Sanders is front-runner for party he vowed never to join

BERNIE SANDERS, the socialist running neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, once explicitly ruled out ever joining the party, documents seen by The Daily Telegraph reveal.

But now, the man who once insisted he had “no intention” of becoming a Democrat has taken the lead over the party favourite in a national poll for the first time.

A Fox News poll published yesterday put Mr Sanders three points ahead of Hillary Clinton and showed her support among women collapsing.

In Nevada, which will make its choice for the Democratic nominee today, they are inseparable in the polls.

His once unimaginable gains came as Mrs Clinton accused her rival of attacking previous Democratic presidents Barack Obama, and her husband Bill Clinton.

She said: “I just don’t know where all this comes from. Maybe it’s that Senator Sanders wasn’t really a Democrat until he decided to run for office. He doesn’t even know what the last two Democratic presidents did.”

Mr Sanders’s outright refusal to con- sider becoming a Democrat emerged in an archive of his papers at the University of Vermont in Burlington, where he was mayor from 1981-89.

In July 1988, during his first, unsuccessful congressional bid, he wrote a letter to Derek Shearer, an academic at Occidental College, Los Angeles, who was also US ambassador to Finland.

“No I am not a Democrat and have no intention of becoming one,” he wrote, making reference to what he perceived as the Democratic Party’s shift from “moderate to reactionary policies”. “I am independent for Vermont’s sole congressional seat,” he continued.

The archive, comprising 48 boxes, reveals Mr Sanders to have been a committed socialist, once subscribing to

Socialist Republic, a magazine linked to the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Mr Sanders was an independent senator for Vermont before registering with the Democratic Party last year.

Mrs Clinton was booed by some in the audience when she questioned her rival’s loyalty to the party during a joint question-and-answer session with voters in Nevada on Spanish-language television network Telemundo.

This week Mr Sanders described some of President Bill Clinton’s policies in office as “disastrous”.