But for months, this strength—his profound influence over the party’s direction—has been treated as a weakness. In late December, The New York Times labeled Sanders a “victim of his own success,” arguing that he’d lost his edge because his positions on health care, Wall Street, and the minimum wage have become party orthodoxy. “Sanders may have been the runner-up in the last Democratic primary, but instead of expanding his nucleus of support, in the fashion of most repeat candidates, the Vermont senator is struggling to retain even what he garnered two years ago, when he was far less of a political star than he is today,” Jonathan Martin and Sydney Ember wrote.

Three months later, this take—echoed by other leading publications—seems to have gotten Sanders backwards. While other campaigns have rushed to embrace Sanders policies, such as Medicare for All, he remains the party’s policy pacesetter. Other Democrats who are parroting his positions, often in watered-down form, have yet to dent Sanders’s poll numbers, even as more candidates enter the race. This is even true of Warren, whose ambitious policy work has surpassed Sanders’s in detail and scope (if not in radicalism).



Reports of a decline in enthusiasm among Sanders’s supporters also appear to have been greatly exaggerated. His fundraising and poll numbers disprove the idea that he’s an also-ran. But there are other signs of his continued vitality. Despite his near-universal name recognition, and the media’s overwhelming attention lately to O’Rourke, Biden, and Buttigieg, Sanders has consistently been among the top three Democratic candidates in Google searches, suggesting continued interest in his campaign. Finally, he appears to be broadly liked throughout the party. A Morning Consult poll in February found that he was the second choice for voters who supported the campaigns of Biden, Warren, and O’Rourke, suggesting that support could coalesce around his candidacy as other Democrats drop out.



Sanders may be a victim of his own success in a different way than the Times hypothesized: His popularity is now taken for granted. O’Rourke and Buttigieg, two young and dynamic candidates, have received an enormous amount of coverage over the past several weeks in part because they are fresh faces on the national scene. Sanders, as both the 2016 runner-up and a 77-year-old politician who has served in Congress since the early 1990s, is old news—and so is the resurgence of socialism in American politics, for which he’s largely responsible.

