“I never really paid attention to politics,” said Cara Ciminello, 24, with her fiancé, Peter Sughrue, 25, “and then we heard Bernie, and we were, like, ‘He’s actually giving us a voice. He’s actually saying what we want to hear,’ so then we got behind him—and now we won’t stop till he’s in the White House.”

Nearly half a century has passed since Sanders started running for office, bumming money from friends to put gas in his beat-up blue VW bug, and now here he is, the often dour, oddly charismatic, undeniably indefatigable, 79-in-September Vermont senator and self-described democratic socialist—heading into Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire as at least the co-favorite to win. He won the most votes in Iowa a week ago, a result that seems clear in spite of the botched caucuses. He’s leading in more and more polls, at times trailing only Joe Biden, whose campaign seems to be wheezing. And he has become nothing short of a grassroots fundraising colossus, the possessor of a reservoir of resources that could let him run forever. In this panicky, high-stakes race to take on an emboldened Donald Trump in November, Sanders is positioned as well as, if not better than, any of his many competitors to be the Democratic nominee.

That this man, who has spent most of his life spurning and disparaging the Democratic Party, who is only semi-nominally even a member of the party and who is reviled by some of its biggest names, could be by summer its titular head is a prospect few would believe possible. That is, if they hadn’t seen Trump do something similar in 2016: The ultimate anti-establishment outsider, the almost ridiculous choice in fact becoming the choice. The seriousness of Sanders’ chances can be measured in relation to the apoplexy he’s started to generate among stalwart operatives. Bernie Sanders? “Having him for president of the United States?” longtime Democratic strategist James Carville said when we talked last week. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Regardless, though, of what happens Tuesday and from here, Sanders, already more than any other 2020 candidate, has shaped the ideological tenor of Democrats’ lumbering primary process—more even than he did in ’16. His "Medicare for All" proposal, the linchpin of his expansive progressive agenda, has served as the policy position around which the other top candidates have defined themselves. Add in the poll numbers for Elizabeth Warren, another left-of-center Democrat angling for giant structural change, and the upper tier of the Democratic field leans more toward Sanders than it does Joe Biden. And he has ensured his stamp will remain on campaigns still to come. By far the most prominent surrogate in the field is Sanders’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a first-term, just-turned-30 congresswoman from New York City who could be his granddaughter—and whom Sanders supporters and, in particular, his legions of millennials view as proof that all of this is not about just an individual but rather a movement that has altered the contours of liberal politics and is nowhere close to done.

A question hangs here in the wintry New England air.

Is the Democratic Party Bernie Sanders’ party now?

“Not yet,” Matt Bennett, an executive vice president at center-left think tank Third Way and a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns, told me.

But …

“Look,” Bennett said, “I think if he wins the nomination, and even if he loses to Trump, boy—that’s going to be hard for me to say no. Because AOC’s coming as the next generation, and who knows what happens to our party?”

Sanders supporters, unsurprisingly, are more certain.

“Bernie,” Ciminello said as the band wrapped up, “is the future.”

And out he came, no tie, the blue blazer, the stern face. The white hair. The crowd roared. “Power to the People” he blared. And then Sanders said what he’s been saying since the 1970s, said what he was saying 10, 20, 30 years before so many of the people at his rallies were even born, jabbing that finger to underscore the pillars of his platform—universal health care, universal child care, higher wages for workers, a redistribution of wealth, which is to say a redistribution of power—from the millionaires!—from the billionaires!—all building in his jackhammered Brooklynese to a pronouncement that would have been inconceivable 50 years ago, five years ago, maybe five months ago. Inconceivable to some even still. “Our campaign is the campaign that can, and will, defeat Trump,” he said. “Let us win here in New Hampshire, let us then go on to Nevada, South Carolina, California. Let us create the political revolution this country needs! Let us defeat the most dangerous president in the modern history of America!”

He pumped his fist.

The people chanted his name. “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!”

