Bernie Sanders’ stepdaughter thwarted in US mayor race

Vermont’s largest city of 42,000 went to the polls to elect a mayor in a three-way race won by Democratic incumbent Miro Weinberger.

Independent Carina Driscoll ran on a progressive platform similar that of her stepfather, but her 35 percent haul of the vote failed to stop Weinberger from winning a third term on 48 percent of ballots cast, early results showed.

Her mother is Jane O’Meara, who had three children from a previous relationship when she married the now independent senator from Vermont in 1988.

​Driscoll grew up in Burlington, graduated from the University of Montana and moved back to Burlington, where she and her husband set up the Vermont Woodworking School, which now has 40 full-time students.

She served previously in the Vermont state legislature, the Burlington city council, and as assistant to mayor Weinberger. She also worked on Sanders’s Congress re-election campaign in 2000.

Sanders, who electrified populists and left-leaners in the 2016 US presidential race before losing the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton, got his political start as mayor of Burlington from 1981-89.

Son Levi Sanders announced last month that he was running for Congress in the state of New Hampshire, also pushing a platform similar to that of his father.