WASHINGTON—The race to be the Democratic presidential nominee in this November’s election came down to a question of Bernie versus Not Bernie — that much was clear by the time the first primary was held. Eventually, Not Bernie won.

“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” Bernie Sanders said in a video message to his supporters Wednesday, bowing to the coronavirus crisis, the imperative to defeat Donald Trump in November, and the simple, crushing delegate math. “I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful,” the senator from Vermont said. “And so today, I am announcing the suspension of my campaign.”

Former vice-president Joe Biden, the early front-runner who seemed on the verge of defeat in February before becoming the consensus choice of his party’s centrist liberal mainstream, is now the presumptive nominee. Sanders offered his congratulations, calling Biden a “very decent man” whose campaign he would support.

Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who preferred to identify as an Independent senator, never joined the Democratic Party. In two runs for the presidential nomination, he crusaded against its establishment. While it now appears certain he will never become its nominee, he dominated a debate within the party, and reshaped it to a large extent in the image of the movement he led.

As he noted Wednesday, the party’s mainstream has almost wholly adopted planks of his platform that were once considered fringe or radical: some form of universal health care, a higher minimum wage, fighting climate change though green energy, easing the burden of student loan debt. Those ideas defined his campaign, and while polls show voters never warmed to the “socialist” label, the proposals are now popular.

Like the NDP in Canada’s Parliament, Sanders has been the “conscience” of the Democratic Party, urging it to view questions of health and economic struggle as rights issues rather than as tax and budget debates. Like Tommy Douglas, the NDP’s first leader, he transformed his country’s politics without ever ascending to its highest office.

And he intends to continue exerting that influence. While Sanders dropped out of the race, he said his name will remain on primary ballots so he can continue to accumulate delegates and shape the party’s election platform.

Sanders spoke Wednesday, as he has for some time, about winning ideological and generational battles. He never managed to transform his support among younger voters into high turnout by them, but their preference for him does indicate the party’s future.

He also revolutionized campaign fundraising, claiming two million individual donors who made more than 10 million contributions. And his campaign rallies were something to behold: large, raucous, filled with laughter and music and cheering. For a time, they served as the Democrats’ optimistic antidote to rallies held by Trump in arenas filled with chants about building walls and locking up political opponents.

Ultimately, it was the spectre of another Trump term that did in Sanders’s campaign. As much as Democrats told pollsters that health care was their top priority, they said defeating Trump was more important than any policy issue. Even Sanders acknowledged that the same was true for him.

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And they concluded that Biden, for all of the lack of genuine enthusiasm he generates, was the best candidate to take on Trump. His long resume of electoral successes, including serving as vice-president to the still-popular Barack Obama; his widespread and often goofy likability; even (maybe especially) his soft, nostalgic rhetoric about uniting rather than fighting — those things looked less like weakness to a lot of voters than like stability. I heard versions of that from Black voters in South Carolina, who turned out to support Biden after he campaigned hard there, and I heard versions of it from white voters in Virginia, where Biden won handily without ever campaigning. They liked Sanders’s message, but they wanted a more moderate messenger.

That’s a choice — to choose the blandest option because they think that’s a way to win — that has backfired on Democrats before. Those wary of choosing the ideological candidate always point to George McGovern’s historic loss in 1972. But counter-examples of inevitable bland centrist picks failed in the cases of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Michael Dukakis.

In any event, party members were already choosing ideological moderation in the form of Biden before the coronavirus pandemic overshadowed the contest. Soon after it became clear that Sanders was the front-runner — with his victories or near-victories in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — the party coalesced with astonishing speed behind Biden. The other candidates dropped out, with all but Elizabeth Warren rallying to Biden. When Sanders led the race, he was receiving the support of just under 30 per cent of voters in a crowded race. This week, as he dropped out, a YouGov poll showed him with the support of about 30 per cent of voters in a two-candidate contest.

His support didn’t change much. It was always Sanders versus everyone else. Once everyone else got together, it was effectively over. On Wednesday, he acknowledged that while his ideas have taken over the Democratic Party, Biden will take them into the election.

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