In the wake of Bernie Sanders’s loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, some people argued that, as Vanity Fair put it, he “won in the end” because his race had “a profound, and lasting, effect on his party.” This was not a fanciful idea. The Vermont senator’s “revolution” had succeeded beyond progressives’ wildest expectations, pushing the party leftward on health care, climate change, economic redistribution, and foreign policy. Since Barack Obama’s ascendance, no other politician has had such a deep influence on the direction of the Democratic Party—except perhaps the sitting president.

And yet, as Sanders takes steps toward a second run for the Democratic nomination, many think that he has lost his political momentum. “I don’t see a lot of lasting energy for Bernie,” Markos Moulitsas, the founder and publisher of Daily Kos, told The Boston Globe. “It’s different from last time when he was the alternative to an unfortunately flawed front-runner, and there were just two of them. Right now, the mantle of ‘progressive’ can be carried by any number of candidates and potential candidates.”



Sanders, this line of thinking goes, is “a victim of his own success”: Yes, he moved the Democratic Party leftward, but he’s been neutered by younger, more broadly appealing candidates who are aping the ideas he popularized. So Sanders allegedly can’t count on his army of supporters to turn out in droves a second time, or even necessarily his staff. “The reluctance of former aides to embrace another campaign reflects what’s expected to be a sprawling field of Democrats stampeding left—unlike the binary Hillary or Bernie choice during most of the Democratic primary two years ago,” Politico reported in December.



Yes, Sanders will face more challenges in 2020 than he did in 2016, when the Democratic Party cleared the lane for Clinton, leaving him as the only true alternative. When the primary begins in earnest later this year, there may be as many as three dozen challengers, many (perhaps most) of whom will support Sanders’s key promise, Medicare for All. But the argument that Sanders has fundamentally lost his political appeal understates the differences between him and the emerging Democratic field.

No one questions that Sanders demolished the conventional wisdom in 2016. He was an undecorated independent senator from an extremely liberal state who only identified as a Democrat to run for president, and moreover described himself as a democratic socialist. Yet he forced the prematurely anointed Clinton, around whom the entire party establishment had coalesced years prior, to campaign like hell until the very end.

