Coalition of the Sane: Bernie Sanders Never Won Anything. The Democrats Should Stop Acting Like He Did

 

As a student of American politics I've always known that as long as political parties have existed there have been battles over what positions to take. These fights involved everything from slavery to economic issues to the rights of the common man to civil rights to our increasing role in international politics. Almost all of these battles were settled on the convention floor and either party would unify behind a candidate that they believed best expressed those issues.

As the presidential primary developed during the 20^th century the voters were increasingly given a choice into which candidates in each political party they thought best embraced the worldview they shared. This sometimes led to schisms in both political parties that led to very public fissures – Goldwater's takeover of the convention over the Republican party regulars in 1964, the battles over the Vietnam War during the 1968 and 1972 election - but during my lifetime (which essentially begins at the 1980 election) these battles were basically all decided well before the conventions took place. If this increasingly led to conventions becoming performative and political theater, it was because both the Democrats and Republicans had agreed on the concept of party unity in which whatever internecine conflicts the candidates have had during the primary season are resolved and you go in with a united front against the opposition until November.

Now to a point I do agree when the media talks about a battle being fought within the Democratic party during the 2026 election cycle, and while they might be inclined to use hyperbole ("battle for the heart and soul of the party", for example) I don't deny that's its there. What I have a problem with, honestly, are the people who are leading the loudest and biggest part of the opposition: the far left wing of the party represented most prominently by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and AOC and 'The Squad' in the House. Because the war that seem determined to wage even if they bring the party down was settled by the voters at least by 2020. And strangely enough the losers seem unwilling to acknowledge the severity of their defeat.

I'm going to bring this up as often as I have to: Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 primary to Hilary Clinton by a considerable margin. He ridiculously overperformed because he was the only real opposition to her and where he did well as in the caucus states where his supporters could organize rather than the primary states where the Democratic base shows up. Sanders would ultimately accept that but there's a good argument none of his supporters ever have. A significant number of those who voted for him in the primary would vote for Trump in the general, despite Sanders fully endorsing Clinton when he conceded and on the campaign trail.

After Trump's upset win understandably the Democrats were demoralized and many people did believe that Trump would have lost if Sanders had been the nominee. The fact that they chose to try and move the party in that direction was in a way the most normal thing the left has ever done. The Democrats had to give a valid consideration to the possibility they'd lost because they had rejected the left-wing of the party.

Sanders would spend the 2018 election trying to fill the gap of party leader. That was also acceptable, with Hilary having lost and essentially out of politics there was  no unifying voice to fill that gap. Sanders then tried to play the role of kingmaker and endorsed many candidates on the Justice Democrats that formed after his defeat. And that's where people should have started to wonder if Sanders was the man for the job. Because for all intents and purposes he was a failure.

Not every candidate who ran as  a Justice Democrats had Sanders' de facto endorsement during the 2018 midterms but many did and the vast majority ended up losing their primaries or their general elections badly. The one that should have made the entire media realize the limit of Sanders' power was Christine Halquist who ran as a Justice Democrat in Bernie's native Vermont.   She lost to the incumbent Republican Phil Scott in what was a landslide losing by nearly 15 percent of the vote while Bernie got 67 percent in his reelection to the Senate outpolling Halquist by over 73,000 votes.

This should have registered to anyone paying attention that only Bernie could win with his platform, even in his own state.  And the point was driven home all the harder during the 2020 primaries where he and fellow progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren were ultimately trounced by the more moderate Joe Biden.

After Biden was elected President in 2020,  combined with the failure of the Justice Democrats to do well in the midterms and that despite the endorsement of so many progressive such as Sanders, Sara Gideon lost reelection in a landslide to incumbent Susan Collins, the message should have been clear to anyone with a functioning brain cell.  Whatever the electorate might think about the Democratic Party as a whole it didn't want the kind of policy that the Bernie-AOC wing embraced. Sanders seems to have accepted that and was willing to work with the Biden administration.

 But critically AOC and her colleagues in the House never have. For whatever reason – perhaps because they've been watching Fox News for too long – they seem to believe they are the true voice of not just the Democrats, but the American people. That the voters had so overwhelming rejected the Justice Democrats that they'd barely been able to find a sixth of the number of candidates to run for office that they had in 2018 should have been an even bigger sign that their politics weren't the kind that most people were willing to run on.

If anything the 2022 midterms, in which the Democrats historically overperformed, more or less confirmed this. No new Justice Democrats were elected to office and one of the ones who had been two years earlier Marie Newman, lost her seat in Congress. The battle was over, the people had made their voices heard repeatedly.

And yet over the 2020s the Justice Democrats have demanded the Democratic Party dance to their tune, despite not having the political power within the base to back it up. It is conceivable that it is because of the disaster that led to Biden being forced to step down in July of 2024 is part of the reason the party establishment continues to listen to them, believing that they need them for support in future elections.

But this falls apart when one considers that by and large progressives have never been supportive of the party unless the candidates meet their needs. During the Mississippi governor race Tate Reeves, the Democratic candidate was in a close race but many on the left rejected him because he was running as a pro-life candidate. To be clear for any Democrat to have a chance to win national office in a deep red state they must by design embrace far more conservative positions then one in a deep blue one. And regardless of Reeves's personal views on the subject, with the Mississippi legislature being a supermajority Republican there is no way he could have passed pro-choice legislation and not had it immediately overridden.

And yet Mississippi progressives essentially sat out the election. To be clear Haley Barbour was one of the most scandal ridden governors in America at the time, having been involved in a welfare corruption scandal that had made national news. There's no question that his policies were actively hurting Mississippians. Yet many progressive truly thought that even living under his governorship, that there was no real difference between the two parties. And as a result Barbour narrowly won reelection.

