Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

By any measure, the Bernie Sanders campaign has vastly outperformed expectations of what a self-described democratic socialist could accomplish at the presidential level in 2016. After 35 states, he has won 16. He forced Hillary Clinton to adopt several of his positions. A fundraising juggernaut, he has outspent his opponent since January. National polling shows him roughly tied with Clinton among Democrats and besting all three Republican candidates in November.

And yet, the “revolution” that Sanders called for didn’t show up. Clinton’s 16-point New York win is simply the exclamation point. First, electorally, Sanders hasn’t been able to win any states on Clinton’s natural turf, while she picked off states like blue-collar Ohio and quintessentially liberal Massachusetts. Eleven of his 16 state wins were in low-turnout caucus states, while she has dominated well-populated primary states. He struggled to win the votes of older voters and whiffed with Southern African-Americans.


But on a more important level, Sanders has also failed to substantially change the Democratic Party at its core: its acceptance of big-dollar fundraising and incremental policy advancement. That was a tough task for Sanders, especially considering he had steered clear of the party for most of his political career until his presidential quest (prompting Hillary to remark at one point, “I’m not even sure he is a Democrat”). For all his success at the polls, Sanders’ ideologically pure campaign foundered on the predictable shoals of policy specifics and political feasibility, obstacles that a progressive populist movement will need to overcome to truly succeed.

Yes, he staked out new ground for those progressives who deride the 16 years of Clintonism and Obamaism as woefully “centrist.” He stoked opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and she abandoned her early support. He made anything less than a $15 minimum wage akin to being a sell-out (never mind that he embraced $10.10, as all Democrats did, just two years ago). He made Clinton bend his way on opposition to fracking. Despite her cultivation of financial industry financiers, he prompted her to try to outdo him on who would whack Wall Street hardest.

And much of the populist pressure could still affect how a President Clinton would govern. The prospects of another multinational trade agreement have dimmed. JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon believes that there won’t be “a banker serving in a major role in Washington in the next 10 years.” Sanders’ moral victories give reason to believe that all it takes is the will to campaign on big, bold ideas to expand the parameters of the politically possible.

Yet those parameters are bound to narrow again as Hillary takes the party back toward the center. Sanders didn’t help matters by coming up short time and again with genuine specifics on how he would change things. That was especially evident—and probably harmful to him in the New York voting on Tuesday—when Sanders gave thin and dismissive responses to the New York Daily News editorial board’s probing questions about which bureaucratic tools he’d use to achieve his goals, the economic consequences of his plans and the particulars of his foreign policy. In doing so, he validated the Clinton campaign critique that, in Bill Clinton’s words, he’s a “change-talker, not a change-maker.”

The Daily News debacle was the final battle Sanders lost in the Democratic wonk war. Back in February, former Democratic members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers criticized the Sanders campaign for claiming his plans would spark an unrealistic amount of economic growth. Their call was backed up by many Democrats' favorite economic guru: the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. The circle of Sanders-friendly wonks fired back, and Krugman’s name was suddenly mud in the leftist corners of Facebook. Sanders’ allies also made game defenses of his Daily News interview. But it’s not enough to have others fill in the blanks for you. The bottom line is: Sanders never seized the opportunity to show his policy depth and political savvy.

Clinton, however, seized the same opportunity to sell her pragmatism. There is no doubt that she was pushed to the left in the course of the campaign. But it is also true that she drew lines marking where she would stand her ground, even at the risk of campaigning in prose instead of poetry. When Sanders pressed her on supporting a tax on carbon pollution in the most recent debate, she argued it was too fraught politically: “My approach I think is going to get us there faster, without tying us up into political knots with a Congress that still would not support what you are proposing.” Her insistence that she’s a “progressive who gets things done” may not have inspired the idealistic young, but it satisfied the larger voter pool of the jaded old.

Another Sanders misstep was making his campaign look like a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party apparatus—a great strategy for winning left-leaning independents but not so much for the larger pool of registered Democrats.

In January, he downplayed Clinton endorsements from Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Human Rights Campaign as coming from “the establishment.” In a fundraiser email in support of a candidate running in a Nevada House primary, he took a gratuitous swipe at EMILY’s List, a major funder of female Democrats. And instead of working with the Democratic National Committee to raise money for a wider range of congressional candidates, the Sanders campaign attacked Hillary Clinton for doing so at a big-dollar fundraiser hosted by George Clooney.

The cost was a smooth-talking smackdown from Clooney on Sunday on NBC’s Meet The Press: “we need to take the Senate back, because we need … that fifth vote on the Supreme Court [to] overturn Citizens United and get this obscene, ridiculous amount of money out so I never have to do a fundraiser again.”

Clooney’s artful statement highlights a crucial point: There is a huge amount of overlap between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters. The divisions are mostly over the degree of ambition and choice of tactics, not general ideological direction. Attacking fellow Democrats as “corporate Democratic whores,” as one Sanders introductory speaker did, or creatures of the “establishment,” limits the ability of the Sanders campaign to win votes from rock-ribbed Democrats today and to build alliances within the party tomorrow.

Alliances were not Sanders’ strong suit in the campaign. Sanders’ friction with women’s rights groups and his difficulty navigating the politics of race betrayed the difficulty of building a diverse, electorally potent coalition around a rigid set of economic issues.

When he used Donald Trump’s comments about criminalizing abortion to pivot to “serious discussion” around “serious issues,” Clinton chastised Sanders for trivializing reproductive freedom (in New York, the two tied with men, while Clinton won women by 26 points). While he did make inroads with younger people of color in the North, his dismissal of Clinton’s Southern landslides, which contributed to her insurmountable delegate lead, only reminded voters of his failure to build bonds with African-American communities throughout his long political career.

Accepting where the Sanders campaign fell short is a critical step toward developing a game plan for the Democratic Party’s future that can build on what he accomplished. For example, the Sanders campaign will soon be deciding on its priorities for the Democratic convention. If it’s carrying a chip on its shoulder about the lack of support from superdelegates, it might prioritize a fight over the nominating rules in hopes of reducing the number of unpledged delegates in 2020 and beyond. But that would only increase intraparty animosity. And it wouldn’t solve the problems that caused his defeat; the reason Sanders won’t be the nominee is pledged delegates, not superdelegates.

The Sanders campaign will be on firmer ground forcing floor votes on enshrining a $15 minimum wage and opposition to unfair trade deals into the party platform, pulling the party leftward without sparking major dissension. Considering that Clinton did not forcefully reject limits on bank size, compromise language on additional Wall Street reform is probably attainable. But moving into areas where Clinton resisted being pinned down, such as a carbon tax, would produce more convention friction than Sanders needs to establish his influence within the party.

Then, after the convention, where do the Sandernistas go? No doubt time is on their side. The Washington Post’s James Downie, noting that much of the Democratic Party leadership is nearing retirement, says that to triumph, Sanders supporters need to be “running for office and joining party organizations.” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie similarly argues, “The people inspired by Sanders need to do more than beat the establishment; they need to become it.”

But right now Hillary Clinton and all that she and her husband and former boss represent are still the Democratic establishment. And that is unlikely to change anytime soon. If the Sanders campaign proved that ambitious goals can shift the debate, so too did it prove that details win debates and coalitions win elections. Without overcoming those hurdles, youthful idealism may once again cool into middle-aged pragmatism.