None of this is a surprise to anyone who has followed my coverage of the Sanders’ campaign 30% strategy. But a new NY Times report into the problems with the Sanders campaign confirms much of what I’ve been arguing.

But first, the good stuff: It seems that two of the campaign’s most corrosive individuals—former columnist David Sirota and top surrogate Nina Turner, were sidelined by the campaign after arguing that Sanders should go nuclear on Biden. “A small group of advisers—including [campaign pollsters] Mr. Ben Tulchin, Ms. Turner and Mr. Sirota—regularly pleaded with Mr. Sanders to attack the former Vice President,” reported Alexander Burns and Jonathan Marin of Politico. “But Mr. Sanders resisted, giving speech after speech scorching unnamed establishment Democrats but declining to pursue Mr. Biden directly.” Sirota was actually barred from traveling with the campaign. Good stuff!

But beside that, it’s clear as always that this was never a campaign built to expand beyond its core base. You can see it in their excuse for losing.

To recap, the campaign decided early on that it wasn’t going to try and expand its support beyond its core base. “Sanders aides believe, he’ll easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention. They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.” The assumption was that the field would remain fragmented.

It was a stupid assumption for lots of reasons. But it was their bet, and they were shocked (SHOCKED!) when it didn’t pay out. “In the view of some Sanders advisers, the candidate’s abrupt decline was a result of unforeseeable and highly unlikely events—most of all, the sudden withdrawal of two major candidates, Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who instantly threw their support to Mr. Biden and helped spur a rapid coalescing of moderate support behind his campaign,” the Times wrote. “Mr. Sanders had been ‘on the brink of winning,’ Mr. Tulchin argued, ‘until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.’”

Ha ha, the most unprecedented event? Oh my f’n god, these people.

In the 2000 Republican primary, 13 Republicans ran, quickly whittled down to George W. Bush vs. John McCain. In 2004, Democrats had nine candidates before whittling down to John Kerry vs. John Edwards as people dropped out. In 2012, Republicans had 12 candidates, which quickly whittled down to Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum.

But they’re going to act as if two candidates withdrawing was the most unbelievable thing that no one could’ve ever predicted, then they seriously had no chance as a campaign. It is rank political incompetence.

Some primaries have cleared fields (Al Gore in 2000, Hillary Clinton in 2016), so there’s either no real primary, or a two-candidate field. But every single primary with a large contested field narrows. What would have been unprecedented would’ve been a split fragmented field going all the way to the convention, and then having a contested convention. Every cycle we think, “is this the year it happens?” and then it doesn’t. Because that’s unprecedented in the era of the modern popularly elected primary system. (As opposed to when party insiders decided the nominee in smoke-filled back rooms.)

But fact is, Sanders was running at about half the votes he received in 2016. He wasn’t on the brink of winning. He was just leading a multi-candidate field with a fraction of his previous support. As I wrote previously, “He even managed to lose ground in Mississippi, where he’d only gotten 16.6% of the vote in 2016.”

There’s clearly some CYA going on here, as Tulchin, the pollster, claimed that Sanders was only behind Biden in South Carolina by 4 points (!) according to their internal polling, and that a public poll showing Sanders trailing by 20 was “an outlier.” Biden won by 29.

So we had a campaign operating under the hope that the field will remain fragmented all the way to the convention, using data that was hopelessly wrong. What more could go wrong? Well, having a candidate that wasn’t interested in doing the work it takes to actually build coalitions.

“[Sanders] has always been disdainful of the art of politics and had to be nudged into wooing even friendly Democratic leaders,” the NY Times reported. “As Ms. Warren relentlessly courted Ms. [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez last fall, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s advisers had to prod Mr. Sanders’s aides into having him call her—a conversation that eventually led to her endorsing him.”

But then the campaign ignored her pleas to be conciliatory toward Warren, which led to the bad blood that kneecapped him when she dropped out. Not only did Warren withhold her endorsement from someone she called “a friend,” but her supporters, tired of the abuse his supporters heaped on Warren (including the infamous snake emojis) moved over en mass to Biden, putting the final nail in his campaign.

In fact, AOC felt so alienated by the campaign—over both disagreements on immigration policy and the campaign’s embrace of controversial podcaster/comedian’s Joe Rogan’s endorsement, that she stepped back from more actively promoting it, leading the Sanders campaign to blame her for Sanders’ problems.

Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t the only key surrogate that tried to get Sanders to build bridges. “It was Mr. Sanders’s persistent lashing of the ‘political establishment’ that concerned Representative Peter Welch, a liberal Democrat and fellow Vermonter who was one of just a few members of Congress to endorse Mr. Sanders’s campaign,” reported Burns and Martin. “Mr. Welch said he had reached out to the campaign last month to implore Mr. Sanders to ease up on that rhetoric, which Mr. Welch believed sounded exclusionary to ordinary people backing other candidates. After all, Mr. Welch said, there were “a lot of voters who are just everyday voters, who decided to vote for other Democrats.”

But that was the beauty of the 30% strategy—Sanders never had any interest in changing his lifelong rhetoric, one that only got him to 43% of the binary primary vote in 2016. So if it couldn’t muster majority support against an (unfairly maligned) unpopular Democrat, why would it do any better in 2020? Well, it didn’t need to be better! They just needed 30%.

It meant he could keep giving the same tired stump speech he’s been giving for decades. And no matter how true it is, if it doesn’t convince people, it ain’t worth shit.

It meant that he didn’t have to make phone calls to try and win endorsements. Remember, they had to twist his arm to give AOC a call, and she owes her political career in large part to the Sanders movement (and Democratic Socialists of America, specifically).

It meant that he didn’t need to step in when his supporters were othering other candidates and their supporters. It actually fit nicely into Sanders’ “with us or against us” viewpoint.

And so what happened? Sander’s total popular vote count was at around 30% when there were dozens of candidates in the race, and when the field compacted, it was still 30%. Let’s call that unprecedented—how a candidate so alienated the entire Democratic electorate that he picked up no one when everyone else dropped out.

If the left hopes to achieve power in the future, it’ll have to do a better job vetting candidates. Because we are doomed to eternal failure if people keep baking candidates who proudly refuse to build a majority coalition.