Those on the left reject all institutions, most notably that of party unity. Many will openly say on social media and the real one that they are fine if Democratic candidates who run for office don't meet their progressive litmus test lose. Many of them will say in other articles that the Republican party is destroying all that America is and yet they've been notably lukewarm about embracing the Democrats even after Trump's reelection. 

And that's the real reason calling this battle 'a civil war' is ridiculous. Because it's not a fight between two evenly matched sides. It's a battle with a fringe group that compared to the national party doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence in either house of Congress, most state legislatures or governorships. Any wins the national party has had in the decade so far have essentially come when the party has gone where the voters are. That has meant, by necessity, going to the center where most of the Democratic base and independents are. During my lifetime it has by far been the biggest keys to our electoral success whether through Clinton's 'Third Way', Howard Dean's 50 state strategy and the kind of neoliberalism Obama preached.

The Bernie-AOC wing, by contrast, has no policy victories to prove people want what its selling and no wins outside the places where their bubbles tend to congregate. They can barely convince Democratic primary voters to come out for them, and they have always lost when they go onto a bigger stage such a statewide race. The electorate at large has overwhelmingly rejected the candidates that stand for the policies Sanders and his colleagues stand for.  And Bernie continues to have no real influence beyond his bubble. Earlier this cycle we saw this play out when a left-leaning candidate he endorsed in a primary for the Utah 1^st district ended up losing in spectacular fashion to the more conservative Ben McAdams.

The only reason the left has any support is because of Harris' defeat in 2024. Yet with the notable exception of Zohran Mamdani's win in NYC and a few primaries in very left-wing districts, the voters have no more support for the Justice Democrats and the far left then they did in 2016. The Democrats won the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey in 2025 by campaigning on economic rather than the social justice issues the left argues for, the overwhelming majority of its special election wins are in places progressives don't get any support and the most likely winners of critical Senate elections have been won by moderates as we saw when James Talarico defeated Jasmine Crockett in a significant victory in Texas and Josh Turek trounced Zack Wahls in Iowa by a bigger majority.  The candidacy of Graham Platner, by contrast, blew up in the left's face and it remains hard to believe Troy Jackson can do any better. And the victories of Annie Andrews in South Carolina and Jamie Davis in Louisiana are states where the Democratic Party is much weaker and have little chance of success.

So that the left continues to think it can hold the Democratic Party hostage is laughable when you consider they have no real leverage and are basically refusing to support a party its never really had much to do with historically.  Essentially their idea of holding the party hostage is putting guns to their own heads – and saying even  if you meet their demands they might still shoot themselves anyway.

I won't argue the party hasn't made its share of mistakes in my lifetime but the biggest one they've made is negotiating with this brand of terrorists. It's been proven time and again they don't need them to win elections and that they can't win them on their own. I acknowledge everything involving Trump has screwed up so much of politics but its worth noting that during this period the Republican have clung to the idea of party unity and won while the Democrats have done a half-assed job  and keep losing. That they keep listening to a side that has no victories to its credit historically as opposed to a side that during the 21^st century alone has multiple ones is basically another sign of our own incompetence, not that the far left wing of the party is correct about knowing what the electorate wants.

And few things could illustrate this point more than a recent State Navigate poll involving the race for governor in Wisconsin. Over the last few weeks the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination is Francesca Hong, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee.  Hong, like most socialists, has a huge approval with young voters in Wisconsin, who are expected to turn out in record numbers. To them the biggest issues are health care, affordability, social issues and ICE. There are thirteen issues that impacted their vote. Hong led on 12 of them, most notably AI data centers and affordability. There's only one she didn't lead in.

Whether or not she can beat the Republican nominee Tom Tiffany.

I've rarely seen the progressive voter encapsulated so perfectly then in this poll. The one thing that is the most important when it comes to an ideal candidate in the eyes of pundits, politicians and election observers is the least important consideration for the most devoted supporters of  Francesca Hong. The fact that the moment Hong became the front runner Wisconsin went on websites started ranking from Toss-Up to Lean Republican will likely do nothing to change the minds of those who are devoted to her. To them, it's not whether you win or lose elected office; it's whether you give the boilerplate progressive stump speech while doing so even if you lose in a landslide. I'll deal with the other ridiculous of this particular way of thinking in regards to Wisconsin later but the fact that the progressive voters really think that a state that went for Trump twice will vote for a far-left candidate in a statewide race demonstrates just how much they're willing to take the Democratic Party off a cliff in the name of ideological purity. It's a lesson that in a swing state the Democrats can't afford to keep losing on even as the left insists on it.

Historically the left has always believed, in the world of Theodore White, that was is morally right is politically sound. And they've made it clear that they would rather lose as many elections as possible then change their mind on the subject.  Since Sanders' arrived they've reached a level of election denialism that rivals anything that happened in 2020: no matter how many times they lose elections, they remain utterly certain that their point of view is wanted by the masses and they have no desire to try and meet anyone, least of all the voters, halfway.

I really do think that after the midterms the Democratic leadership needs to force its fringe members to come to Jesus, win or lose.  They have the upper hand after Platner imploded and they've always had all the cards anyway. The left-wing of the Party has been fighting its Lost Cause since the 2016 Democratic Primary. It's time people like Schumer and Jeffries force terms of surrender on them. They have the majority and as they know, the numbers are what allow you have control. Bernie and his followers never had the numbers at any time and they won't after this election. It's time they came back into the fold and publicly admitted defeat, something they should have learned a long time ago. They've certainly had enough experience with it, even by the standards of Democrats.