This is a religious belief, not an observation. Discounting all allegations of shenanigans, 45% of the Democratic Party primary voters supported him in 2016, and probably around or not much less than that in 2020. The man consistently polls as extremely popular (although that popularity took a hit after 2020), and is as old as dirt, along with a huge number of his voters.
Your views of the situation disregard your observations about the situation, if you're at any way aware of the data about Sanders' popularity over the last 10 years, the popularity of his policies, the fact that he was nearly President in 2016, and the fact that instead of him, a bunch of over-35s elected a wrestler game show host, it's nuts to still pretend that people generally mature into middle-of-the-road conservatism.
I am a very dedicated Sanders supporter, and to say he "was nearly President" in 2016 is just not true. Yes, by the end of the primary he'd gained a lot of steam, but that was the end of the primary. Sanders was in a pretty hopeless situation delegate-wise by Super Tuesday, and only briefly polled within even ten points of Clinton.
He was closer in 2020. But in 2020, Democratic primary voters got a very simple choice: double down on moderate neoliberalism, or try progressivism. Democratic primary voters made a very, very clear choice, and Biden wiped the floor with Sanders from the day it became a two-man race. Biden won nearly two-to-one in vote share and in delegates and won numerous states that were Sanders' base of support in 2016.
Is there a progressive wing in the Democratic Party? Yes. Is it a lot bigger than it was ten years ago? Yes. Is the fact that we've been right all along becoming more obvious by the day? Yes. But are progressives the majority of the party? No. Are we competitive in national primaries right now? No. We have simply not convinced half of the half of the country that votes Democratic that we are in the right.
Part of that is our serious problem with the black vote - it's very hard to win a Democratic primary without it - but it goes well beyond that. Republicans have very successfully painted us as a bunch of frothing-at-the-mouth fools who want to waste all your money sending men to leer at your daughters in locker rooms, and we need strategies to convince people otherwise. We need to play politics. What that looks like, we can debate, but we have so far failed to win the game of rhetoric even though we are, objectively, right.
Of the states that Bernie won, only seven were solidly Democratic-voting (Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Democrats Abroad). Five more are dem-leaning swing states, or were at the time (Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire). The other 11 are solidly Republican: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and West Virginia, and Alaska. If anything, it was Bernie, not Clinton, who overperformed in Republican-leaning areas.
That's largely because both the 2016 and 2020 generals, and the 2016 and 2020 primaries, were highly split along racial and educational lines. Black voters voted overwhelmingly for moderates in primaries and Democrats in the generals in all three contests, while white voters tended towards the more radical candidates in both primaries and the general (although the Bernie -> Trump vote gets exaggerated, it certainly existed, and his massive upset in Michigan foreshadowed Clinton's weakness there).
> Also because the Democratic primaries were objectively and transparently rigged.
Well, in terms of delegates, sure. But Bernie didn't win the vote, either. Clinton beat him by 12 points, not all that much different from the margin Biden was beating him in '20 prior to him dropping out.
> IIRC wasn’t Sanders polling better against Trump than Clinton? Then again most conceivable candidates probably would have…
The polling was a wash, ish, between the two. But of course the polling was also wrong in undersampling critical demographic groups that probably preferred Sanders to Clinton (although I'll note that Clinton won the primary in Pennsylvania, which she ultimately and decisively lost).
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe Democrats would have done a lot of things differently. (I certainly would have - I was so frustrated after Bernie lost that I ultimately voted third-party, although I might not have had I lived in a competitive state.) But certainly conventional wisdom at the time for virtually anyone in the know was that Trump was very unlikely to win, even as his popularity endured through things it never should have, and I don't necessarily blame them for mis-reading an electorate whose simmering frustration was suddenly at a boil.
My point being that Bernie being right does not mean he was, even with the benefit of hindsight, the correct electoral choice, nor does it mean there's some silent majority of Democrats who want progressive action but aren't voting for it.
Your views of the situation disregard your observations about the situation, if you're at any way aware of the data about Sanders' popularity over the last 10 years, the popularity of his policies, the fact that he was nearly President in 2016, and the fact that instead of him, a bunch of over-35s elected a wrestler game show host, it's nuts to still pretend that people generally mature into middle-of-the-road conservatism.