On the last Friday night in February, the sidewalk outside the MassMutual Center, in downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, was thronged with people lining up to hear Bernie Sanders speak. Although the first American had just died from COVID-19, near Seattle, the disease still felt remote, if most people were aware of it at all. The weather in Springfield was gusty and frigid, and most people wore parkas and winter hats, but some of the younger attendees, hopped up on adrenaline and public displays of effrontery, got by with hoodies and track pants. A pack of wiry white guys walked past the crowd chanting “Forty-five! Forty-five!”—a reference to the forty-fifth President of the United States, Donald Trump. It was an obvious bid for confrontation, and it worked. “Fuck outta here, buddy,” a young man holding a “Yang for V.P.” sign shouted after them. A woman standing in line nearby added a note of aggressive empathy: “Hope you guys never need health care!” It wasn’t a policy debate, exactly, but it was an exciting way to start the weekend.
“Merch!” a salesman called out from behind a folding table. “Buttons, T-shirts!” Most nights, he sold merchandise to fans of the Thunderbirds, Springfield’s minor-league hockey team. Tonight, about half of his wares were Sanders-specific (“Talk Bernie to Me”; “Hindsight is 2020”; the iconic silhouette of glasses and a tonsure of mussed white hair), and the other half were general-interest souvenirs of the Resistance (“Dump Trump”; a cannabis-leaf American flag; “Don’t Fucking Touch Me,” an evergreen mantra of misanthropy that had not yet become a timely allusion to social distancing). Another barker, down the block, yelled “Baby Yoda!” again and again, with heavy emphasis on the “yo.” At first this seemed like a purely non-sequitur cry for attention. As I got closer to him, though, I saw what he was referring to: T-shirts on which Baby Yoda, the hyper-meme-able character from “The Mandalorian,” sported a tunic emblazoned with a “Bernie 2020” logo.
It was the day before the South Carolina primary, four days before Super Tuesday. Bernie Sanders, a lifelong democratic socialist and a well-established font of anti-establishment rhetoric, was also, incredibly, the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic nomination for President. The Iowa caucuses, marred by technological blunders and general bureaucratic incompetence, had been a tossup between Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, a very different kind of insider-outsider. (Joe Biden, who had once seemed like an inevitable front-runner, had instead finished fourth, a humiliating result that launched a thousand pre-postmortem opinion columns.) More recently, Sanders had won the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses, the latter by a commanding margin. His supporters and his detractors agreed that he had done more than anyone else alive to shift the Overton window to the left. As he often pointed out in his stump speeches, his positions on health care, the minimum wage, and much else, once considered risibly fringe, were now accepted by almost every Democratic candidate in the race. Through a combination of raw political talent, ideological consistency, a confluence of moment and message, and a bit of luck, he had built a coalition that had recently seemed unthinkable.
In Springfield, two young men stood in line, shoulder to shoulder, shivering while vaping.
“There’s got to be ten thousand people here, dude.”
“Cops said more like four thousand.”
“O.K., still—who else is getting four thousand people coming out in the cold? This is history right here.”
They were both right, or partly right. There were about ten thousand people on the sidewalk, but fewer than half of them were there for the Sanders rally; the majority were lining up for a Thunderbirds game, which would take place at the same time, on the other side of the arena. Inside, after a few banjo tunes by Béla Fleck and addresses by local politicians, Sanders gave his standard stump speech, with a few ad-libbed embellishments. He took a sip of water from a metal canteen, then held it aloft and said, “We’re politically correct—not using a plastic bottle.” The canteen got a round of applause. “We’re having a lot of fun tonight!” he said, to more cheers. He decried the military-industrial complex and the political establishment. He drew the crowd to a moment of peak excitement by uttering the phrase “ten million units of low-income and affordable housing,” which required a remarkable amount of oratorical skill, and again by promising to legalize marijuana, which did not.
Standing next to me were three local campaign volunteers, all in their twenties. Before the Sanders 2020 campaign, they had been inconstant participants in the political process; now they spent most of their free time knocking doors on Bernie’s behalf. “If you love America, you love the children,” Sanders said. One of the canvassers beamed and whispered, “Oh, my God, he’s America’s dad”; another, overcome with emotion, fanned her hands in front of her eyes, trying not to cry. “Many of your friends think politics is bullshit, right?” Sanders said, lamenting that “the younger generation,” despite its progressive ideals, “does not vote in high enough numbers. So what we have got to do is change the culture of America.” In the end, he did change the culture of America, but not quickly enough. In Massachusetts, Sanders was mainly campaigning against one of the state’s two senators, and one of his best frenemies on the left, Elizabeth Warren. On Super Tuesday, the state went to Joe Biden, who had barely tried to win it at all.
