Bernie’s revolution fizzled on first contact with actual voters. It didn’t have to be that way

The italicized states with an asterisk are those that went from exclusionary caucuses in 2016 to regular primaries this year, so we can’t do an apples-to-apples comparisons. California will take its usual several weeks to get a final count, so we don’t know anything there yet. Of the other nine states, Sanders’ vote totals went down in six of them. 

Sanders’ vote increase in Texas was impressive (even if he did ultimately lose the state), but some of those drops were dramatic. In his own home state of Vermont, he barely got 50% of the vote as his total dropped a shocking 31%. 

All told, in 2016, he got 43.1% of the total vote. So far, this year, he’s running at 27.65%. Even if you were to add Elizabeth Warren’s entire total to that amount (and not all her support would go to Sanders), it would still only add up to 40.41%. No matter how you slice it, his movement shrunk. 

This has always been about simple math. His 43% in 2016 was short of a majority. Why not work to build that back up? He could’ve done so in any number of ways:

• He could’ve stayed a Democrat, working to help Democrats get elected. Instead, he ran against and demagogued the party that he needed to elect him. 
   
• He could’ve worked to expand his support in the Black community. Instead, he skipped Selma, didn’t bother to try and get South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement (which ended up supercharging Biden’s results), and refused to adapt his “all lives matter” one-size-fits-all economic message to an intersectional one that explicitly acknowledges the effects of race on policy and governance. 
   
•  He could’ve set a tone that extended from him to his surrogates to his fan base that prohibited treating any potential ally (read: Democrats) as the enemy. Even had his 30% gambit worked, he would’ve needed to rally the support of those very same people to win in November. Maybe it made supporters feel good to rail against the “neoliberal corporatists” or whatever empty slogans they used to slur supporters of other candidates. But how was that, in any way, conducive to winning either the primary or general election? 
   
• I know Sanders and his campaign have been in love with their enthusiastic youth support. But no one will ever win a majority on the backs of the youth vote. It is the lowest-performing. And while it can be motivated to turn out at higher numbers (Barack Obama was good at that), it will never outperform the votes of reliable older voters. If you have a candidate who is running strong with the youth, and another running strong with seniors, I can tell you with 99.9% confidence who will win that election. Sanders always needed to build beyond that youth vote. He didn’t. 
   
• Instead of wasting time trying to win back Obama-to-Trump white working-class voters, he should’ve focused instead on Democrats. Those Trump voters are (mostly) lost to Fox News land. Like trying to get voters who don’t vote, trying to get voters who abandoned the Democratic Party for Donald Fucking Trump was always a weird play. In the end, that vote never materialized. Or, if it did, it went to Biden. 
   
•  He could’ve handed his movement to a less divisive, less polarizing progressive. Yeah, I’m thinking about Elizabeth Warren, someone who could bridge the divide between the left and the establishment, and who had a track record of delivering on progressive priorities. But it didn’t have to be her. In a party that is heavily dominated by women and people of color, he could’ve found a standard-bearer that could’ve pushed his priorities, but is better able to reflect what our party has become. Instead, his personal ambitions overrode such considerations. 

If I sound a little bitter, it’s because I am. We’re stuck with Joe Biden despite starting with the most diverse field in our history, and any number of candidates who would be better standard-bearers than him. The left isn’t shut out just yet: Let’s see who Biden is picking for VP. But a Biden administration will be a slog. No kids in cages! But still, a slog. And instead of rallying around a progressive who could be electable in a Democratic primary, Sanders and his movement bet it all on a kamikaze 30% strategy.