How did this happen? How does Sanders have a shot at being the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party? Of … taking it over? Some say it’s a case of man meeting moment, income inequality having become so blatantly obvious that Sanders’ prescriptions at last make enough sense to enough people. Others point to the 30-and-under crowd, which doesn’t remember the Soviet Union (or is simply strapped by stagnant pay or student-loan debt) and thinks socialism sounds … not so bad. People around politics, meanwhile, wonder if he’s somehow gotten a pass from the media or a not-totally-tuned-in public concerning comments he’s made on topics ranging from George Wallace to socialism to sex fantasies. But those explanations obscure something more tactical about the long, long arc of Sanders’ virtually singular political project.

Because he’s done this before. He did it first in the city of Burlington, Vermont. He did it statewide after that. As he turned himself from a gadfly and an also-ran in the ’70s into a mayor in the ’80s and a member of the United States Congress in the ’90s, he shrewdly and steadily pieced together durable coalitions. The pistonlike consistency of his message and ideology, although frequently cited, was merely the start. Sanders worked within the blunt realities of electoral math. He sensed weakness in opponents and in institutions and exploited it—outpacing complacent, vulnerable Democrats, the way he nearly toppled Hillary Clinton.

“The people who don’t deal with him are the people who think he’s an ineffective radical with hot matches stuck between his toes,” the executive director of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns told The Associated Press in 1988. “You’re just about to say, ‘I’m going to fight this guy to the bitter end,’ and you find yourself linking arms with him.”

And in the end, not always, but almost always, Sanders was the one who won.

“There’s nothing about any of this that feels unexpected or surprising,” Ellen David Friedman, a veteran labor organizer who was a close Sanders associate in the ’80s, told me the other day. “Not because we’re prescient, obviously—but just because we’ve seen it.”

He wasn’t supposed to win.

But he did.

Sanders won in 1981 by 10 votes, 4,030 to 4,020, to become the mayor of Burlington, a pretty and gritty city on the hill above Lake Champlain with a population shy of 40,000.

He won because he ran against an out-of-touch incumbent. Gordon Paquette, a business-friendly Democrat, had won an average of 72 percent of the vote in his five previous campaigns. He was seen as a shoo-in and barely campaigned.

Sanders won because he ran against a divided Democratic Party. Dickie Bove, who had challenged Paquette in the Democratic caucus and challenged him again in the general election as an independent, got 1,091 votes, more than enough to siphon support in a race that wound up so close. “All you needed was 12 people in Florida to send back their absentee ballots,” said Garrison Nelson, a venerable and voluble University of Vermont political scientist, “and Bernie Sanders’ career is over and he’s driving a cab in Burlington.”

He won because the timing was right. Rents were rising. Citizens with lower incomes were feeling a squeeze and wanting a change. Sanders made it his slogan: “It’s Time for a Change, a Real Change.”

He won because he knocked on doors wearing work boots, “probably knocked on more doors than anybody in the history of Burlington,” he would say later in In These Times, delivering the same general message that had animated his four losing campaigns in the ’70s, when he ran for governor and the Senate on the ticket of the small, anti-war Liberty Union Party. “The goal,” he told the Burlington Free Press at the outset of his independent municipal bid, “must be to take political power away from the handful of millionaires who currently control it through Mayor Paquette and place that power in the hands of the working people of the city.” He opposed expensive waterfront condominiums. He wanted rent control. He opposed tax hikes but supported pay hikes for police officers.

He won because he got the endorsement of the Burlington Patrolmen’s Association. How bad could a socialist be if he was backed by the cops?

And he won because of the unusual coalition he forged. Poor people. Old people. Professors and students. Community organizers. Anti-war activists. Environmentalists. Young professionals and members of trade unions. Working-class homeowners and working-class tenants. Disaffected Democrats. The campaign, according to Steven Soifer, the author of The Socialist Mayor, attracted roughly 1,000 new voters.

“It’s just so simple that we tend to ignore it: If the voter turnout is big enough, the left will win,” said Dean Corren, a former state legislator in Vermont and former Sanders staffer. “Getting people to actually come out and vote is challenging, but one of the ingredients you absolutely need is somebody who’s different and exciting.”

