In the aftermath of the presidential debate on October 9, 2016, the American public quickly identified a standout figure, and it wasn’t either of the candidates, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

Amidst the chaos and heated exchanges, it was the unassuming figure of a bespectacled man in a vivid red sweater who won over the hearts of the 67 million viewers tuned in.

His charm lay in the simplicity and directness of his question about the future of the nation’s energy resources, posed with utmost politeness.

His friendly, round-faced appearance and genial manner provided a refreshing contrast to the aggressive exchanges on stage. Later, his endearing act of using a disposable camera to capture the debate’s venue added to his appeal.

Dubbed ‘The Red Sweater Guy,’ he quickly became an internet sensation. Memes flooded social media, with CNN calling him ‘awesome’ and Jimmy Kimmel appointing him as a special correspondent. Some even humorously suggested he should run for president instead. Invitations to Hollywood events, a feature on Saturday Night Live, themed merchandise, and even a Halloween costume in his likeness followed.

This newfound celebrity was Ken Bone, a 34-year-old power plant control room trainer from Belleville, Illinois, a small town near St. Louis where the debate took place. As an ‘uncommitted voter,’ he was selected to pose a question during the event, facilitated by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Ten years on, when the Daily Mail contacted him, Bone was a little nonplussed, having long since returned to normal life after his whirlwind 15 minutes of fame subsided.

It was somehow reassuring to find him still living in the same house, doing a similar job at a power plant, and still politely talking a lot of common sense that many a political candidate on right and left could learn from.

‘When I got your email, my first thought was, ‘Oh, I guess the Daily Mail wants me to subscribe!,’ Bone told me. ‘And then I saw that it was a request for an interview – it almost caught me by surprise.’

Describing his working life, Bone said: ‘I started as an operator out in the field, and then became a control room operator, like you see Homer Simpson doing, running the plant from the computer. And then I became the trainer.’

Aside from the pleasantries, the first thing that’s noticeable about Bone in our interview is that he is not wearing a red sweater.

It turns out that his famous knitwear was sold for charity, raising $10,000 for Greater St Louis Honor Flight, which takes military veterans on visits to Washington DC.

The sweater is now displayed in the New York headquarters of Izod, the midrange clothing company that made it.

Bone does own a ‘knock-off’ version from Walmart that he occasionally puts on to send a funny picture to a friend. Otherwise, it stays in the wardrobe.

‘Never,’ he said of wearing it in public. ‘I feel it would just be like a cry for attention. It would almost feel pathetic, like, “Hey, remember me? I was kind of famous for a week 10 years ago.”‘

In fact, the red sweater wasn’t even his first choice of attire for the debate.

He had planned to wear an olive suit that his grandfather helped him choose but split the pants getting into his car. His wife suggested the red sweater instead.

Looking back, Bone recalls his flirtation with fame as ‘tremendous fun.’ He used it to raise tens of thousands of dollars for charity, helped boost voter registration drives, and sold around 4,000 T-shirts with his face on them.

‘I made about as much money as I make in seven or eight months [at the power plant] selling T-shirts for a week, so that was pretty great. That paid off my car and everything,’ he said.

‘I have one of the T-shirts somewhere. It doesn’t fit me. I think the one that we saved for my wife fits her – but she doesn’t wear a shirt with my face on it. She can see my face whenever she wants.’

He still occasionally gets recognized, and feels his experience in the spotlight had a positive effect on him overall.

‘Life is mostly back to normal now, but I found I’m a lot more comfortable expressing myself and meeting new people,’ he said.

‘I’m by nature kind of introverted. I like to spend time alone and in the quiet, and if I would be at a party or a barbecue I’d talk to the same two people that I was comfortable with.

‘But now I feel like I’m a lot more outgoing because, for a couple of years, people would walk up to me and introduce themselves and want to talk and take pictures, and I just sort of got comfortable with that over time.

‘I think it’s really helped me out as a person, broadened my horizons, because I got to meet a lot of people that are from different backgrounds and different ways of life than I was used to. It’s just made me, I don’t know, a better person I think, to be able to interact with these folks.’

Before the debate, Bone had just seven followers on Twitter, two of them his grandmother who followed him twice.

Afterward, his phone lit up. He became one of the few people feted at both Republican and Democrat events, attending both CPAC, the annual conservative gathering in Washington, and the left-wing Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta.

He can still recite his debate question word for word.

It went: ‘What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?’

Bone told the Daily Mail: ‘People asked me if I was nervous. I wasn’t. Apparently, the most common fear in the United States is public speaking. I don’t have that. I’m frightened of spiders. I’m not frightened of public speaking.’

The believes that the question resonated because the answers did not.  

‘The Trump and Clinton campaigns had gotten nasty and hateful,’ he said, ‘and then people see this guy dressed up in a bright color, who just looks like your goofy uncle who tells bad jokes at the barbecue, and had a funny name, looked kind of fun. Let’s talk about that for a while instead of the bummer that is this election.

