I'm waiting to support him, too.

Um...it's very rural?

just east of a "big" body of water. (They want to call Lake Champlain the sixth Great Lake). It borders Canada like Idaho?

In the last few election cycles, Bernie has faced dem and republican challengers at the same time. The dems only got about 5-10% of the vote, with the repubs getting anbout 25-32% and Bernie winning with a landslide in the 64-69% range.

Bernie Sanders not only has a 100% labor voting record, he always stands with working people in their efforts to achieve fairness and dignity.

Daniel Brush
President
Vermont AFL-CIO

Vote our consience? What tosh! That might lead to STANDING UP FOR OUR PRINCIPLES, and we can't have Democrats doing that, now can we?

He is more 'our candidate' than our candidates... if that makes sense.

Well, even though it's the largest majority-Democrat caucus, it's not very powerful because it's the only caucus in Congress to have no senators as members. Paul Wellstone was in it, but he died.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has little power in the current Republican-dominated House (and no presence in the Senate), but it does have observeable effects sometimes.  It organized the Democratic house revolt against the Iraq war bill, that led to 2/3 of the Democrats in the house voting no despite their leadership supporting the bill (and Gephardt being almost a co-author :/).  Kucinich was chair of the progressive caucus and that was one of his claims to leadership experience, when he ran for president.

"Declaring" is an act that marks the start of your "Candidate Campaign", which is subject to a different set of legal rules than a "Candidate Committee" (what a candidate can form before they "declare".  It takes some preparation to be ready for that.  I doubt he'll declare right away.  He has said he is going to run.

It looks like MoveOn.org is already on the case.  Yesterday my wife got a call from them asking how she felt about Sanders.  They mentioned a few other possibilities among Democrats with state wide recognition but the list was not long or impressive.  It seems clear that Sanders is the one.  The state Democrats at the county level are now filled with DFA types like me and so it is unlikely that there will be a major challenge to Sanders from that side.  The real question is whether or not Vermont's second term Republican Governor James Douglas will give up a very strong chance to be reelected once again to go to the aid of his party.

According to today's Rutland [Vermont] Herald editorial Race of the century

Last night on the Vermont Public TV show "Vermont this Week" the journalist panelists seemed to agree that Douglas, unlike many other Vermont Republicans, was a real Republican loyalist and in the end probably would answer the call of his party.

Of course in such a race it would be very difficult for Douglas to successfully distance himself from national Republican issues in the way he has so far succeeded in doing here in Vermont.  As the Herald editorial puts it

Of course it would be much better for Republicans if Jeffords would just disappear now and let Douglas name some other Vermont Republican as his successor -- someone who could then run in 06 as an incumbent.  In fact there is a letter to that effect  printed in today's Rutland Herald Jeffords should leave office now.    It says Senator Jeffords' should resign now since

I think that whatever Jeffords personal situation  (his wife does have cancer and he has admitted he "sometimes forgets things") it is very unlikely that he will soon forget how the GOP has treated him over the years and do anything to let them off the hook so easily.

So if it is Douglas vs. Sanders in 06 then we have almost everything wide open here in Vermont. 

The only real reason Douglas was able to win the first time was that the Progressives split the liberal vote when Howard Dean left office.  This last election the Democrats avoided a serious split by nominating a former Progressive as their candidate for governor , but he was not a strong contender and it hard to unseat an incumbent governor in Vermont (and always has been).  And in the last Lt. Governor race the Progressives once again succeeded in splitting the liberal vote and a not-to-impressive young Republican Brian Dubie won with 41% the vote after Progressive Anthony Pollina got 1/4 of the vote and Democrat Peter E. Shumlin got about 1/3.

So we liberals of Vermont have a strong chance getting a total of four open seats in 06.  Of course we can expect a lot of out of state money to come in but it probably will not all be on the Republican side and there are real limits to what you can do with TV ads when it comes to Vermont politics.