Just after Klobuchar and Buttigieg suspended their presidential campaigns and, along with the former candidate Beto O’Rourke, announced their support of Biden in early March, Shakir valiantly spun the news to me as a sign of Sanders’s strength. “Quite frankly, I see fear and panic in the establishment,” the campaign manager said. “They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t think Bernie Sanders was on a path to winning the nomination and in fact the presidency. And I think those who are accustomed to having and enjoying power might see this as a threat to them.”

Shakir did not seem to think these developments represented honest concerns about having a democratic socialist at the top of the ticket. Like his boss, the campaign manager believed that this was solely about the establishment’s determination to install a protector of the status quo. He insisted to me that Team Bernie was in fact delighted to see it come down to their boss versus Biden — “a perfect foil,” he maintained. “Because they lived through the same moments together, saw the same information, saw the Iraq war, the bankruptcy bill, the balanced-budget bill that tried to cut Social Security, the same trade deals. And one person voted the right side of history and the other the wrong side. And when you vote, judgment is the most important factor.”

But now the Sanders campaign was confronting the judgment of voters: Biden had a center-left coalition (including the allegiance of the party’s crucial black constituency) that seemed capable of prevailing in a general election, while the Sanders movement relied on young voters who weren’t coming out all that abundantly in February and March and therefore couldn’t be counted on to produce a record turnout in November. Precisely because he had come so far — from “Who the hell is Bernie?” to “How the hell do we stop Bernie?”— the gale force of the post-Super Tuesday “Stop Bernie” movement felt, to Bernie and Jane Sanders, far more brutal than it did during the previous cycle. This was not really about wanting to unseat Trump, in the Sanderses’ view. This was about shutting down Sanders’s anti-establishment critique. Little seemed to have changed since the spring of 2015, when Hillary Clinton’s upstart challenger was told by his aides that he might not be able to get on the ballot for the New Hampshire primary because of an obscure provision stating that only registered party members could do so. His muttered reply to a campaign aide then could apply now: “[Expletive] Democrats.”

“The only reason Bernie’s in this race,” Jane Sanders told me in early February, “is because we think he’s the best chance to defeat Trump.” Sanders himself acknowledged this foremost priority the day after his electoral firewall collapsed in Michigan — and then added, with a degree of candor that was remarkable even for him, that millions of Democratic voters across the nation happened to disagree that he represented the best chance of doing so.

Sanders concluded his brief remarks to the press that Wednesday afternoon by enumerating questions he intended to ask “my friend Joe Biden” at their first and only one-on-one debate four days later. It was a signal that Sanders intended for his legacy to be not a kamikaze mission but instead something more fruitful for the party that was never his. In 2016, Sanders proved he could energize a new generation of voters. During this cycle, he found a way to organize and communicate effectively with Latinos — evidenced not only in Nevada and California but also along the border in Texas, where his delegate share came to just nine shy of Biden’s. That accomplishment is no cheap trick. Should Biden, the probable nominee, combine his gains in the Dallas and Houston suburbs with his former rival’s organizational superiority near the Mexican border, Texas could flip to the Democrats for the first time since 1976.

In defeat, Sanders has prompted a reckoning within the Democratic Party. He has forced upon it an airing of ideological differences, compelling progressives and moderates to choose their leader and then make the case in public. Since the rise of the Tea Party, self-described “principled conservatives” like Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton have claimed that they, too, yearn for such a debate with the Republican Party’s center-right establishment, only to opt for Trumpism instead. Even as the two-man race has taken a more pugilistic turn while the economy reels and a pandemic sweeps the globe, Sanders has remained steadfast in his willingness to let the Democratic voters judge him by his democratic-socialist vision of what America should be. And so, it would seem, they have.