The thought in Democratic circles was perhaps Scranton Joe, with his strong labor union ties, would have been able to beat Trump in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Had that been the case, Biden would have become president rather than Trump and would have been the incumbent president at the start of the 2020 Democratic primaries.

A second factor that made Biden look relatively appealing was that most of the Democratic candidates younger than him were “woke.” Not all of them — businessman Andrew Yang presented himself as a centrist, even if his platform was fairly liberal, and Tulsi Gabbard would, within eight years, become a Trump-supporting Republican. But when questions about defunding the police, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or decriminalizing illegal border crossings came up, a lot of the Democratic field at least flirted with positions that seem unthinkable today. 

Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, then 44 years old, expressed his support for taxpayer funding of transgender abortions in a 2019 Democratic primary debate. 

“And, you know, what that means is that just because a woman — or let’s also not forget someone in the trans community, a trans female — is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the right to exercise that right to choose,” he said. “And so I absolutely would cover the right to have an abortion.”

Biden may have exhorted debate viewers to turn down their record players at night, but he never said anything quite like that. 

More than anything else, there was fear that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) might win the Democratic nomination that year. Sanders was the surprise runner-up to Clinton in the 2016 primaries who famously tangled with the Democratic National Committee. He was a socialist. He had little grassroots black support. And Democrats feared he was the only nominee their party could put up who would lose to Trump, even at the height of the pandemic.

Biden had his problems, but he was none of those things. He had been vice president under Barack Obama for eight years, a much happier time for Democrats than the Trump administration. Democrats coalesced around Biden in South Carolina, with Rep. James Clyburn in particular rallying black voters behind him, and it was off to the White House from there.

That all seems like ancient history now. Trump returned to the White House, and Democrats have buyer’s remorse about Biden. Books are now coming out in which people close to the Biden administration tell their tales that he was too old to be president almost from the beginning of his term. Even loyalists like former White House chief of staff Ron Klain are quoted describing Biden as “out of it.”

“Klain feared the debate with Trump would be a nationally televised disaster,” writes journalist Chris Whipple in the book Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. And quelle surprise, it was!

This time around, Sanders has been the beneficiary of Democratic self-doubts. Democrats wish they had held a more open primary in 2024 rather than circling the wagons around an addled Biden. Failing that, they wish there had been a more competitive process for picking his replacement after the debate disaster rather than simply anointing then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

Sanders has become the symbol of what happens when Democrats, rather than democracy, pick the nominee. The DNC kept its thumb on the scale against Sanders and for Clinton in 2016. Their preferential treatment of Clinton was the most damaging revelation from the WikiLeaks emails that circulated during that campaign, prompting some Rust Belt Sanders supporters to stay home or even cast their ballots for Trump that November.

As previously mentioned, Sanders was the main target of the Democrats’ decision to throw in with Biden. Sanders came away with the most delegates in Iowa and won New Hampshire outright, finishing ahead of Pete Buttigieg in both cases (though Buttigieg inched ahead of Sanders in Iowa’s popular vote share). Biden was deemed more likely than Buttigieg to be able to bring black voters, a crucial demographic, into the anti-Sanders coalition. 

Sanders might have lost the Democratic nomination either or both times without the Democratic establishment working against him. But that work is no longer remembered by just the most progressive elements of the party. The rank-and-file Democrats who question their party’s leadership recall this history, too.

As left-wing as Sanders is, he does represent a time when the Left was not preoccupied with cultural issues. Many Democrats, including some progressives, believe cultural warring is what cost them the support of working-class voters. Hispanics, Asians, and to a lesser extent black men are beginning to desert the party, while working-class white people have largely left. 

The Democrats’ economic messaging has been similarly found wanting by these progressives. One of the first to take notice was Sanders, of course. 

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said in a blistering statement the day after Trump won. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Sanders has become an important driver of anti-Trump messaging since the president took office earlier this year. The Vermont socialist quickly identified Tesla CEO Elon Musk, head of the bureaucracy-cutting Department of Government Efficiency (at least for now), as a key bogeyman. Democrats are once again talking about oligarchy, a favorite Sanders theme.

To that end, Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have launched a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. More than 34,000 turned out to hear the progressive pair in Denver. Another 11,000 later showed up for them in nearby Greeley, Colorado. “They want to know if the people of America are going to stand up to Trumpism, oligarchy,” Sanders told the crowd, according to CBS News.

That’s not to say many Democrats are exactly clamoring for Sanders to run for president again. He is older than Biden. He was just reelected in November but was one of the last incumbent senators to announce he was seeking another term. He told Politico this would likely be his last. “I’m 83 now. I’ll be 89 when I get out of here. You can do the figuring,” Sanders said. “I don’t know, but I would assume, probably, yes.”

Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, is 35. She’ll be 39 by Election Day in 2028. Vice President JD Vance will be 44.

In a now leaderless Democratic Party, there is a great desire to move on from the people who have been in charge before. CNN asked Democrats in a recent poll to name the political figure who “best reflects the core values” of the party. Sanders was named by 8%, just behind Harris at 9% and Ocasio-Cortez at 10%. Fully 30% did not identify anyone. 

Sanders hasn’t exactly bucked the cultural trends that have come to define the Democratic Party, even if they don’t define him as much as some younger progressives. Where he once occasionally deviated from liberal orthodoxy on gun control, running to the right of the Republican incumbent on a gun-related vote to first get elected to Congress as an independent in 1990, and immigration, telling progressive influencer Ezra Klein that open borders were a plot against the poor by the libertarian Koch brothers, he does no longer.

And the Democrats still aren’t necessarily Sanders’s party. The Ezra Kleins of the world are now asking why blue states and the big cities therein are so often poorly run, touting “abundance” over pure redistribution. Technocrats such as Buttigieg came out of the Biden administration in a better position to run for president in 2028 than some others.

DEMOCRATS KNEW THE RISKS WITH BIDEN. WHY WEREN’T THEY BETTER PREPARED?

Nevertheless, it is no longer taken for granted in Democratic circles that Sanders was a sure loser against Trump in 2016 or 2024. There is a desire among a wide cross-section of Democrats, from the surviving centrists to the progressive Left, to get back to pocketbook issues to beat Trump Republicans. Some of these Democrats feel Trump is ceding the economic ground with Musk and DOGE.

At the very least, those “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Bernie” T-shirts and bumper stickers might be in vogue once again.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.