Jane Sanders, the wife of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, marched with her husband this month through the Baltimore neighborhood of Freddie Gray, the man fatally injured in police custody, and took notes while they met with African-American pastors.
In Iowa, she schmoozed with supporters and reminded her husband to lighten his long, dark stump speeches. (“Doom and gloom!” she says she tells him. “Any hope at the end of the tunnel?”) She spent hours helping him prepare for this month’s debate, she reviews campaign ads, and come January, she will start venturing out alone as a surrogate for her husband in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Ms. Sanders may, with the exception of Bill Clinton, be the most politically active and experienced spouse in the 2016 presidential election.
When her husband was first elected to Congress in 1990, Ms. Sanders attended orientation not as a spouse, but as a chief of staff who vetted potential aides for congressional experience and ideological fervor. She went on to be a press attaché who smoothed things over with reporters irritated by her prickly husband and who, according to other members of Congress, kept the professorial Mr. Sanders down to earth. As a media consultant she worked on his re-election ads, and as a political fellow traveler she participated in the formation of the House’s progressive caucus.
“She has his ear like no one else in discussions at a very high level,” said David Weinstein, the senator’s senior policy adviser. “She speaks for Bernie, and it’s not just because she’s his wife. It’s because she is his confidante.”