Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s theory of victory was simple: An unapologetically socialist politics centering Medicare-for-all and welfare state expansions would unite the working class and turn out young people at unprecedented rates, creating a multiracial, multigenerational coalition that could lead Sanders to the Democratic nomination and the White House.

“When we bring millions of working people, people of color and young people in the political process, there is nothing we cannot accomplish,” Sanders wrote in a February 2 Facebook post.

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced the end of his second campaign for president on Wednesday, but remained adamant that he was winning the ideological struggle even as he conceded the fight for the Democratic nomination.

“Few would deny that over the course of the past five years our movement has won the ideological struggle,” Sanders told supporters via livestream. “We have always believed that health care must be considered as a human right, not an employee benefit, and we are right.”

For a few brief weeks in February 2020, it looked to many as if Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign would follow the path of Donald Trump’s.

Sanders, an outsider candidate disliked by the party establishment, was leading national polls with around 30 percent of his party’s electorate — just like Trump. Sanders performed strongly in the early states, and the rest of the crowded field seemed hopelessly divided.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s second crusade for the White House is over. The insurgent candidate had briefly seemed like the favorite for the Democratic nomination this time, but he fell behind the mainstream party choice — again.

The news broke on Wednesday that the Vermont senator would suspend his campaign. Former Vice President Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Sen. Bernie Sanders — whose presidential bid has fallen on hard times since a disappointing Super Tuesday earlier this month — rekindled some of his old momentum on Monday with a win over former Vice President Joe Biden in the Democrats Abroad primary.

The contest had a bit of an unusual format: The primary was conducted from March 3 through March 10, and voting took place at various locations around the world. Results, however, weren’t reported until Monday due to a high volume of mail-in ballots.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, America is now facing a troubling reality: Both the president and his top two rivals for the White House are at a particularly high risk of both contracting the virus and becoming seriously ill from it due to their ages and nonstop contact with the public.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, older adults are “at higher risk of getting very sick” from Covid-19, as the disease caused by the novel coronavirus is formally called, than the general population is. As such, the CDC advises that older people should “stay at home as much as possible” to avoid contracting the virus.

Sen. Bernie Sanders just got a small bit of much-needed good news: He won the Northern Mariana Islands caucuses, beating out former Vice President Joe Biden.

The territory — a small string of islands in the Pacific — has just six delegates to the Democratic National Convention in July on offer.

Phara Souffrant Forrest returned a set of keys she found dangling from a doorknob in a Crown Heights apartment building. She told the occupant not to worry — it happens to her, too. And then, she extended her hand: “Hi, my name is Phara, and I’m running for New York state Assembly.”

Souffrant Forrest, a 31-year-old union nurse from Brooklyn, is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that also endorsed Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. She’s a bit of a nervous campaigner, and having a reporter tag along the night I met her out canvassing in February wasn’t helping. But as the evening went on, she gained steam. She started her campaign early “because we’re overachievers,” she told me. “Talk fast, walk fast,” she joked as we went between apartments.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has consistently railed against the millionaire and billionaire class and promised to take on Wall Street throughout his career. But the rich-guy freakout over his candidacy never materialized, even during the period when Sanders was surging in the polls.

It might seem strange given how strongly Wall Street reacted to a potential Elizabeth Warren nomination. But there is just “more fear of smart-as-a-whip Aunt Warren than of Crazy Uncle Bernie,” one mid-level hedge fund executive told me. (Some Wall Streeters, of course, were Warren fans.)

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders once admitted that his 2016 campaign was “too white.” But despite his attempts to build a diverse coalition of supporters in 2020, it was clear on Tuesday that he hasn’t been able to bring black voters, a core constituency for the Democratic party, into the fold.

Former Vice President Joe Biden won big with black voters in Michigan, the state with the largest delegate trove on Tuesday, and in Missouri and Mississippi, according to CNN exit polls. Black voters supported Biden at rates of 66 percent in Michigan and 72 percent in Missouri — states where he reaped double-digit victories over Sanders. And in Mississippi, where black voters made up 69 percent of the electorate, they backed Biden over Sanders nearly 9 to 1.

Bernie Sanders has successfully built a coalition of young voters and Latinos of all age groups that has powered strong performances in states like Nevada and California, but these voters just weren’t enough to deliver wins for the Vermont senator during Tuesday’s primaries.

Sanders did perform well among his core constituencies: He won about 76 percent of voters under age 30 and 53 percent of Latinos across the six states that voted, according to Washington Post exit polls. But overall, these demographics did not make up enough of the Democratic primary electorate Tuesday to give Sanders much-needed victories.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is the favorite to win the Latino vote in the Arizona primary next week, as he has in several states so far.

But things are different in Florida, where former Vice President Joe Biden is currently besting Sanders among Latino voters by an 11-point margin, according to a Telemundo poll released Wednesday.

It seemed natural to many that when Sen. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the presidential race, she would endorse her longtime ally for Bernie Sanders for president. Yet she didn’t — and one reason, judging by her Thursday exit interview with Rachel Maddow, is anger at the way Bernie’s online supporters have behaved.

