Bernie Sanders: a twice-failed presidential candidate and the Democratic Party’s most consequential loser.
Sanders announced on Wednesday that he is ending his presidential bid. His exit from the race shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sanders suffered a series of losses in important primary states to Joe Biden, who had more than 1,200 delegates by mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic ground the campaign to a halt. Sanders had only about 900 delegates. The winning candidate must win at least 1,991 delegates. To prevent Biden from becoming the nominee, Sanders would have needed to win more than 60% of the delegates in remaining primary states. It seems Sanders looked at the electoral map and finally concluded this would be impossible.
Sanders won’t be president, but that doesn’t mean his presidential campaign was a complete failure. Quite the opposite, actually. Sanders’s prominence and influence have shaped the ideological future of the Democratic Party, even if he won’t be at its helm.
Policies that were once considered taboo in the Democratic Party are now commonplace, and liberals have Sanders to thank. He has pushed the Democratic Party even further to the left, setting a precedent and drawing attention to a key set of policies that future and current leftists must include on their agenda to be welcomed into the party. “Medicare for all” is now the standard. Student loan debt forgiveness is so popular that even Biden, who fancies himself a centrist, has agreed to incorporate it into his platform. And the “Green New Deal” already has a host of young Democrats bent on making it a reality.
These milestones are not insignificant. Sanders’s candidacy has, in some ways, captured the Democratic Party for the leftists. Biden might claim to be a centrist, but he must appease Sanders’s large, enthusiastic base and even win these voters if he hopes to beat President Trump in November. This will require cozying up to leftist policies such as student loan debt forgiveness and Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy plan.
This happened on the Republican side of the aisle back in 1964 when Barry Goldwater challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson. Goldwater lost in a landslide, as did the rest of the Republican Party. But there’s a reason conservatives still remember who Goldwater is: He shaped the platform of the party, pushing Republicans towards limited government, deregulation, and economic stability — a platform that would come to fruition 20 years later under Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
In much the same way, Sanders has left a larger mark on the Democratic Party “than many a winner has done,” as columnist George Will said of Goldwater back in 1998. Sanders’s greatest success, of course, has been to normalize socialism. American voters are still wise enough to reject it, but they are no longer surprised by it. That means it’s not going away any time soon.
Sanders is now one of politics’ “creative losers,” to borrow another phrase from Will. He lost the election, but he might have just won the future. In politics, that’s what really matters.
