’s a vision for “re-claiming the city” still worth aspiring too, four decades later in two, three, many Burlingtons.
(Steve Early lives in Richmond but spent his politically formative years in Vermont. He is a longtime member of the Communications Workers of America, was a co-founder of Labor for Bernie, and has written six books, including Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com).
Steve Early
Steve Early is a longtime labor journalist and author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review Press, 2013), The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2011) and Embedded With Organized Labor (MRP, 2009)