“Bernie has that unique ability to talk about what could be versus what is and connects with people,” said Gary De Carolis, a progressive ally on Burlington’s Board of Aldermen when Sanders was mayor. “He connects with a lot of different groups of people, but one group in particular are people who have felt like no one really, in the end, truly cared about what their issues were. And he rejuvenated their interest in the political system.”

“We pulled off something no one thought we could do,” Sanders said at the time of his unlikely victory. He called it a “mini-revolution.”

“It’ll never happen again,” a Democrat who was a past president of the board vowed. “He’s a one-term mayor.”

Only it did. And he wasn’t.

In 1982, when Sanders wasn’t even on the ballot, he nonetheless knocked on more doors, an effort that helped three progressives running for seats on the board to oust Democrats. It meant there were five progressives on the board, not two, along with five Republicans and now just three Democrats—a fundamental shift of power. There was no way around it anymore. The Democrats had to work with Sanders. This was only solidified when he was reelected in 1983 with 52.8 percent of the vote and turnout was 3,000 votes greater than just two years before. And then Sanders won again in ’85. And again in ’87. The Democrats in Burlington had tried to stop him, and they failed.

It was clear, though, even then, even from the start of his electoral success, that Sanders had his sights set beyond Burlington. He wanted “fundamental changes in the economic structure of this country,” he said in his initial inaugural address. “In the final analysis, the people of America are going to have to say that the wealth, labor and natural resources must be used to benefit all the people, not just a few super-rich.”

It was equally evident that he was ready for a slog. “The concept of burnout is a neurosis of our time,” he told an interviewer, according to a transcript in his papers in the Sanders archives kept at the University of Vermont. “A person works three years on something and says he’s burned out because he didn’t change the world.”

Trying to change the world, Sanders seemed to understand, was going to take a lot longer than that.

On the campaign trail, Sanders’ events often feel different from those of the other candidates. The average age is lower, the identifiable misfits and outcasts more numerous, the work boots more conspicuous—the devotion more pronounced. I’ve attended town halls, meet-and-greets, and news conferences of his that were just as workaday as those of the others. At his best events, though, there is a kind of electric charge.

Late one night late last month, for instance, in Ames, Iowa, in a double-decked auditorium, capacity not quite 900, well more than 1,000 people wedged into every seat and stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles. Hundreds more lined up outside. Inside, up on the stage, the band Portugal. The Man injected into the venue a festive, practically triumphant vibe. It was loud. It was fun. It was body-heat warm. It was a bona fide scene. And when Sanders finally came out to give his speech, he took a look at the crowd and landed a joke. “We won’t tell the fire marshal,” he said to laughs. “Not a word.”

But the event I found myself still thinking about, even in New Hampshire, was one I had gone to the night before Ames, in Iowa City.

Two reasons. The first?

“Lot of people,” Mark Stimson, 63, from Fairfield, told me, scanning the throng packed inside the University of Iowa’s student union. “And he’s not even here.”

Sanders was in Washington for the impeachment trial. Ocasio-Cortez was more than a surrogate. She was the headliner. “I know people who are here just to see her,” University of Iowa freshman James Gulden said. “I think that Sanders is the one politician really in America that represents the values that I hold,” said UI senior Brendan McDonough. “And I think that his association with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the Justice Democrats is just really empowering.”

But the second reason?

Phillip Agnew.

“Just a few months ago in Queens,” said Agnew, an activist and an organizer, standing behind the lectern before Michael Moore, before AOC, “our candidate asked us to ask ourselves if we were willing to fight for somebody that we didn’t know … so today I’m going to ask you to be open to getting to know the human being to your left and your right. … The human beings who form the most powerful movement in the history of electoral politics. So, if you’ll indulge me, I want you to kindly ask your neighbors, ‘Can I hold your hand?’”

A ripple of nervous laughter.

But more than 800 people held hands.

“I want you all to close your eyes and follow my instructions,” Agnew said. It got quiet and still. I watched from the rear of the room.

