Sanders might have gotten the wrong idea in 2016, when he ran a much more competitive primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Comparing returns from this year’s primary in Michigan, where Sanders got slaughtered, with his narrow win in 2016, we can surmise that he was the beneficiary of the not-Hillary Clinton vote.

Aside from outreach to Hispanics, Sanders learned and changed little between 2016 and 2020. One can tick off the list of errors that plagued his campaign, but here’s the bottom line: He is an inflexible ideologue who does not know how to form an winning majority in his own party. It was not as if no one warned him that one cannot insult and scream your way to the nomination. The New York Times reported:

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Mr. Sanders proved unable to expand his base well beyond the left or to win over African-Americans in meaningful numbers. He failed to heed warnings from traditional party leaders, and even from within his campaign, about the need to modulate his message and unify Democrats.

Ironically, if the media used the same lens to evaluate him as they do female candidates, it would have been obvious from the start that he could never win. He was “unlikable,” he screeched and he was too angry. Most of all, he is drearily repetitive, unwilling to deviate from his message, tone and identified enemies. If you saw one Sanders debate performance, you saw them all. (“Perhaps the most significant factor [in his defeat], as with every presidential campaign, was the candidate himself, and the stubborn ideological and stylistic consistency that both endeared Mr. Sanders to his supporters and limited his ability to build a majority coalition larger than his own progressive movement.”) It is why he remains a loner in the Senate, author of no major legislation and a non-player in virtually every negotiation.

Populist leaders on the right and left often convince themselves that they are the only true voice of the “people”; therefore, whenever they lose, the culprit is some vaguely described conspiracy (the “establishment,” the “deep state,” etc.). If you think you already represent the true will of the people, you naturally do not think you have to reach out to anyone.

This is not how politics work whether you are on the right or left, the fringe or the center. The two progressive stalwarts who understand this better than anyone are both women.

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Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — by her self-identification (Democrat, not socialist), her dealmaking in the Senate, and her agenda built on step-by-step, concrete plans to solve problems — presents a much more palatable message and agenda than Sanders’s all-or-nothing outlook. Warren may take on big pharma, big banks and big business, but she does not go around sticking her finger into the eyes of fellow Democrats. One does not have to agree with her proposals to see her goal is to win people over to her cause. She presents her policies as practical solutions to the inequities capitalism creates.

Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is willing to challenge (and even primary) moderates in her party, understands politics are about addition. “There’s so much emphasis on making outreach as conflict-based as possible,” Ocasio-Cortez recently told the New York Times. “And sometimes I even feel miscast and understood. Because it’s about what tools you use, and conflict is one tool but not the only tool.”

Earlier this month, she tweeted:

That’s quite a different sentiment than one got listening to Sanders and his infamous Bernie Bros.

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Those on the left need not slap a “socialist” label to their chests to show their devotion to serious change. There is a long tradition of leftist champions within the Democratic Party, from Robert M. La Follette to Eleanor Roosevelt to Paul Wellstone.

The Democratic Party, especially its core supporters — African Americans — may simply not be as left-leaning as Sanders would like. But, far better than Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Warren seem to understand the benefits of not scaring or gratuitously offending those in your party (or the rest of the country). If the left is going to have influence, it will either be in pitching ideas to an electable progressive (Biden), as Warren has done on bankruptcy reform and student debt cancellation, or in finding a leader who is a happy warrior, not a bellowing grouch aided by an army of online bullies.