Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom in mainstream Democratic circles was that Bernie Sanders was finished. He was too old and too stubborn; he reminded voters too strongly of an election they’d all like to forget. Sanders may have shocked observers (to say nothing of Hillary Clinton’s campaign) in 2016, but he was now yesterday’s news. A crowded field of nominees, moreover, had adopted the Vermont senator’s ideological playbook, making him just one of many candidates advocating for policies like Medicare for All and free college.

Today, however, Sanders is the Democratic frontrunner, leading all candidates in fundraising and trailing only an undeclared and hobbled Joe Biden in the polls—and Sanders has edged into the lead in at least one tracker. Facing Donald Trump in a general election and entering the White House in January of 2021 both seem increasingly possible, maybe even probable. “So far, the 2020 election is playing out exactly as Bernie Sanders had hoped,” The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote on Wednesday. “And that has Sanders thinking with growing seriousness that this could very well end with his election as president.”



His opponents, many of whom are still stewing over the 2016 election, are also thinking about the growing possibility that Sanders wins the Democratic nomination. “From canapé-filled fundraisers on the coasts to the cloakrooms of Washington, mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried that their effort to defeat President Trump in 2020 could be complicated by Mr. Sanders in a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016,” wrote The New York Times’s Jonathan Martin on Monday in a survey of the “Stop Sanders” movement’s developing strategy for halting the 77-year-old’s momentum.



But the comparisons to Donald Trump’s insurgent 2016 campaign are limited at best and facile at worst. Sanders’s most vocal opponents in the party are an assemblage of establishmentarians and familiar Beltway hands, none of whom speak for a political constituency of any size or significance. Moreover, far from hurting Sanders, this impotent assault is self-defeating, fueling the narrative that party gatekeepers want, at all costs, to keep a political revolution from taking over the Democratic Party.



There is undoubtedly an ideological component of the anti-Sanders wing of the party that is often framed in practical terms. Attacks on Sanders (and other high-profile Democrats like Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez) often contend that left-wing goals like socialized medicine will be an electoral albatross, dooming the party to failure in battleground states. These arguments are rarely presented in policy terms, but it’s easy to draw a line between an opposition to Sanders rooted in the Democratic Party’s donor class and Sanders’s high-tax proposals and class-war rhetoric.