After the rally in Springfield, I followed the Sanders campaign for the rest of the weekend as it continued, via chartered jet, to Boston, then to two cities in Virginia, then to two more cities in California. (If the notion of Sanders reclining on a private plane is difficult to imagine—how else could he have managed to pop up in a different state every few hours?—then this a testament to Sanders’s enduring reputation as a socialist guerrilla, when it would be at least as accurate to describe him as a career politician.) Of the hundreds of Sanders supporters I met, at these rallies and others, some were Bernie-or-bust; some were deciding between Sanders and Warren; some were deciding between Sanders, Biden, and Buttigieg; some would have been happy with any Democrat, or were tempted by Trump. A few self-identified as “Bernie bros”; others rejected the term as a meaningless smear; still others, probably a plurality, swore that they’d never heard the term before. (Some things are a big deal on Twitter and absolutely nowhere else.) I talked to a woman wearing a hijab who was heartened to hear the only Jewish candidate in the race “speak out on behalf of the dignity of the Palestinian people.” I talked to an employee of a big pharmaceutical company who said that “when Bernie calls our industry evil, he’s right.” I talked to many, many people who just wanted health care, or student-loan forgiveness, or a habitable climate.
I spent much of February trailing the Sanders campaign, doing what was then my job but what would now seem like brazen, unthinkable stupidity: walking through airports, touching doorknobs, shaking hands with strangers, elbowing my way into hangar-sized rooms packed with thousands of people. Then, in early March, I returned to New York, the world ended, and Bernie Sanders, the front-runner who would lead a generation into the streets, evaporated before my eyes into an also-ran, conducting “digital rallies” in the cloud. The Sanders campaign hosted a “fireside chat,” live-streamed from Sanders’s house, in Vermont; the intent was to invoke Franklin Roosevelt, but the offscreen flames, combined with the camera’s automatic color correction, lit up Sanders’s face like an overheating jack-o’-lantern. Neil Young, appearing on another of Sanders’s live streams, played “Heart of Gold” in front of his fireplace in Telluride, Colorado; a few commenters on the stream wondered whether the song was a sly allusion to Sanders’s cardiac health. When I opened my notebooks from the campaign trail, now two weeks old, they were unrecognizable, missives from a parallel universe. Nothing about Sanders’s message had changed, but the world had passed him by.
The Internet will now ring out with think pieces attempting to explain either why Sanders made it as far as he did or why he failed to close the deal. Maybe if he had been more aggressive, or more conciliatory, or more concise, or more voluminous, he could have turned things around. Maybe, if he had reiterated once more what he meant by democratic socialism, he could have won over the skeptics who heard his desire for a Scandinavian-style safety net as code for executions in Central Park. Maybe if he had given a sweeping speech about race—as Barack Obama did in 2008, and as Cornel West and others reportedly advised Sanders not to do in 2020—he could have won a larger share of the African-American vote. Sanders and his core supporters will forever blame “the establishment” for his loss; Sanders’s critics will counter that the voters simply considered Biden more electable, a result that they will ascribe not to collusion but to democracy. If the coronavirus pandemic had descended sooner, maybe it would have redounded to Sanders’s benefit; or maybe the moment would have seemed ripe for a candidate who had a plan for that, or a candidate running on a universal basic income. The truth, although it doesn’t make for a tidy think piece, is that all of these hypothetical claims have some merit. We tend to overlearn the lessons of each election, pretending that the outcome reveals some essential truth about our national character. But the 2016 election doesn’t make all women unelectable, and this year’s Democratic primary doesn’t obviate the popularity of universal health care. George McGovern’s loss in 1972 doesn’t prove that a leftist can’t win any more than Al Gore’s loss in 2000 proves that a moderate can’t win. If Sanders’s luck had held through Super Tuesday, this would not have meant that the Democratic Party was irredeemably in the thrall of socialism; the fact that a plurality of the base has settled for Biden, for now, does not mean that the Democrats are fundamentally and forever the party of throwback centrism. “I ran for the Presidency because I believed that, as the President, I could accelerate and institutionalize the progressive changes that we are all building together,” Sanders said on Wednesday, formally announcing the end of his campaign from his house in Burlington, Vermont. “While the path may be slower now, we will change this nation.” Then, presumably, he turned off the camera, set the table, and told the old story of an unprepossessing prophet who didn’t quite make it to the promised land.