Both state and national polls often show her with the highest favorability rating among Democrats of any of the candidates. When a recent Economist/YouGov survey asked Democratic primary voters about candidates whose nominations would disappoint them, Warren was last, with 11 percent.

Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders’s press secretary, dismissed arguments for Warren’s broad acceptability, writing on Twitter, “Warren has plenty to recommend her, but nominating the candidate who people don’t feel so strongly about one way or the other is not how you beat a man as galvanizing as Trump.” But the claim that people don’t feel strongly about Warren is just wrong.

She’s drawn huge crowds throughout the race, and people wait in line for hours to have their picture taken with her. Warren has almost a million individual donors, which is a bit less than Sanders’s 1.2 million, but impressive when you consider that Sanders had a previous presidential campaign in which to build up his donor list. I’ve heard from many people that they’ve never felt as passionate about a candidate as they do about her.

Sanders may have even more intense devotees — it’s one of his great strengths as a candidate. But there are also a lot of Democrats who detest him. Joe Biden, too, faces significant internal opposition — in the YouGov poll, 21 percent of Democratic primary voters said they’d be disappointed if he were the nominee, including 40 percent of those ages 18 to 29.

With Biden and Sanders atop many polls, I fear that if the race comes down to the two of them, it will become vicious and destructive, because each has so many supporters who view the other as unacceptable. We could even, God forbid, face the sort of contested convention we avoided in 2016.

Obviously, the nomination is going to be bitterly fought no matter who comes out on top in the February contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. But backers of opposing candidates would be quicker to reconcile themselves to Warren than to any of the other front-runners. A Warren candidacy would not force centrist Democrats to make their peace with socialism nor ask young socialists to jettison their dreams of egalitarian economic transformation.

The better she does next month, the more hope there is that Democrats will be able to fight Trump rather than one another.