He’s staying.
After a disappointing finish in Tuesday night’s primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) showed no signs of quitting the Democratic primary during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
Bernie not dropping out creates two immediate decision points.
First, people on the progressive side will need to decide if they start to cut him loose, so as not to infect their ideas with anymore with the angry old old socialist/communist who may be helping Trump get elected yet again. AOC, Warren, etc, have a choice to make. Get ahead of Bernie, and help make themselves relevant, or go down with the ship.
Second, Bernie himself has a choice. Promote his ideas, have a debate with Biden about whether those ideas or other ideas are the way to go, and why. Have some honest discussion. Keep his ideas and his relevancy alive. Pivot to attacking Trump and highlighting that his differences with Biden are small in comparison.
Or he can keep attack Biden as he did Hillary as being “crooked” and paid for by billionaires. Run the kind of dishonest advertisements and make the same stupid statements that he has been doing in Florida TV advertisements. If he goes with the dark side , he is just doing Putin and Trump’s work for them, as he did in 2016. Then he needs to be destroyed by Biden, and cut off from civil discussion. He will show he is just a communist who really is not interested in making things better, rather he is interested in power in service of an extreme ideology, and willing to do anything to win.
The democrats can’t make these decisions for “progressives” but what the “progressives” do right now will impact how welcome they are in the democratic party in the future.
Mirroring Trump, there will be no pivot for Bernie.
Sanders’ statement is about the future of the Democratic Party and not this election Some of us are more concerned with the immediate future of the United States and this election.
Sanders then argued that while his campaign has “won the ideological debate,” it is “losing the debate over electability.”
Those dang millennial candidates and their participation trophies. Elections are about winning, my dude. Not interested in your twisting yourself into a pretzel in order to figure out why #actually you’re winning. I know of another guy who behaves that way.
Good luck…
Of note, “winning the ideological debate” resulted in Senators Warren and Harris bear-hugging M4A and being destroyed by it. I think it’s highly probable that a somewhat-lefter candidate would be in the driver’s seat for the 2020 nomination if they hadn’t touched that third rail.
So I’m not sure what kind of winning this is.
Bernie’s problem is that about 70% of voters in the democratic primary are concerned first and foremost with winning the 2020 election. It is issue #1, #2, #3 …
Bernie’s claim to be the guy to win is demonstrably untrue, as polls and this very election has shown. And the problem is that the messenger (an ex-, if not current angry Trotskyite) and his tone (very trumpian, populist) is wrong, but also that while the message is popular (ending income equality, health care for all) is popular, the SOLUTION/POLICY he proposes: $54.6T in new taxes and spending and major nationalizations (health care, etc) is just not what the public wants or believes will win an election.
Too many americans know what Just Happened to Jeremy Corbyn, don’t want the same disaster here.
That’s two straight bad Tuesdays. St Pat’s will be three.
He had his chance to prove that he could turnout young people in such numbers that they would sweep the GOP in November.
Not enough showed up.
I like your ideas Bernie, but if you can’t bring those new voters out in the primary in sufficient numbers, I have no faith you’d do so in the general.
To add to this, the problem is not that the message hasn’t been explained properly or at sufficient length, or most Democrats think we’re “not ready” for the message, etc. It’s fundamentally a minority platform even within the Democratic Party. People don’t want it.
This Warren supporter is throwing it in with Biden.
When all is said and done in the Dem primaries…
Ds/Is need to VoteBlueNoMatterWho!
None of the this “write in” or stay at home stunts…
It will only re-elect the Criminal IMPeetus!
Shut up you stupid old fool. We will continue to destroy you on future Tuesdays.
As White Sox announcer Ken Harrelson used to say: It’s OVAH!"
…despite losing the delegate count to former Vice President Joe Biden, he is “strongly winning in two enormously important areas which will determine the future of our country.”
Hmm… now who does that remind me of? Oh, right… 
He’s replaying 2016 and, since this is his last run, he’d rather cut the baby in half than give up.
And the campaign isn’t ‘losing the debate over electability,’ it’s lost the debate over it.
Voters have told you, Bernie.
“I say to the Democratic establishment: in order to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country and you must speak to the issues of concern to them. You cannot simply be satisfied by winning the votes of people who are older,” Sanders said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/10/takeaways-democratic-primaries-march-10/
And it deserted him again on Tuesday. Voters aged 18 to 44 were 40 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 2016, but just 32 percent on Tuesday. In Missouri, they were 41 percent in 2016 and 32 percent on Tuesday. In Michigan, youth turnout was the reason he pulled a shocking upset in 2016, but 18-to-44-year-olds’ share of the vote dropped from 45 percent then to 38 percent on Tuesday.
“I say to the Democratic establishment: in order to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of our country and you must speak to the issues of concern to them. You cannot simply be satisfied by winning the votes of people who are older,” Sanders said.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
On the need to vote, I just wanted to make one point. Bernie’s and his supporters argument was that he could just shit can the middle of the electorate (suburbanites, independants, etc), tell them to go f themselves, because well the Youth would turn out and vote and we could do what Trump did, go all base, all the time.
The reality is that the democratic base is NOT “democratic socialist” nor is it “progressive”, but I don’t want it to go unsaid that MORE YOUTH ARE VOTING. Perhaps a little bit of Bernie’s idea is correct, but is is just being obscured by much higher turn-out; i.e a bigger tent
The reality - obscured by the media that can’t do math is that (a) youth turn out is up, but (b) it is being burred by middle age/older voters who are “coming back” to the democratic party, or switching from the republican party.
E.g. MI. 2016 1,280,718 votes, 19% were under 30, or 224K “youth” votes.
2020 (so far, numbers will go up) 1,585,410 votes, 16% were under 30, or 253K “youth” votes.
We need a coalition. Young People (at least in MI) are turning out, their numbers are not down, we just need to include them in the discussion.
cc: @inversion @noonm