Had he been the Democratic party’s nominee, Bernie Sanders could have won the presidency. I’ve been waiting more than half a year to say this aloud, and today’s as good a day as any to get it off my chest.

I’m not saying this just because Jeremy Corbyn’s amazing candidacy, inspiring perhaps more than 70% of 18-24 year-old British people to vote, skewered Theresa May’s trash austerity politics and imperiled her prime ministership.

I’m saying this because it’s a good moment to reflect upon how, if the so-called left (especially the Labour party in the UK and the Democratic party in the US) rallied around candidates who supported actual leftist politics – a commitment to strong labor protections, a confidence in creating a robust safety net, an aversion to working for Wall Street, a distaste for fighting to get “centrist” votes, and an unwavering commitment not to back down to intimidation from the right – their candidates could win.

Yes, I know that May, who tweeted that if she were to “lose just six seats I will lose this election and Jeremy Corbyn will be sitting down to negotiate” Brexit, is slithering her way back into another government, even as her party has lost 12 seats. But she has been been severely weakened.

The number of voters who desire conservatism is dying off faster than Theresa May’s credibility. Voters who want centrism are kicking the bucket more quickly than Hillary Clinton can make excuses for why she lost. Young people and non-white voters are the future of electoral politics.

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A candidate who can appeal to the majority of young people – who largely reject capitalism, who reject racism, who don’t want to be in debt for life just for getting an education, and who don’t want their society’s resources hoarded by a greedy few – is the kind of candidate who will be on the upswing in the coming years and who can win.

In the UK, that candidate was Jeremy Corbyn. In the US, it was Bernie Sanders.

It doesn’t look like Corbyn is heading to 10 Downing Street right now. And, of course, Bernie didn’t win the Democratic nomination. But I have to wonder: could Corbyn have become prime minister if his own party had actually fully supported him over the past few weeks rather than railing against him? And could Bernie have won the nomination (and then gone on to spare us the insanity of Trump) if the DNC hadn’t stacked the deck in Clinton’s favor?

Regardless, Bernie always polled better head-to-head against Trump than Clinton did. Like Corbyn, Bernie clearly had the youth enthusiasm, winning more young votes than Trump and Clinton combined. Like Corbyn (and Trump), Bernie’s rallies had an electric energy Clinton’s rarely, if ever, did.

Unlike Clinton, Bernie actually won primaries across the upper midwest, in places like Wisconsin. And unlike Clinton, he probably would have actually campaigned in Wisconsin, and may have been able to hold on to Pennsylvania and Florida – and gone on to win the White House.

Of course, Bernie could have lost, too. He never got right with black with voters. When Killer Mike, the rapper, was getting dragged on Twitter for defending Bill Maher earlier this week, I remembered how he thought Killer Mike was the smartest choice to outsource about 90% of his African American outreach to, along with Nina Turner. (Then again, at least Bernie didn’t use enslaved prisoners to run his mansion – or if he did, he didn’t blithely explain it as “a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs” in a book which used the possibly African proverb “It takes a village” for its title.)

But Bernie, like Corbyn, roused a sense of hope that another world was possible, especially among young people. When dour Clinton railed that universal healthcare will “never, ever come to pass”, he pushed Medicare for all – and young voters embraced it. While Clinton embraced Henry Kissinger and Wall Street, Bernie rejected that such “pragmatism” and cynical centrism was moral or even electorally helpful. He was right.

There was a similar beauty in the Corbyn’s campaign: he didn’t give in to fear, and he courageously embraced the left. I was so happy to see that, even after the two recent attacks in Britain and May’s attempt to scare people into voting for her, voters contracted instead of expanded her power. The fearmongering failed. Hope was embraced instead.

“Politics has changed,” Corbyn said last night. “Politics isn’t going back into the box where it was before. What’s happened is, people have said they’ve had quite enough of austerity politics, they’ve had quite enough of cuts in public expenditure, under-funding our health service, under-funding our schools, our education service, and not giving our young people the chance they deserve in our society.” These are the same sentiments that brought Bernie, a lifelong Democratic socialist, within striking distance of the Democratic presidential nomination.

Since the Brexit referendum, we’ve had a sense of dread that the world is drifting inevitably and unstoppably to the far right. Macron’s victory put the brakes on that a bit, as did Corbyn’s strong showing last night. But so, too, did the strength of Bernie’s campaign last year. He showed that young people and working-class people don’t want Democratic politicians to be in the pocket of, or actually be former executives of, Goldman Sachs.

The Democrats would do well to look at Corbyn’s success last night, and Bernie’s success last year, and to look for someone with such hopeful and broadly popular principles to rally behind in the future. Because they could win bigly.