“If you grew up in a happy home, please squeeze your hand. Gently,” he said. Some titters. Which stopped with the next prompt. “If you grew up in a home that wasn’t so happy,” he said, “please squeeze your hand. If you’ve ever wondered where your next meal might come from, please squeeze your hand. … If you’ve ever fallen ill and self-medicated or ignored it because the bill might hurt more than the ill, please squeeze your hand. If you’ve ever lost a job, please squeeze your hand. If you’ve ever laid awake at night …”

And standing there, watching all these people, their eyes closed, holding hands, as this sequence of questions from Agnew grew increasingly raw—“if you’ve ever been assaulted”—I found myself blinking back tears.

He raised his hands. He asked everybody else to do the same.

“Repeat after me,” Agnew said. “With these hands, we will rebuild our communities.”

They did.

Since that evening in Iowa City, I’ve told people about Agnew’s portion of the program and the effect it had on the crowd, and on me.

I mentioned it to Bennett from Third Way, who told me, essentially: Be careful. “The danger of covering movement candidates is that as a human being, you and all your journalistic colleagues, it is impossible to remain immune from the sense that these people are really on to something. But I’m telling you. Elizabeth Warren’s crowd in Washington Square Park was big and super friggin’ enthusiastic this summer. Howard Dean was packing ’em in.” Fair enough.

“What I would say,” Bennett said, “having done five presidential campaigns—two losses, two wins and a tie—is that what you really have to gauge is the feeling of electricity during the general election, not during the primary, because primaries are distortion fields.”

Ellen David Friedman, Sanders’ friend from the ’80s, sees something else at work. “I have to say,” she said, “that if you have the courage and the confidence to approach the questions of this election from the perspective of touching on one’s individual trauma and the recovery from trauma, then you’re on to something, in my view—because who the heck is not traumatized in one way or the other by just being alive right now? So, if they’re willing and they’re able to … figure out collectively what we do about it, well, that’s very serious organizing mojo there. So, yeah, I’m super, super optimistic.”

That Sanders can win?

“Absolutely.”

He wasn’t supposed to win.

And he didn’t.

In 1986, Sanders had run for governor, and he had lost—and lost big—getting less than 15 percent of the vote. He had won in Burlington, again and again, but people remained skeptical his small-city success could translate statewide. In 1988, he ran for Congress—“if enough of us believe we can win...then we will win,” he wrote in a letter to supporters—and he lost. But it was close. He got 37.5 percent, and Peter Smith, the Republican who won, got 41. And the Democrat? He got just 19 percent. It was a loss, but Sanders would come to think of it as a “turning point.”

“Even though Bernie lost in 1988, he set down an important political marker. He had shown that in Vermont he was the viable alternative to the Republicans and that the third-place finishing Democrat had in fact been the spoiler”—not Sanders, according to Jeff Weaver, his longtime adviser. “Bernie was now more popular than the Democratic establishment in Vermont.”

He had proved to people he could win.

Two years later, he did.

He won, in 1990, in a rematch against Smith, and it wasn’t even close. He won 56 percent of the vote. Smith didn’t even crack 40. Smith was a beatable candidate—a moderate Republican, a former lieutenant governor, an Ivy Leaguer who made for a good foil for the insistent Sanders. He made mistakes with some votes in Washington. He made mistakes during the campaign in Vermont.

But more than anything else, Sanders won because of what the Democrats did.

The Democrats put up a University of Vermont professor, a neophyte and a nonfactor with next to no support from the party. This lack of support was partly because Sanders had placated the party by endorsing (albeit tepidly) Walter Mondale for president in 1984 and (more enthusiastically) Jesse Jackson in 1988. That year, he went to the Democratic caucus to give a speech on behalf of Jackson, which turned into a wild night—a woman slapped him—but ultimately his intermittent outreach and endorsements patched up some burned bridges.

Really, though, Sanders won in 1990 because he finally had forced Democrats in Vermont to relent. He had all but made them vote for him. The electoral math was clear: If they didn’t, the Republican was going to get reelected.

“They basically surrendered,” said Garrison Nelson from UVM. “The Democrats in Vermont surrendered to Bernie.”

“When he does better than their candidate, they finally saw the writing on the wall,” said Corren, the former state legislator and former Sanders staffer.

People who’ve known him the longest can’t help but see similarities between then and now.

The 1988 race?

“It’s 2016,” said Terry Bouricius, who’s been friends with Sanders since the ’70s.

