The Bernie Sanders Movement Is Finally Dead

When will the left admit it?

Bernie Sanders in 2016. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

In 2017, when I was the politics editor at Vice, I commissioned a profile of Paula Jean Swearengin, an environmental activist running a longshot campaign in West Virginia to unseat Senator Joe Manchin, one of the most conservative elected Democrats in the country. It was a story about the tangled politics of a state where the coal industry had boosted the economy and poisoned the water, and about the loneliness of being a progressive in a part of the country that had essentially rejected the Democratic Party. But it was also a story wrapped around a broader idea.

“Swearengin and her supporters hope that by running on a left-wing populist platform that stresses economic and environmental justice, they can turn back the tide of red that’s swept over the state,” wrote the story’s author, Paul Blest. “It gets at the heart of a larger question that liberals all over the country are trying to find an answer to: Can progressives save the Democratic Party in red states?”

Wouldn’t it have been nice if the answer to that question had been yes?

For decades — my entire life, essentially — Democrats have been committed to a squishy, defensive sort of centrism. Even Barack Obama, for all his aspirational rhetoric, didn’t break this mold. But the 2016 election seemed to scramble politics. Hillary Clinton, the personification of the Democratic Party establishment, endured a surprisingly strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, then lost in the general to Donald Trump. Maybe voters, especially working-class voters, were signaling that they loathed the status quo; maybe Democrats should therefore embrace their own form of populism to counter Trump’s. Maybe Sanders was a herald of our future, where Democrats embrace a European-style welfare state that provides citizens with healthcare, tuition-free attendance at public universities, and strong wages.

In the wake of Kamala Harris’s defeat to Trump, we’re re-running those circa 2017 arguments now, with the same rhetoric and even the same cast of characters. Sanders recently said the Democrats have “abandoned working class people”; Democratic Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy has been running around talking about the “the wreckage of 50 years of neoliberalism.”

“The only move for the Democratic Party,” the labor journalist Hamilton Nolan recently wrote, “is to get more radical.”

I would love it if Americans embraced politics like Nolan’s. Imagine if they demanded that the rich pay their fair share and that private health insurance be abolished and that our many, many corrupt institutions either be fundamentally reformed or burned to the ground. I would love it if America was a different country, if the world were a different way. Unfortunately, I lived through the last several years of political history, and unlike the leftists currently advocating “Bernie Sanders, now more than ever,” I remember how badly these people lost.

The great leftward lurch

Immediately after the 2016 election, a standard narrative about Democrats’ Obama-era failings crystallized on the left. The pollster and political consultant Stanley Greenberg did a fair job of summarizing it in a 2017 American Prospect column:

Working-class Americans pulled back from Democrats in this last period of Democratic governance because of President Obama's insistence on heralding economic progress and the bailout of the irresponsible elites [after the 2008 economic crisis], while ordinary people's incomes crashed and they continued to struggle financially. They also pulled back because of the Democrats' seeming embrace of multinational trade agreements that have cost American jobs. The Democrats have moved from seeking to manage and champion the nation's growing immigrant diversity to seeming to champion immigrant rights over American citizens'. Instinctively and not surprisingly, the Democrats embraced the liberal values of America's dynamic and best-educated metropolitan areas, seeming not to respect the values or economic stress of older voters in small-town and rural America. Finally, the Democrats also missed the economic stress and social problems in the cities themselves and in working-class suburbs.

The solution, lefty Democrats determined, was to return to the roots of the party and embrace the working class in both policy and aesthetics. This shift was almost excessively documented by journalists looking for a new trend to jump aboard. An enormous amount of media oxygen (and donor money) was sucked up by Randy Bryce, a Wisconsin union iron worker running a quixotic campaign for the seat formerly occupied by House Speaker Paul Ryan¹. Richard Ojeda, a former paratrooper and Trump voter turned Democratic populist out of West Virginia, was feted by the left and profiled by Politico. (I was far from the only editor dispatching reporters to West Virginia.) Across the country, politicians inspired by Sanders ran on progressive messages that ordinarily would have terrified Democrats. A few even won elections in 2018, most notably a handful freshly minted left-wing members of Congress who got dubbed the “Squad” (Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.)

Pundits began to muse that radical ideas could inspire voters, not turn them off. “Ahead of an election where enthusiasm may make the crucial difference, Democrats should see this rhetoric — this energy — as a critical asset,” future New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote of “abolish ICE.” Leftists insisted that Medicare for All was popular. Climate advocates said that there was an untapped population of young voters passionate about fighting climate change who needed to be pushed to vote but could win elections for Democrats.

Graffiti in 2020. Photo by the Turducken via Flickr.

There was a kind of intellectual drift during this time, too. The original notion that Democrats should woo the working classes with economic populism got replaced with the theory that left-wing ideas of all sorts were surefire winners. Or maybe what happened was that left-wing populists were, in practice, just across-the-board leftists. Squad leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t just a champion of Medicare for All, she made videos explaining the virtues of the term “Latinx.” Bernie Sanders in 2016 was somewhat pro-gun and anti-immigration, but by 2020 he’d flipped on both issues and had adopted standard progressive positions. So had a lot of the other candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary, which featured proposals to decriminalize border crossings and promises to give gender affirming care to prison inmates.

To the old-school, moderate wing of the Democratic Party, all this looked like a flirtation with electoral suicide. But leftists insisted they were being pragmatic and that progressivism would inspire the youth. “We need to bring working people back into the Democratic Party,” Sanders said during one 2020 primary debate. “We need to get young people voting in a way that they never have before. That is what our campaign is about.”

