She’s the kind of millennial Democrat the party says it needs to retake the White House. But will other progressives follow her path?
When Symone Sanders enters the Matchbox restaurant in Capitol Hill’s Barracks Row, she’s hard to miss: Big sunglasses, intricately painted nails and a shaved head. She walks through the door on a summer day, checking the phone in her hand every few seconds to see if she got a text message or new alert. Every millennial does this, but like most things with Sanders, she is one notch more intense about it. The texts and alerts come more often, and she checks them more often, too.
“I guess for some people I’m an anomaly,” Sanders tells me once we are seated an acceptable 30 feet or so from Lewandowski, with glasses of sangria in front of us. In a company town where the stereotypical operative is a white Ivy league graduate, Sanders concedes that she stands out. “I’m a bald, 29-year-old black girl from the Midwest who does politics.”
In her current role, Symone Sanders represents something that could become very important in 2020 Democratic politics: If Biden becomes the nominee, and the activated political left is going to get in line for Uncle Joe, they’re going to walk the path that Symone Sanders walked, from the lure of the purist to the siren song of a person who you don’t entirely agree with but says he can just plain old, exactly, there’s no quick way to capture her unusual position in the 2020 Democratic campaign...
“It hasn’t made me less critical of Biden,” McKesson told me over the summer. “I want to see what she saw.” It points to Sanders’ unusual status in Washington. It’s common for Democrats to build a career as a political operative and then transition to a role as a political commentator—perhaps while maintaining their work in politics. It’s much rarer to see someone rise through both spheres concurrently.
Sanders’ job, in part, is to weave her boss’s decades of shifting political positions and comments into something that feels coherent, and palatable, to Democratic primary voters in the America of 2020. This is not always easy. Before a rally in Philadelphia around the start of Biden’s presidential campaign, Sanders was pressed by CNN’s Victor Blackwell over Biden’s defense of the 1994 crime bill, legislation that progressives say contributed to mass incarceration.
During the 2016 campaign, Symone was regarded by some Bernie Sanders staffers as more of a hired gun than a true believer. That’s been on public display this cycle.
That’s a notable contrast to her explanation of how she decided to work for Biden—that he seemed like the best candidate to beat Trump. She seemed to instinctively understand how important thankless tasks, and a close relationship with the candidate, are to advancement in politics. Less than five months after joining the campaign, Sanders was its deputy communications director.
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