In America anyone can get up and announce his candidacy as a would-be President. The next Presidential election is almost exactly a year away, but the election campaign was already making front page news in every newspaper that I picked up during my recent visit to the US.

The real fever will begin in a couple of months, from February on, when each state will decide the date of a Primary -- the mini-election, to choose the nominee of each party. Once all Primaries are completed, whoever has won the most states will become his or her party’s nominee to compete in the general election in November.

Standing for an election is an enormously expensive exercise. A hundred million dollars is not nearly enough to win a Presidential election. Even a billion dollars may not be enough. In 2012, both Obama and Romney raised and spent a billion dollars each. Funny thing is that as a candidate raises obscene amounts of money, more money pours in because of the air of "winnabilty". The Presidential election in America must be the biggest show on earth.

The United States has an Electoral College. No other country has electoral college system. Every state nominates a certain number of citizens as electorals. (The number of electorals is exactly the same as the number of Congressional representatives and Senators per state.) The allocation is based on the population of each state. For example, the state of New Jersey has fourteen electoral votes while Florida has twenty nine. In 2000, the contest was between Gore and Bush. Gore received the majority of populous votes and thereby gained all fourteen votes from New Jersey. Florida was a huge toss-up. Bush and Gore were neck and neck. The Supreme Court ruled that a few thousand very questionable ballots were valid and that led to a tiny margin of victory, in populous vote, for Bush. Because of that tiniest margin Bush received all twenty nine electoral votes in Florida and the presidency. It’s a winner-take-all deal.

Currently, there are fourteen or fifteen candidates for the Republican Party’s nomination. Most do not have a snowballs’ chance in hell but they are there for media attention, fame, notoriety and future influence. Hilary Clinton is the main contender for the nomination of the Democratic Party but now there is another contender, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, a maverick who has entered the arena and whose popularity has exceeded even his own expectations.

Sanders, who looks like everyone’s benign uncle, has been known as a democratic socialist for decades. In America, socialism used to be a damning label for a politician, but Americans are no longer as naïve as they used to be during the cold war. One survey conducted recently showed that forty nine percent of the voters, under the age of thirty, had positive views of socialism.

Bernie Sanders is a senator from Vermont -- a small, fairly conservative state. It was a long and arduous struggle for him. He had run twice for senate and twice for governor and never got more than six per cent of the votes. His appetite for campaign, however, made him try again and again. He at last got elected as a mayor of Burlington in 1981, the first 39 year old, newly-elected mayor, who did not own a suit.

As a mayor, he did some sterling work like providing creative solutions for providing affordable houses including a community land trust that enabled low-income residents to buy homes. He resisted a developer’s plan to turn a derelict lake waterfront into a cluster of high rise building. Instead he made the entire area open to public. His ascent to the Senate in 2006 was stunning because he trounced a Republican candidate, one of the wealthiest men in the state of Vermont.

Since joining the Senate, Sanders has made a name for himself for gestures of defiance. His oration against tax cuts for the wealthy has since been published in a book form.

Corporations and multi-national networks come under heavy attack in Sanders’ addresses to the public. "America today" he declared recently, "is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. But most people don’t know that, most people don’t feel that, most people don’t see that because all of the wealth is in the hands of a tiny few. This grotesque level of income and inequality is immoral".

Sanders wants to break up the big banks, create jobs by rebuilding infrastructure and move towards public funding of election and provide free tuition at public universities. He wants to end what he calls "the eternal embarrassment of being the only major country on earth which does not guarantee workers paid medical and family leave".

Sanders’s message is particularly potent for young people who are struggling financially. They feel heartened by a politician who points out to them that as hard-working Americans "some things aren’t a privilege but right".

It is not just the out of work youngsters or the blacks and Hispanics who find life to be unbearable because of poverty. Many lower middle class Americans who have had the advantage of a university education are feeling the pinch. There are white couples -- husband and wife working full time -- who own a home, work more than forty hours a week but can barely put oil in their heating tanks in the winter.

People with views like the equitable distribution of wealth and other such "pernicious and dangerous notions" have never succeeded in reaching a position of importance in the American political system. When Sanders says, "We are living in, and in a nation and a world, which worships not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and sick, but worships the acquisition of money and great wealth," he is derided as a fist-thumping pulpitarian.

Even if he fails to secure the Democratic nominations, Sanders has exposed a deep indignation about the distribution of wealth which other candidates (or a future President) cannot ignore. In a recent poll conducted by the New York Times, nearly seventy per cent of Americans feel that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed, and seventy five per cent Americans believe that Corporations exert too much influence on American politics.

Can Bernie Sanders win the Democratic nomination, let alone the Presidency? It is unlikely, if only because he hasn’t got the resources to raise money and he refuses to accept money from the mighty corporations. It is not conceivable that the tide will turn. Big money is not going to allow that.

No one who talks of political revolution in America has ever had a chance to be elected to the highest office. Miracles however, can happen.