People
The allies, rivals, family, and campaign figures who appear most often in the story of Bernie Sanders.
Jane O’Meara Sanders
Sanders’s wife since 1988. Jane O’Meara Sanders served as president of Burlington College from 2004 to 2011 and has been a close political adviser throughout Sanders’s career. The college closed in 2016; reporting on the closure attributed it to financial pressures, and the matter was publicly disputed.
Larry Sanders
Sanders’s older brother. A British-based social worker and politician, Larry Sanders has been active in the Green Party of England and Wales and has campaigned publicly for his brother’s presidential bids.
Levi Sanders
Sanders’s son from an earlier relationship. He has occasionally appeared in campaign contexts but maintains a largely private profile.
Hillary Clinton
The Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. Sanders challenged Clinton for the nomination, then endorsed her on July 12, 2016, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and spoke for her at the Democratic National Convention that month.
Joe Biden
President of the United States from 2021 to 2025. Sanders challenged Biden for the 2020 Democratic nomination, withdrew on April 8, 2020, and endorsed him on April 13, 2020. In the Senate, Sanders chaired the Budget Committee during the passage of Biden’s American Rescue Plan in 2021.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
U.S. Representative from New York, first elected in 2018. She endorsed Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and has appeared with him at rallies; commentators have frequently described her as a political ally, a characterization she has embraced publicly.
Gordon Paquette
The five-term Democratic mayor of Burlington whom Sanders defeated by 10 votes in the March 1981 mayoral election — the race that launched Sanders’s career in elected office.
Peter Plympton Smith
The incumbent Republican congressman Sanders defeated in November 1990 to win Vermont’s at-large House seat, beginning his sixteen years in the House.
Jim Jeffords
The Vermont senator — elected as a Republican, later an Independent — whose retirement opened the seat Sanders won in 2006. Jeffords’s 2001 departure from the Republican Party had briefly shifted control of the Senate.
Patrick Leahy
Vermont’s Democratic senator from 1975 to 2023 and Sanders’s Senate colleague for sixteen years. Leahy, as the senior senator, and Sanders, as the Independent junior senator, served together as Vermont’s Senate delegation from 2007 to 2023.
Peter Welch
Democrat who succeeded Leahy in the Senate in 2023 after serving eight terms in Vermont’s House seat. Welch now serves as Vermont’s senior senator alongside Sanders.
Faiz Shakir
Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign manager, and previously his Senate office’s national political director. Commentators noted the campaign’s emphasis on grassroots fundraising and digital organizing under his management.
Source notes
These profiles summarize relationships documented in the official Senate biography, election reporting, and the campaign histories cited on this site’s sources page. Descriptions are limited to public, documented roles; private lives are not treated here.
Factual baseline: September 2026.