16 places that shaped the 2016 election: Burlington, Vt.

By Nov. 9, the votes will have been cast and counted, there will be a winner and a loser, and the country will begin a slow return to normal. Historians will have their say on the outcome, but all of us who have lived through this election will carry away indelible memories of a shocking year in American history: of a handful of ordinary people, swept up in the rush of history; of a series of moments on which the fate of the nation seemed, at least briefly, to turn; and of places on the map that became symbols of a divided nation. As we count down to Election Day, Yahoo News has identified 16 unforgettable people, moments and places.

Bernie Sanders was born, unmistakably, in Brooklyn and still carries himself with a no-nonsense demeanor honed by a twice-daily struggle for the last seat in a crowded subway car. But he has lived most of his life in Burlington, Vt., a placid, picturesque city of 42,000 on the shore of Lake Champlain. If Burlington were a car, it would be a Volvo station wagon from the 1980s — smart, progressive and fuel-efficient — the first city in the U.S., according to PBS, to get its electricity entirely from renewable sources. The lone Republican on its 12-member City Council is outnumbered not just by four Democrats but by independents and members of the Progressive Party. It has an antiwar tradition that dates back to the War of 1812; its best-known product is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And, as of 2010, the city was 87.3 percent non-Hispanic white, about the same as Montana.

Sanders fetched up here in 1968, with no money and not much in the way of a vocation, holing up in the hills, like Castro, to plot his revolution. Sanders’, though, would be fought in the pages of free local newspapers, and with posters and folk songs and door-to-door canvassing. He joined the tiny Liberty Union Party, a Vermont institution whose 2016 platform declares “WE must raise the standard of WORLD-WIDE human love and SOLIDARITY,” but he left it to mount an independent run for mayor in 1980. A long shot against a five-term Democratic incumbent who was considered such a shoo-in that the Republicans didn’t even nominate a candidate, Sanders mobilized students and professors at the University of Vermont, social workers and progressives to win by 10 votes.

He governed as a classic “sewer socialist,” a term that originated in Milwaukee to describe reform-oriented, progressive politicians seeking incremental, concrete improvements in constituents’ lives. Re-elected twice as mayor, then to Congress and ultimately the Senate, he remained proudly “independent,” also describing himself as a democratic socialist, with the emphasis shifting over time from the noun to the adjective. One of his proudest achievements, and the thing he will probably be remembered for the longest in his adopted hometown, was the redevelopment of the lake waterfront into a mixed-use district of housing, parks and public spaces threaded by bicycle paths. And it was there, on a sunny day in May 2015, surrounded by strolling couples, families and dogs, against a backdrop of sailboats and kayaks, that he announced his audacious bid for president. If he was hoping to lock in the local vote, he succeeded: he won Vermont by a margin of 86 to 14. — By Jerry Adler

Bernie-mania! Sanders launches 2016 campaign in Burlington, Vt.
There were dogs and children playing, people singing, and bikes and beach balls rolling. There was plenty of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream eating, and melting, down by the lake. Kayaks and sailboats floated by. In other words, it was a pretty typical late-spring day in Burlington, Vt., the largest city in the state with the second-smallest population — but an unusual setting for the first formal rally of a presidential campaign. >>>

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