Outsider in the White House

Bernie Sanders’s political autobiography, with an updated afterword that brings his story up to the 2020 presidential campaign

Explaining where he comes from and how his politics were formed, Senator Bernie Sanders describes in detail how, after cutting his teeth in the Civil Rights movement, he helped build an extraordinary grassroots political campaign in Vermont, making it possible for him to become the first independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. He is now the longest-serving independent in US political history.

An extensive afterword by the Nation’s National Affairs correspondent, John Nichols, continues the story with Sanders’s entrance into the Senate, the drama of the 2016 Democratic Primary, his ongoing resistance to Trump, and the thrilling launch of his 2020 bid for the White House. A new foreword by Nina Turner, former president of Our Revolution and co-chair of the Sanders for President campaign, provides a rare glimpse of Bernie as a person. Outsider in the White House is the story of a passionate and principled political life.

Bernie Sanders was elected to the US Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Early in his career, Sanders was director of the American People’s Historical Society. Elected Mayor of Burlington by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York.