it takes a different kind of candidate to do well here.

You really need to go out there and meet a lot of the people

who are going to vote for or against you.

We tend to produce candidates

who may be a little bit rough around the edges

but have that personal touch.

-Bernie Sanders seemed to come out of nowhere in 2015.

He was an obscure senator from a small state.

And he shouted a lot.

-You want to share it with the American people!

-But people were listening.

-Bernie Sanders is the person

I've been looking for all my life.

-I just like how he doesn't lie.

He tells the truth, and he's just about the issues.

He's not playing a political game.

-People were making fun of me last summer,

"He's not gonna make it."

Look, here we are now, this summer.

We're going.

-For David Zuckerman, it brought back old memories.

-Bernie first inspired me as a cynical college student

back in the early '90s.

I thought that the corporate money in politics,

that the two parties and the power structure

was something I didn't want to get involved in.

-But thanks to Sanders, Zuckerman did get involved.

He's now Vermont's lieutenant governor.

-I was incredibly impressed with what he did a few years ago

where basically that inspiration for me I saw happen

with millions of people all across the country.

-For many Americans, it felt like Sanders

had a fresh and urgent message.

But it was the same message he'd been running on for 40 years.

-What we talk about is the fact that in our society,

theoretically a democratic society,

you have a handful of people who control our economy.

In the United States today,

we have the most unequal distribution of income

and wealth of any major country on earth.

-When Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981,

it got national attention.

-Face it, you don't find too many socialists

in elective office in this country,

and one is elected mayor of a sizable city, well, that's news.

-You try to make the story, you know, Communist takeover.

I said, "No, no, not at all."

-Garrison Nelson has known Sanders

since his earliest days in politics.

He says Sanders may have talked like a radical,

but he didn't govern like one.

-There's no five-year plan.

There's no collectivize agriculture.

There's no nationalizing, you know, of industry.

Every rich person in Burlington remained rich.

You know, no, they weren't driven out of the city

by the lefty mayor.

-Already gone through and been approved.

-No, Senate's not in.

-Bob Kinzel is one of Vermont's most well-known journalists.

He's covered Sanders for decades.

-Bernie's got a lot of philosophical ideas

that are quite broad and wide-ranging.

And people say, "Can he compromise?

Can he work with people?

Can he work with the business community?"

And as mayor, he showed he could.

-What is the history of this problem?

How long has this problem gone on?

Is it worse today than it was 20 years ago or what?

-Well, the problem has almost gone on forever.

As long as Burlington has had a sewer system,

which probably dates from about the middle of the 1800s,

we've been dumping it in the lake.

-Now, if you look at the old waterfront,

you had these big oil tanks out in the water,

and the place was just a mess.

And he worked with the business community to say,

"Let's make the waterfront sort of the jewel of Burlington."

-Sanders also increased funding for the arts

during his four terms as mayor.

-So you had this sort of synergy of lefty politics

and then, you know, artists and musicians,

and the city just became just vibrant,

sort of mini mecca here in the woods of New England.

-Bernie Sanders. It's time for change.

-In 1990, Sanders ran for the House of Representatives

as a member of the independent party, and he won.

In 2006, Vermonters made him a senator.

He spent much of his time in Washington as an outsider,

a third-party politician in a two-party town

and a champion of progressive policies at a time

when Democrats were moving to the center.

-As an independent,

I have problems with the Democrats' bill.

It does not go anywhere near far enough.

Let me describe very briefly how, with a single-payer system,

we can provide quality healthcare

to every man, woman, and child in this country.

We should be clear that a war

and a long-term American occupation of Iraq

could be extremely expensive.

Does anybody in America

really think that the problem in this institution now

is that working people and poor people have too much power?

-If you keep pushing further and further to the left,

you start to drag the middle in that direction,

and I think that's been his way

of operating throughout his legislative career.

-Sanders has sponsored more than 400 bills

during his nearly 30 years in Congress.

But only seven of those bills were passed into law.

One protected a Vermont mountain range.

Another codified a water-sharing agreement

with neighboring New Hampshire.

Two of the bills expanded government support for veterans,

while two others simply renamed Vermont post offices.

-He hasn't done squat for anybody.

-Rob Roper leads a free-market think tank in Vermont.

-Are there more jobs in Vermont?

Are there higher-paying jobs in Vermont

as the result of him having been in office?

-Sanders may have little to show for his decades in Congress,

but he has remained Vermont's most popular politician.

-Bernie Sanders is a bulldog for what he believes in.

-What's fascinating about Bernie is that,

yes, he has progressive voters, yes, he has liberal voters,

but he also has some very conservative Republican voters.

He can go up to the Northeast Kingdom,

the most rural part of Vermont, and people will go,

"Give 'em hell, Bernie."

-Chris Pearson saw it firsthand

as a campaign volunteer in the '90s.

-Aye. -Now he's a state senator.

-I had only actually been with Bernie

a few times at this point, and I'll never forget this.

This guy walks up, kind of working-class guy, says,

"Bernie, I disagree with you on just about everything,

and I vote for you every time."

And I'm looking at Bernie like,

"Wow, how's he gonna answer this?"

And Bernie says very frankly, says, "Why?"

And the guy says, "I know right where you stand.

These other guys, I don't have a clue."

-Consistency may be a strength for Sanders, but he may need

more than that to stand out in a crowded Democratic field.

-Given that there are so many choices,

it's been more challenging for him

to not only grow his pool of support,

but to expand it, as well.

-We need a lot of buses to get to Washington.

-And though he can certainly electrify a crowd,

he often struggles to connect with people one-on-one.

-When it comes to him on the campaign trail,

he does not tend to interact on a one-on-one level

with a lot of voters the way that some other candidates do.

-Hi, Senator. -Hey, Nick.

-How are you? -Good.

-Some Democrats I've talked to say, "Look, Democrats

want to know their candidates.

They want to see them.

They want to talk to them up close."

So that could be one of the challenges that he faces

as he tries to grow support.

-Communities devastated, the jobs moved overseas.

-The Sanders campaign is different this time around.

-Real change never takes place from the top on down.

-More professional and better organized than it was in 2016.

But the man at the center is likely to keep doing

what he's always done.

-So much of the money is going into the war effort

and into the military that we don't have enough money

to build all the housing that we want built.

-When you hear him speak,

you are really getting Sanders himself.

He's famous for scrawling out his speeches

on his yellow notepad.

He's been doing that for decades.

And, you know, you can have consultants

and you can have pollsters telling him what to do,

but he's probably not gonna listen.

-Oh, who said they like coke? -Me.

-You tell me about that. -I like Coca-Cola.

-Oh, Coca-Cola.

Alright, but who knows about cocaine?

Anyone ever seen cocaine?

-Yes. No.

-Yes. -Alright.

Hold it. One at a time.

What about cocaine? Good thing, bad thing, what?

-Bad. -Bad.

-Why is it bad?

-Because it has a bad effect on the body.

-That's right.

Do you know people who take drugs?

-No.

-You don't have to tell me who, but I bet you do.