Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Senior David Flemming interned for the senator for a school assignment in high school.
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Hillsdale College senior David Flemming, despite his conservative views, once interned for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., while in high school.
He was able to land the internship through a class he took in high school, which required its students to find an internship suitable to their interests.
“Though the internship was for Sanders, I did it as a service for Vermont,” said Flemming, who has lived in Vermont all his life.
After struggling to find a politics internship with Vermont’s congressman, his only option was to work for Sen. Sanders in his Senate Office.
“I actually had a lot of discussions with people about whether or not I should accept the offer because he didn’t agree with me politically,” Flemming said
Flemming’s high school classmate and friend Lucie Alden remembers the time well.
“I was really glad to hear that he was interning for Senator Sanders,” Alden said. “It is a huge honor and accomplishment to work for one of the nation’s most senior senators. I may have been a little surprised as well, as I know David has some more classically liberal political and economic views. With Bernie, that could make things interesting.”
He ultimately decided to take the offer, and interned for Sanders for about two months.
“After school every Wednesday I would take the bus down to the office and I would be there for maybe three until 5 every week,” Flemming said. “There are about 25 people in his Burlington office which is about 20 miles away from where I live.”
Interns for the Sanders office were responsible for completing a daily report of all relevant news stories from local Vermont newspapers in addition to database upkeep, outreach visits, and drafting responses to constituent questions.
Though Flemming did not support Sanders on most issues, he found the work environment enjoyable.
“They put a lot of trust in me, though they knew I was of the opposite political persuasion,” Flemming said. “One time, they gave me their entire mailing list as an excel document and I was supposed to delete duplicates. If I was more of an immoral person, I could have sabotaged his whole mailing list, but I was impressed, they actually put a lot of trust in me to do this, so I tried to do it well.”
David’s supervisor Harper Gay, who was Sander’s Statewide Outreach Representative at spoke well of Flemming.
“I give him high marks for keeping his mind open while trying something new, when he may not have been entirely comfortable with it,” said Gay. “He took to his daily tasks with gusto and had the ability to focus in with appropriate levels of intensity.”
Aside from occasionally seeing Senator Sanders around the office, Flemming and the other interns were able to attend a news conference led by the senator.
“He was talking about some kind of renewable energy that he was wild about, and I just got to listen in,” Flemming said.
While Flemming made clear the work environment was positive, he recalled two events which made him uncomfortable as a conservative.
“At the very end of my time there, the office threw a party for all of the interns,” he remembers. “For about 30 minutes the team spoke about the importance of democracy and talked about the U.S. Constitution in kind of flippant terms, and how many foreign countries have more democratic constitutions than we do, which didn’t seem true to me.”
He also was asked later to campaign for the Bernie Sander’s re-election campaign, which Flemming politely declined to do.
“If it had been a more conservative senator, with a similar workplace culture, I may have considering getting more internships or maybe a job after college,” Flemming said. “I loved working there.”
This past summer Flemming decided to attend Sanders’ kick-off rally in Burlington, Vermont, just to see how the political environments had changed since he was working for Sanders.
“I decided that I would show up wearing my ‘Stand with Rand’ shirt, just to be that guy,” Flemming said. “It was fun seeing all of the Sanders supports as I was walking around.”
One woman stopped him to take his picture next to a pro-Sanders sign, and Flemming agreed. Ultimately, while Flemming has no intention of returning to work for Sanders — last summer, he interned for the libertarian Independent Institute — he views the experience as positive.
“I guess the experience shaped how I see the world in some ways,” Flemming said. “I think Bernie is to Vermont what apple pie is to America in some ways. There are some people who defiantly disagree with him, but even those people who do disagree with him respect him, I think. That is definitely a high honor for any politician to have that kind of universal respects.”