It may be hard to believe now, but for a New York minute it seemed that Bill de Blasio was going to be the champion of an insurgent left. Progressive activists and commentators hailed de Blasio’s landslide victory in New York’s 2013 mayoral election as a sign of an encouraging new direction for the Democratic Party. His unabashedly liberal campaign—which centered on income inequality, or what de Blasio poetically termed a “tale of two cities”—prefigured the unrest that would shake the party, culminating in Bernie Sanders’s unlikely challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary.

De Blasio’s 2013 platform, which The New York Times called “the meatiest material presented by any candidate” in the field, sounded themes that are now standard fare for Democrats with national ambitions. He promised a universal pre-kindergarten program, paid for by a tax on the wealthy; an identification card that would allow undocumented immigrants to access city services; an ambitious plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing; and reform of stop-and-frisk, the Bloomberg-era program that effectively allowed police to target minorities with warrantless searches. “Government must focus on the needs of families, must be the protector of neighborhoods, and must guard the people from the enormous power of moneyed interests,” de Blasio thundered in his campaign announcement.

Democratic voters rebuked twelve years of plutocratic rule by handing de Blasio a primary victory over the Bloomberg-favored Christine Quinn.* As Peter Beinart wrote in The Daily Beast, “De Blasio’s victory is an omen of what may become the defining story of America’s next political era: the challenge, to both parties, from the left.” He added, “It’s a challenge Hillary Clinton should start worrying about now.”

Yet as de Blasio weighs entering the 2020 race, the prospect of a President de Blasio has been met with widespread derision. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard termed his interest in the presidency an “embarrassing quest for national fame,” while the mayor’s own allies (anonymously) told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “fucking insane.” De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has said the “timing is not exactly right” for him to launch a campaign. The New York Times, which seems to take gleeful pleasure in dinging de Blasio for everything from calling errant snow days to ostentatiously hanging around Iowa, recently noted that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has generated far more presidential buzz than the mayor of the country’s biggest city. Even in his hometown, there seems to be only one person who thinks a de Blasio presidential campaign would be anything other than a joke: de Blasio himself.

Even the mayor’s own allies told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “fucking insane.”

How did he fall so far? De Blasio does, after all, have a robust record of actual accomplishments under his belt, which is more than what can be said for, say, Beto O’Rourke. He was once the favorite of grassroots groups and leftist elites alike. Perhaps the left soured on him because he is a singularly ham-handed politician, who possesses all the native charm of a Howard Schultz, the billionaire Starbucks founder who is trying to win the presidency one sanctimonious tweet at a time. Perhaps de Blasio has never been as progressive as his early cheerleaders made him out to be; he might simply be an opportunist who saw, early on, the way the wind was blowing and adjusted accordingly. Or maybe the Democrats, unnerved by the disaster of the last election and fearing another Trump victory in 2020, have started to prefer candidates who are all promise and no baggage.