PBS Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

As you heard in that debate over donor size, Sanders does do much better than Clinton with small donors. He has a much larger base of donors, and raised twice as much money as Clinton from donations under $200 as of Feb. 1, 2016.

Sanders is right that the big banks have gotten even bigger since the financial crisis. But they’re also much more heavily regulated, and being forced to hold much more capital. So they remain “too big to fail,” but also less likely to do so.

Ideology is notoriously hard to measure — especially for presidents like Franklin Roosevelt who didn’t serve in Congress — but it looks like Sanders would stand out as quite a bit more liberal than the last three Democratic senators who became president. Looking at congressional voting scores provided on voteview.org (for economic issues), Sanders stands out from the rest of the group. With a score of -.368, Obama was more liberal than John F. Kennedy (-.308) and Lyndon Johnson (-.236). (The more negative a score, the more liberal a candidate was.) Sanders was even more liberal than that. His score was -.523 in the 113th Congress.