That’s not the case today. Many of the indicators point in Sanders’s direction, or they’re fuzzy enough that hyper-confident proclamations predicting doom, disaster, and insanity seem to be just that: cherry-picked punditry. Or perhaps there’s something else at work: maybe the panicked Sanders-can’t-win takes are fueled by the deep-seated centrist fear that he definitely can.

Chief among the Oh Not Sandersers’ concerns is that Sanders is a lifelong democratic socialist. A Gallup poll shows that while socialism has become more popular recently, only 43 percent of Americans believe that socialism would be good for the country, while 51 percent believe it would be a bad thing. Chait argues that, though Republicans call every nominee a “socialist,” it’ll be “child’s play” for them to paint Sanders’s programs as “radical and dangerous” when he is a self-described socialist. Bennett and Erickson use Sanders’ primary losses in 2016 to argue that he couldn’t win the general in 2020.

Both points may be true, but despite Sanders’ proud socialism, he is still America’s most popular politician, drawing more individual donors (1.4 million) than any other candidate in 2019. And the pair leave out that in a more recent New York Times poll, Sanders leads Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. However Americans feel about theoretical systems of government, it doesn’t necessarily translate to how they feel about a well-known individual politician.

Oh Not Sandersers argue that he is “untested” because he’s only won in the deep-blue state of Vermont. In this case, they cite old video of Sanders “palling around with Soviet communists,” bad writing from his youth (including a theory that sexual repression causes breast cancer and a musing on female rape fantasies), and the sketchy finances of his wife’s stretch as president of Burlington College. Frum also cites Sanders backing Iran when they took U.S. hostages. “Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that,” he writes. Of course, the Republicans will attack any candidate for anything: Last cycle, it was the much-tested Hillary Clinton and her e-mails, and Trump rallies still chant “lock her up”—nevermind that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of e-mails about government business from a personal account. In the 2004 presidential campaign, the upright and near unassailable John Kerry—who received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts for his combat duty in the Vietnam war—was attacked for...his military service, making Swift Boating a political verb.

But voters seem to overlook damaging stories for candidates they like: Bill Clinton had numerous charges of sexual harassment and assault, including a credible rape accusation, George W. Bush was a dolt with a DUI. The real question to ask is how Sanders would respond to the attacks. Would he fumble and, say, challenge a potential voter to push-ups, as Biden did when asked about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings on the campaign trail? By all indications, Sanders would push through it, and return to his message of economic populism. When he was asked about Clinton’s comment that “nobody liked him,” he quipped, "On a good day, my wife likes me, so let’s clear the air on that one." Sanders’s newfound prominence also means that the Republican attack machine hasn’t had the chance to build the case against him for years a la Clinton.

That all aside, the Oh Not Sandersers argue as if the choice for Sanders or not were a vacuum—as if there were not other candidates in the race. Pete Buttigieg, who trails Sanders by 16.8 percentage points in a national average of polls, has only 2 percent support from black voters, a key constituency for Democrats, while Amy Klobuchar, who trails Sanders by 19.2 points, has 0 percent support from black voters. Stop-and-frisk pioneer Michael Bloomberg, 15.5 points behind Sanders, has the highest unfavorable ratings with black voters, as well a plutocrat brand that may not inspire young voters in numbers that the Democrats need to win. After her own summer surge, Elizabeth Warren has fallen in the polls after fumbling her Medicare-for-All plan. And while Biden is the only candidate to lead with black voters and voters overall, he seems to be running his campaign in a general state of cognitive decline, and drew only 50 people to an Iowa event right before the caucuses. All of which is to say that if there’s a statistical case against Sanders, there’s an even stronger one against the Democratic alternatives.