‘As I was walking back to the car, I was like, “Well, I guess that was fun. That’s over.” And then I get home, and it’s my face on TV that they’re talking about on CNN. It was very surreal.’

Over the past decade, he has been on his own political journey. In 2016, Bone voted for Clinton, though with no particular enthusiasm. 

In 2020, he supported Andrew Yang in the Democratic primary, calling him ‘the only candidate that was really looking forward to problems that would be coming down the line.

‘And it turns out, with as much as he was worried about data privacy and AI, it seems like he was on to something, but not everybody was listening.’

With Yang out, he cast a ‘protest vote’ for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen in the general election because he wasn’t sold on Trump or Joe Biden.

Then, in 2024, he voted for Kamala Harris, feeling that he wanted to return to a major party choice.

These days, he has many concerns as a voter, including the cost of living.

‘My wife and I talk about it every time we go to the grocery store,’ he said. ‘Working in the utility industry is a good career. I make well above the median income, very comfortable middle class salary, but it feels like a little bit less every time I go to the grocery store. We’re like, how do people who are near the poverty line, who maybe don’t even qualify for any kind of assistance, how do they live?’

He is also critical of ‘Trump’s private ICE army out on the streets’ and the healthcare system, and now supports a form of single-payer care. 

‘I didn’t think that the government could efficiently run it,’ he said. ‘But then you just look around the world and see that we’re spending more per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world.

‘Maybe we should adopt the system somewhat akin to the NHS [in the UK] or to the Canadian health care system. And, if we’re that exceptional, we should be able to do it better.’

He has an unambiguous take on the Iran war.

‘Hate it,’ he said. ‘With the amount of money we spent on the Iran war we could have funded an untold number of social programs in the United States, or maybe just contributed a little bit less to our national debt.

‘Will the ceasefire even hold? And, if it does, what did we get? We got an Iran now able to charge a toll for ships going through the Strait of Hormuz, which they didn’t before. We have no guarantee that they’ll stop enrichment of uranium. We have a worse deal now than we had under the Iran nuclear deal from the Obama administration that just got balled up and thrown in the trash.’

Looking ahead to the 2028 election, Bone said that he wants to see younger candidates emerge.

‘I wouldn’t necessarily say directly that it should be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but I’d like to see someone with youthful energy. I just want to see the people at least get another choice and, if they reject it, then they reject it.’

Just as he was 10 years ago, he remains an uncommitted voter, waiting to be inspired.

‘Now, I think I’m still sort of in the same boat that I don’t like either of the major parties that much,’ he said.

He also wants to see less partisanship, saying that people should be able to call out their own team for bad behavior.

‘I played recreational sports since I was a little kid, and when somebody on my team did something dumb we weren’t afraid to tell them.

‘I don’t know why we’re afraid to tell our own political affiliates when they’re doing something self-destructive or dumb.’

If he were invited back to a debate stage in 2028, he says he would ask the same question again about energy in search of a satisfactory answer this time. 

‘We still have a lot of people working in the coal and natural gas utilities that are thinking, “Will this place be around forever? Where will I go? What will I do, and how will the grid stay energized if we retire this asset?”

‘I think we need real answers to that, especially with all these new large load data centers being built. We need to be able to guarantee that your average person can still afford to run their heating and air conditioning. We need to keep rates affordable, keep the lights on, stop rolling blackouts, and also not take away good-paying blue collar jobs like the guys that I train.’

Bone briefly toyed with running for Congress in 2018 but decided it wasn’t for him. He didn’t want to drag his wife and son, now 23, through the publicity mill.

His moment in the spotlight also came with a darker side, including death threats that prompted police and even SWAT visits to his home, combing for explosives.

‘Sure, it was probably all just internet trolls, but they have to take it seriously.

‘Someone called the police station and said, “I killed Ken Bone, and I’m in his house with a bomb.” So, the SWAT team shows up to my house. The person ended up being, like, a 15-year-old kid. I said I didn’t want to pursue anything. I don’t know if anything happened to that kid, but it was very scary. It really makes it tough to want to be in the public eye.

‘It made me sad but I wasn’t surprised by it. I just kind of knew that’s how things go – if you get recognized on the internet that those sort of things happen.’

Today, his message for fellow Americans is simple. 

‘One, treat other people well, even if they don’t agree with you. Two, it’s OK to demand better from your leadership.

‘And, in addition to that, vote. Not just in the presidential election, not just in the midterms, vote for your city council person, vote for dog catcher. Pay attention. When we’re really paying attention to the issues and talking to each other, I don’t think we’ll be able to help but get better.’

His experiences after the debate taught him that everyone can make a difference.

‘I was able to get out and talk to a lot of people, and shake a lot of hands, and remind folks that it’s OK to get to know other human beings,’ he said.

‘You’re able to interact through more than a screen, and we can treat each other well. And then you make the world a tiny bit of a better place, just within a bubble 10 feet around you. That adds up if everybody does it.’