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“Nobody likes him.” “Nobody wants to work with him.” When Hillary Clinton’s withering statements about Bernie Sanders were reported last month, many people interpreted them as sour grapes — as the fruit of her resentment that he bruised her during the 2016 Democratic primary and didn’t do more to help her in the general election.

But while her words were uncharitable and unnecessary, they spoke to a wider truth about Sanders that didn’t get all that much attention four years ago and hasn’t been widely discussed this time around, either: He isn’t and has never been popular with his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. Clinton would know that firsthand because she served with him there. I know that because I’ve heard some of those colleagues talk about him, describing him as arrogant, uncooperative, unyielding, even mean. One of them once joked that he was the Democrats’ Ted Cruz.

I mention that not in the interest of reviewing his legislative career or assessing his personality. I’m intrigued by the way in which his political success — he is indisputably the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination — contradicts bromides about the importance, professionally, of making friends and using honey instead of vinegar. Sanders didn’t do that. And neither did Donald Trump on his path to the presidency.

They’re very different men with very different values, and my reservations about Sanders are nothing like my revulsion to Trump. But they both demonstrate that personal charm, kindness and the regard of your peers matter less in politics than does the power of your pitch or, to use the lingo that my fellow Times columnist David Brooks did recently, the resonance of your myth.