Ted Cruz is the Bernie Sanders of the Republican race, and Bernie Sanders the Ted Cruz of the Democratic race. No matter how you look at it, three delusions drive both candidates' campaign narratives.

Delusion Number 1

We will transform the country, uniting it behind an expansive agenda that will move the nation's politics sharply away from center. The country must see that it agrees with us and has all along.

"All across this country, millions of people rose up and became the Reagan revolution," Cruz said to an overflowing hotel auditorium in Ames, Iowa, on Saturday, citing a moment in which a Republican who was called too conservative converted a generation of working-class Democrats. "The same thing is happening again. All over this country people are waking up."

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"This campaign . . . is about political revolution and transforming America," Bernie Sanders told a crowd of 3,500 packed into a college gymnasium in Iowa City on Saturday. "What I will do . . . is start to make the United States Congress listen to what the American people want by mobilizing the American people," Sanders said in Des Moines on Thursday. The point is punctuated at Sanders rallies by Jill Sobule's " Democratic Socialist Marching Song ," which declares that "There's nothing to fear, just look in the mirror, you are a socialist, too."

Cruz and Sanders cannot lead simultaneous popular political revolutions. And, in fact, neither will. As my colleague Ruth Marcus pointed out last week, President Barack Obama had the best chance in decades to revolutionize American politics, and he failed. Cruz and Sanders, each offering far more radical agendas than Obama did, each appealing to slices of the country eager for ideologically comforting wishful thinking, will not even get the chance.

Delusion Number 2

The nation is primed for a revolution because things are terrible.

The country is "staring at the edge of a cliff," Cruz said in Ames, warning of another four to eight years of Obama-like leadership. "Our Constitution is hanging by a thread," Cruz's warm-up act, Glenn Beck, declared. "We are facing enemies foreign and domestic."

Because of Citizens United, Sanders claimed in Iowa City, the United States is an "oligarchy" in which the top expropriates money from the bottom and the next generation is all but doomed to crushing student debt and a lower standard of living. "I don't think (Sanders) is a McGovern. I think he's an FDR," Berner Lisa Avelleyra said at Saturday's Sanders rally, comparing the nation's current conditions with the Great Depression that propelled Franklin Roosevelt into office with a massive congressional majority and mandate.

Sanders's hyperbole is somewhat more palatable than Cruz's; income inequality and campaign finance reform are more serious issues than overblown tales of the death of American freedom. But both candidates take real problems - income inequality, political money, inefficient government programs, the use of executive orders over the past two presidencies - and amp them up into high national emergencies at a time when the economy, the jobs picture and healthcare access are all steadily improving, when the United States stands among the freest places on Earth, and when Americans enjoy advanced levels of protection from all sorts of threats, from terrorism to disease. The country faces big challenges, but the fundamentals are not dire .

Delusion Number 3

The country is in its current state because of the corrupt or otherwise illegitimate actions of others.

Cruz warned about the "root threat of progressivism" and declared that in his first day in office he will revoke all of President Obama's "illegal and unconstitutional executive actions," begin the process of repealing Obamacare and end the Common Core educational standards. "Washington is fundamentally broken," Cruz explained, because of "bipartisan corruption." He makes jokes about Democrats stealing elections with voter fraud.

Sanders reliably traces the country's problems to "these huge financial institutions that. . .control the economic and political life of this nation." In a 20-minute speech Saturday night he mentioned billionaires more times than I could count.

Delusion Number 3 is crucial. It makes the country's problems seem easy to solve - rescind Obama's executive actions! Overturn Citizens United ! - and it implies that those who oppose the program are complicit in the corruption.

Do they have a chance?

But, of course, reality is more complicated. Cruz ignores analyses finding that the regulatory drag from the president's Environmental Protection Agency climate change actions, for example, is simply too small to seriously harm the national economy. Sanders' blaming Wall Street for everything ignores all sorts of evidence that disagreements in the United States reflect much more than simple election-buying ; corporate America did not want the government shutdowns or the debt-limit shenanigans of the past several years, yet the GOP went through with both, anyway.

A core reason the United States is not already an arch-conservative country or a democratic socialist country is the political system's many checks and balances combined with voters' preferences. In other words, people disagree. Which is exactly what most Americans will do if the Republicans nominate Cruz or the Democrats nominate Sanders.