Of course the analogy is imperfect — don’t come at me with Bernie never governed a major state and Reagan was a New Deal Democrat and had a whole celebrity career before he went into politics, I’m well aware. But it’s an interesting echo, at the very least. And the parallels between the arguments used to dismiss Sanders and the Reagan-can’t-win assumptions of late-1970s pundits have kept me moderately bullish on the Vermont socialist’s 2020 chances.

With Sanders officially in the race, the reasons for bullishness have grown. Whether he is technically the front-runner or not depends on how you assess the impressive poll numbers of the undeclared Joe Biden: Are those a real signifier that the Democratic Party’s moderate wing is ready to have the former vice president as its champion, or just an artifact of name recognition that will collapse once Biden starts having to answer for his record?

But every normal metric makes Sanders a front-runner, and a stronger-looking candidate than all his declared rivals: His fund-raising is impressive, his crowds are big, and his early poll numbers give him both the expected 20-25 percent floor and room to grow. (In the weekend’s poll of Iowa, he would claim almost a third of Biden’s supporters if the ex-vice president decided not to run.) And he’s facing a field sufficiently large that the advantages of having a core of unshakable supporters are likely to be magnified.

Meanwhile his campaign so far is suggestive of the ways — again, like Reagan — that a long history of ideological extremism can actually be helpful to a presidential candidate. Precisely because Sanders is a known quantity, because nobody doubts his commitment to left-wing policies, there may be less pressure on his campaign to embrace every idea floated by reporters or touted by activists. (It’s probably a good sign, for instance, that he was just attacked from the left by Julián Castro for insufficient zeal on reparations.)

Nor does he need to adopt the strident tone of younger would-be revolutionaries or the politicians pandering to them to prove his socialist bona fides. As the conservative writer Ben Domenech noted recently, “the truth is that Sanders, despite his socialist label, seems to have a less harsh vision of politics than many others within the party.” Because his record is what it is, he won’t always have to be the most zealous candidate on stage — and like Reagan, he might even be able to promise certain kinds of moderation while keeping his base secure in his fundamentally revolutionary intentions.

Of course this last possibility is just a hypothetical, and Sanders’s rumpled-professor style of socialism (and all those Soviet-friendly video clips lurking on YouTube) might ultimately inspire more backlash than Kamala Harris running hard to the left or Elizabeth Warren filling in all the policy details that Sanders leaves a little hazy. To argue that Sanders has qualities in common with Reagan is not to argue that he’s necessarily the most electable Democrat, or that in nominating him the party wouldn’t be taking a substantial risk — as Reagan really was a risky choice in 1980, and his victory by no means foreordained.

But it is to argue that if you want a new president to be transformative — as, obviously, many people on the left desire — there are clear advantages in electing somebody whose entire career is associated with an ideological insurgency, and whose victory would shock the more adaptable sort of politician into understanding themselves as inhabitants of a new political reality, in which no matter what poll numbers show on any given issue, it’s taken for granted that the former world has passed away.