Local Opinion: Why Bernie can win: A brief political memoir

On March 17, Arizona Democrats will decide who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump. For many Democrats, the answer is anyone but Bernie Sanders. Here is why the opposite is true — why Bernie is the best suited to take back the White House. The story begins 18 years ago.

I first felt the political reverberations of Bernie by following a different U.S. senator from Vermont. In 2001, Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords made national headlines when he left his party, declared himself an independent, and handed Senate control to Democrats. No longer did George W. Bush’s Republicans have a lock on government.

Largely forgotten now, Jeffords was hailed as courageous. Indeed, he was. When I met Jeffords the following year while I was in Washington, D.C., he shared with me about the death threats he had received. Yet if you believe — as I do — that politics is the art of the possible, Jeffords’ decision reflected the tectonic shift that Bernie had wrought in the rural parts of Vermont.

Fast-forward 10 years. It was 2011 and I had recently moved to rural Vermont to study law. Mr. Jeffords had since retired to relative obscurity, and Vermont’s longtime congressman, Bernie Sanders, had been elevated to the Senate. Coming from Tucson, I found small-town Vermont to be quaint, community-oriented, and ... conservative. “Take Back Vermont” signs on roadside barns and garages were still prominent. These were the remnants of a decade-old movement pushing back against Vermont’s decision to grant civil unions to same-sex couples.

Nevertheless, my neighbors welcomed Bernie with enthusiasm. At a nearby town hall meeting, I watched my neighbors signal their support for Bernie’s invective against corporate elites. These were the same voters who had recently elected a Republican state legislator and voted for the Republican gubernatorial candidate.

My experience in that town hall was not an aberration. Bernie consistently wins almost every region of Vermont. This includes Orleans County, a remote area of the state that favored Trump in 2016 and whose shuttered factories resemble the parts of Pennsylvania that left political pundits scratching their heads following Trump’s victory.

Like many parts of rural Vermont, Orleans County does not look like the avocado-toast-consuming young crowds that fill Bernie’s presidential rallies. Orleans County is aging: its median age is eight years higher than the national average. In 2018 — after going for Trump — Orleans County voted to re-elect its democratic socialist senator.

It’s difficult to overstate how ruby red Vermont was at the time Bernie entered politics in the 1970s. Republicans had won every single U.S. Senate race since 1856, and, with only one exception, every Republican presidential candidate since Lincoln had won Vermont. In short, Bernie rose to political prominence when the Green Mountain State was redder than the soil of Sedona. Today, most statewide offices in Vermont are held by Democrats. The current lieutenant governor hails from the Progressive Party.

In Arizona, all of the energy and attention of Democrats is channeled into the Great State of Maricopa. Yet, we Democrats should not overlook that Trump won Arizona by 90,000 votes. Combined, Arizona’s 13 rural counties are expected to generate upward of 700,000 votes in November. Many parts of those 13 counties resemble Orleans County.

If Bernie achieves in rural Arizona even a muted version of what he’s achieved in Vermont, he will be the first Democrat to win Arizona since 1996. And this is to say nothing of the unique potential for Bernie to inspire new groups to vote for the first time.