And 2020?

“1990,” Bouricius said, “where he won.”

“What we need in this country,” Sanders said in his victory speech that November, “is a mass movement of tens of millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say: ‘We want national health care! We want the millionaires and the multinational corporations who have not been paying their fair share of taxes to start paying!’”

Before Sanders was even sworn in on Capitol Hill, he had his eyes, still, on that long slog goal.

“The game,” he told the Associated Press, “is not going to be won in Congress. It is going to be won on the back roads and the main streets of America.”

The main street in Derry, New Hampshire, is called West Broadway. Outside the Opera House, where Sanders had just finished a town hall, a man had parked his red F-350 snow plow, on the grass no less. It was festooned with a truculent number of flags and signs. "Veterans for Trump." "Women for Trump." "Deplorables for Trump." "Drain the Swamp." "Build the Wall!" “NO MORE BULLSHIT.”

Inside, in a Q&A, a woman stood up to make more of a comment. “You seem like one of the most authentic candidates right now,” she had said, “so I wanted to hear what you had to say.” She was worried, though, about “open borders.”

“I don’t believe in open borders,” Sanders had responded, “if ‘open borders’ means anybody can come from any place in the world.” He talked about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He talked about “comprehensive immigration reform.” He talked about “a path toward citizenship.”

Now outside, crisp, cold air and bright blue sky, some 20 or 30 feet from the Trump plow, I introduced myself to the woman. In 2016, she told me, she had voted for Trump. “We all recognize he’s not living, you know, a Christian life,” said Christine Caron, a stay-at-home mother of two teenage daughters from Danbury. “But we didn’t hire him to be our pastor or our Jesus. We hired him to protect us from people that want to take away our freedoms and people who want to kill babies.” Still, as a Baptist, she’s troubled at times by the profane way that the president talks.

Caron had driven more than an hour to see Sanders. She believes he got a “bad rap” in 2016. She didn’t care for Warren’s attack on Sanders last month. She sided with him. “He’s getting kicked in the head again,” she told me. Still, she wonders about his expensive proposals, and higher taxes, and who will get what. “It feels like I’m being asked to help for people that are doing better than me,” she said. But she considers him the most “electable” candidate in the Democratic field.

It’s a topic that’s understandable, and unavoidable, and not just as it pertains to the primary. Could Sanders beat Trump? He gets asked about this a lot—especially of late. And he typically answers by talking about turnout, which was not great in Iowa, and about his support from young people, “the most progressive generation in American history.” And he nods to his potential crossover appeal—the appeal that he has, and always has had, to the alienated, the dissatisfied, the down-and-out citizens from all over who are not so much moored or motivated by ideology but rather just looking for a plainspoken champion.

Not everybody, to put it mildly, sees it this way. “We don’t see a path,” Third Way’s Bennett told me, “for Sanders to win the election”—the stakes of which, Carville, said, are inordinately high: “If the Democratic Party doesn’t come together, we’re going to lose the country.” Added anti-Trump Republican strategist Rick Wilson: “There’s a 65 percent chance Trump’s going to win again—and if it’s Bernie, there’s an 85 percent chance Trump’s going to win again. He will fucking destroy the Democratic Party.”

Here, though, was Christine Caron, Trump-supportive but Sanders-curious. Her husband, an air-traffic controller at the small airport in Lebanon, hadn’t voted for Trump—couldn’t vote for him but couldn’t vote for Clinton, either, according to his wife, and so he voted third party.

I asked her what she was going to do on Tuesday.

“I think,” Caron said, “I’m going to vote in the primary for Bernie.”

And in November?

No question. Trump.

“I don’t see him,” she said of Sanders, “swinging me away.”

And her husband?

“Now my husband,” she said, “is a bigger Trump fan than I am.”

Caron’s vote for Sanders on Tuesday, assuming she does vote for him, would amount in her mind to her pick for her second choice for president. “Who do I want it to be if Trump loses?” she explained. “I’d rather have somebody authentic.”

I thanked her for her time. I walked back toward my rental car. Still parked in the grass by the Opera House was the Trump plow.