Populism without the popularity

I wanted Sanders’s theory of politics to work. The arguments he and his followers made sense to me intellectually, and I was excited by the prospect of a youth voting surge ushering in a new, more progressive era of American politics. But this didn’t happen.

Outside of a few deep-blue big cities, all those firebrands lost their elections. Left-wing candidates failed to find purchase in red states or swing states. The one who probably came closest, Nebraska congressional candidate Kara Eastman, did manage to win a primary against a more moderate Democrat in 2018, but went on to lose her general election, and then lost by a bigger margin in a 2020 rematch. Justice Democrats, a group founded by former Sanders staffers that tries to elect left-wing candidates, has notched just four wins and over 60 losses, according to a tally of its endorsements on Ballotpedia; in 2023 it laid off staff amid fundraising struggles. Paula Jean Swearengin lost by 40 points to Joe Manchin.

Hidden reserves of voters yearning for Medicare for All and tuition-free college have refused to materialize, time and time again. Instead, the Democrats who win elections in swing districts have tended to be moderates, or even conservatives.

As for Bernie Sanders, he failed to increase youth turnout in the 2020 presidential primary — or more accurately, he turned out young people, but even more older people voted. The uninspiring Joe Biden, one of the few primary candidates not to actively court the progressive vote, led in the polls for nearly the entire campaign and won the nomination.

Leftists have a way of explaining why these losses shouldn’t count. “The Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders,” the pundit Krystal Ball recently wrote. One Jacobin piece from 2021 attributes Sanders’s 2020 defeat to the Democratic establishment, Barack Obama, Covid, a lack of attention paid to Biden’s fourth-place finish in Iowa, and an “all-out media campaign” that reinforced the idea that Biden would be more electable than Sanders. Even years later, leftists claim that Sanders would have ushered in “a massively popular FDR style presidency that would have permanently vanquished Trumpism,” to quote Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson.

This cosmology leaves quite a lot out. It ignores the repeated failure of Sanders-esque candidates to win elections. It doesn’t take into account the large number of Democratic primary voters who, on the eve of the 2020 campaign, self-identified as moderate and so oppose Sanders for mundane, non-nefarious reasons. It leaves out polls showing that Trump was perceived by voters to be more moderate than Clinton in 2016 or Kamala Harris in 2024² while in 2020 Biden was more likely then Trump to be seen as moderate. The Sanders dead-enders — at this point, that’s what they are — want everyone to believe that the Democratic establishment is at once fantastically unpopular yet powerful enough to squash a populist uprising. Sanders’s Senate campaign got fewer votes than Harris’s presidential campaign in his home state of Vermont, yet left-wing pundits still insist he would have defeated Trump nationwide in a hypothetical 2024 matchup. In 2017, “Bernie would have won” was at least a hot take. In 2025, this stuff is plainly just cope.

The problem is the voters

If the last few years of history teaches us anything, it’s to be suspicious of the idea that America is on the brink of revolution. The US voting public is exceedingly comfortable; they largely want the future to be like the past, but with slightly larger pickup trucks. They elected Trump on a platform of weaponized nostalgia, elected Biden to clean up the chaos of the Trump years, and then went back to Trump because they missed the economic status quo of 2019.

To point out that such sanguine voters resist large-scale progressive change is not to make a moral judgment about progressivism. Bernie Sanders was right about so many things — but his fans insist that his ideas were not just correct, but wildly popular. The electoral record suggests this second part just isn’t true.

Ironically, the left’s greatest policy victories have come not through grassroots mobilization but through persuading party elites to embrace progressive ideas. Those dastardly Democratic bosses running the Biden administration didn’t govern wholly as centrists. Biden signed far-reaching climate legislation into law, appointed crusading anti-monopolist Lina Khan to head the Federal Trade Commission, and attempted to forgive student debt until blocked by federal courts. Biden also resisted calls from centrist pundits to attack progressives publicly.

The next wave of moderate Democrats may take a different tack. Already you’re seeing figures like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman (a political wind vane and and rabid Israel hawk) openly bash the left. Some centrists, like New York Congressman Richie Torres, openly blame the left for the 2024 defeat.

Isn’t that unfair? Didn’t Harris run as a moderate? Isn’t the party establishment trying to both claim credit for the 2020 victory and shift blame for the 2024 loss? The left has failed in its efforts to seize control of the Democratic Party, and now they have to listen to moderates pretend that the left was in control this whole time.

The problem for the left is that the last eight years of discourse, posting, organizing, and campaigning has failed to result in a true mass movement. Sanders is too old for another presidential run. The Squad, rather than building power, lost two House seats in 2024. Few moderate politicians need to worry about left-wing primary challenges. There’s no leftist who has won a major election in a swing state who can provide a blueprint for the future. If it seems like everyone’s punching left, that’s because the left can’t punch back.

NOTE: This post has become my most popular Substack article ever and by far the most commented one. That's great, I'm happy to have y'all discourse in the ‘ments, but please be respectful and do NOT use crappy language. While I don’t have the time to closely monitor the comments section, I reserve the right to remove dumb/nasty comments and ban aggro/moronic commenters, which I will do without a second thought and without giving anyone a chance to argue with me. Thank you everyone for reading!

1. Correction: I originally wrote that Bryce ran against Ryan, when in fact he ran against Bryan Steil.

2. If this surprises you, remember that unlike many Republicans, Trump opposed cuts to Social Security in 2016 and toned down his anti-abortion rhetoric in 2024.