Jane Sanders, the wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, marched with her husband this month through the Baltimore neighborhood of Freddie Gray, the man fatally injured in police custody, and took notes while they met with African-American pastors.

In Iowa, she schmoozed with supporters and reminded her husband to lighten his long, dark stump speeches. (“Doom and gloom!” she said she tells him. “Any hope at the end of the tunnel?”) She spent hours helping him prepare for this month’s debate, she reviews campaign ads, and come January, she will start venturing out alone as a surrogate for her husband in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Jane Sanders may, with the exception of Bill Clinton, be the most politically active and experienced spouse in the 2016 presidential election.

When her husband was first elected to Congress in 1990, Jane Sanders attended orientation not as a spouse, but as a chief of staff who vetted potential aides for congressional experience and ideological fervor. She went on to be a press attaché who smoothed things over with reporters irritated by her prickly husband and who, according to other members of Congress, kept the professorial Bernie Sanders down to earth. As a media consultant she worked on his re-election ads, and as a political fellow traveler she participated in the formation of the House’s progressive caucus.

“She has his ear like no one else in discussions at a very high level,” said David Weinstein, the senator’s senior policy adviser. “She speaks for Bernie, and it’s not just because she’s his wife. It’s because she is his confidante.”

It is a role she has played in her husband’s tight group of advisers since she and Bernie Sanders started working together at Burlington City Hall in the 1980s. And it is one she continues to inhabit on the presidential campaign trail.

When Andrea Mitchell of “Meet the Press” mentioned Sunday that Bill Clinton was going to campaign for his wife, Bernie Sanders said, “We’re going to let my wife, Jane, out, and I think Hillary is going to be in real, real trouble.”

But more than being another legislative aide or campaign strategist, Jane Sanders is unique on her husband’s team for her ability to soften his political persona as a grumpy scold.

During a recent rough patch of the campaign, as her husband’s standing in the polls stalled behind Hillary Clinton, Jane Sanders offered a tour of the couple’s home and all the places where he acted something like a normal American dad.

There was the barbecue, in a backyard framed by birch trees, where he grilled steaks. In a kitchen decorated with wind chimes, Irish blessings (“May the road rise up to meet you”) and a Norman Rockwell poster, she prompted her grandson to impersonate Bernie Sanders when he stands on a chair waving his arms like a conductor.

In the living room, where Bernie Sanders likes to sing along to the Supremes while feeding logs into a wood-burning stove, she opened a photo album, which she had taken out earlier that day to show producers from “Good Morning America.” She showed off pictures of their wedding day, where a saxophonist friend serenaded them with Abba hits, and a distant Christmas morning when he gave her son, one of her three children from a previous marriage, a He-Man sword.

But Jane Sanders could make her husband only so relatable. Asked how much he watched the television that is surrounded by porcelain tchotchkes, she laughed, and her daughter, Carina Driscoll, 41, shouted from the adjacent kitchen.

“We were watching the Super Bowl, and he turned it off at halftime!” Driscoll said. “What American does that?”

A philosophical compatriot of her socialist husband, Jane Sanders is also, like him, a Brooklyn native. Born Mary Jane O’Meara to Irish Catholic parents, she was the youngest of five children brought up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Her father broke his hip when she was a toddler, beginning a decade of hospital stays and difficulties paying health care bills that imbued her with a sense of economic injustice.

At 14, she came to understand the difference money could make. Her brother Ben, who had learned horseback riding in Prospect Park and eventually became a Hall of Fame equestrian rider, helped the family with money he made performing at Madison Square Garden and training Olympic show-jumping horses.

After graduation from Catholic school in Park Slope, she studied in Tennessee, became engaged to David Driscoll at 18, went back to Brooklyn, followed her husband to Virginia and fell in love with the idea of Vermont, which she had been reading about in the self-sufficiency magazine Mother Earth News.

In addition to their own children, the couple took in foster children, which strained the marriage and helped lead to a divorce. Jane Sanders became a community organizer and met Phil Fiermonte, who remains a key member of Bernie Sanders’ team. She joined Bernie Sanders’ inner circle herself at age 31, after meeting him during his victorious insurgent campaign for mayor of Burlington in 1981.

They began dating and she ended up running the city’s youth office.

“She was involved all the way through,” said Kathy Lawrence, who used to work for Jane Sanders in the youth office. “They had long days and then out to meetings at night.”

With an abundance of wavy red hair and conviction, she shared the mayor’s temperament and relished the political heft afforded by City Hall, even on issues seemingly peripheral to municipal governance. She berated city aldermen for not showing appropriate interest in a visiting councilman from Belfast, Northern Ireland, saying, “Don’t you care that human rights are at stake here?” according to The Burlington Free Press, which reported on the shouting match that Bernie Sanders soon joined in her defense.

The couple married in 1988, squeezing their wedding in before a trip to Yaroslavl, in the Soviet Union, Burlington’s sister city. The trip — jokingly referred to as a honeymoon — has also become something of a punch line for Republican candidates who accuse Bernie Sanders of Bolshevism.

The couple had a more traditional honeymoon a year later, in St. Lucia in the Caribbean. (She and Bernie Sanders, 74, who has a son from a previous relationship, have no children together.)

When they got back, Jane Sanders helped her husband win his 1990 race for the House and his 2006 campaign for the Senate. Barred by Senate rules from serving in her husband’s office, she returned to Vermont as the interim provost of Goddard College.

In 2004, she became president of 200-student Burlington College, but kept her foot in politics, cutting ads for local politicians with the Leadership Strategies consulting firm. In 2011, she abruptly resigned from her position amid accusations by board members that she had overextended the college with a $10 million real estate purchase. She later became a commissioner for the Vermont Economic Development Authority.

But over the last year, her focus has shifted back to helping her husband in his presidential run.

Even in the comfort of her home, sitting on a sectional couch in a living room decorated with Asian antiques, she was hard at work in the service of his progressive vision.

As Jane Sanders spoke in the interview about how the campaign had urged her to “give a different perspective” of her husband, of whom she proclaimed herself “incredibly proud,” Bernie Sanders phoned in from Washington.

“It’s been nonstop,” Driscoll, who answered the phone, said, updating Bernie Sanders about his wife’s humanizing offensive. “But it’s been good.”

© 2015 The New York Times Company