“I think there’s a real problem with online bullying and online nastiness. I’m not just talking about who said mean things; I’m talking about some really ugly stuff that went on,” she said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders faces an even bleaker situation today than when he was at an equivalent point running against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary.

After taking considerable criticism for leading an excessively white political movement four years ago, Sanders successfully built a more diverse base of support, particularly among Latino voters who helped carry him to victory in Nevada and California. But building that new base also cost him the support of a lot of rural white voters who will come into play in the coming contests.

In the last couple weeks, people from President Donald Trump to supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders to top Republican operatives have begun to loudly proclaim that the Democratic presidential primary is being “rigged” against Sanders in favor of former Vice President Joe Biden.

The conspiracy theory is that “establishment” members of the Democratic National Committee and liberal media elites are so terrified that Democratic voters might elect Sanders, a democratic socialist, to be the party’s nominee that they’re actively conspiring to ensure that doesn’t happen.

One of the big questions in the debate over Sen. Bernie Sanders’s angry online fans is whether they’re worth talking about at all. They don’t speak for the campaign, so it’s unfair to blame Sanders for their antics. And the vast bulk of the American public isn’t on Twitter — why would you expect them to base their vote on what happens on that site?

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign exit interview with Rachel Maddow, aired Thursday night, is a clarifying moment in this conversation. In the interview, Warren showed palpable anger with the online Sanders army’s treatment of her and other progressives.

Disappointment tests all movements, and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s is no exception. As the Sanders coalition grapples with what to do after his disappointing showing on Super Tuesday, a long-simmering tension between two camps is starting to bubble over.

Sanders’s campaign is by no means over, but he’d expected to be in a better position than he is now. Coming off a big victory in Nevada a little over a week ago, Sanders turned around and lost South Carolina by more than expected. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar dropped out before Super Tuesday and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders fell slightly behind in the delegate count despite strong Latino support in Texas and California. And now he needs to play catch-up in the face of an unfavorable map.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders talks about his presidential campaign, he emphasizes that it’s a movement — the start of a “political revolution,” which he says will drive typically apathetic voters, particularly the young, to turn out and vote.

But if Super Tuesday was anything to go by, Sanders’s political revolution isn’t happening — and it’s former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, or perhaps general opposition to President Donald Trump, that seems to be driving turnout.

Bernie Sanders has a superdelegate problem again. He needs a solution.

Though he’s looking in a stronger position to win the nomination in 2020 than 2016, he may still come up short of the delegate majority needed to win. Though the race is still fluid, it’s possible that superdelegates — the thing Sanders supporters spent so much time criticizing in 2016 — could hand the nomination to former Vice President Joe Biden. Or, Sanders may have to convince them that he should be the party’s standard-bearer against President Donald Trump.

On an otherwise triumphant Super Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden’s victory speech in Los Angeles was interrupted by two protesters (Sarah Segal and Ashley Froud) wielding signs reading “Let Dairy Die.” Security escorted them out. But they’d accomplished their mission of getting on nationwide TV on the biggest night of the presidential primaries.

The protest followed similar direct actions at recent Bernie Sanders rallies, where topless protesters have interrupted the events, among them two women with “Let Dairy Die” written on their chests.

Bernie Sanders won Utah’s Democratic primary election on Super Tuesday.

The win is a necessary one for Sanders — who went into Tuesday as the frontrunner in the Democratic primary, but is still fending off a resurgent Joe Biden. Utah holds 29 pledged delegates, which will be given out proportionately — 19 of the pledged delegates will be allocated by congressional district, and another 10 will be allocated based on the statewide vote. A candidate will need 1,991 elected delegates for a majority at the Democratic National Convention later this year; if no candidate gets that, there will be a second ballot, and potentially more, involving unelected superdelegates.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has won the Colorado primary, sweeping a state he won handily in 2016.

Sanders has been the heavy favorite to win Colorado for months. He beat Hillary Clinton by 19 points in the state’s 2016 caucuses. This year, Colorado switched to a primary system, opening up accessibility for unaffiliated voters to cast their ballots as well.

Sen. Bernie Sanders just pulled off his least surprising victory of the 2020 primary: He won his home state of Vermont.

The state is one of the 15 states and territories to hold their primaries on Super Tuesday, and there was never any real doubt it would go to anyone but Sanders. The FiveThirtyEight polling average for Vermont showed him leading the field with 53 percent support; his nearest challenger, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was almost 40 points back with 14.2 percent.

Despite coming in second in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is still putting up monster fundraising numbers.

Sanders’s campaign announced they’ve raised $46.5 million in February, the largest monthly sum any Democratic candidate has raised so far this cycle. It will ensure Sanders stays competitive as the campaign shifts from the early states to a national primary — a change that calls for substantial money to reach voters in multiple states with ads.

Democrats opposed to Sen. Bernie Sanders want you to know they’re scared.

The New York Times’s Lisa Lerer and Reid Epstein reported last Thursday that 84 of the 93 Democratic superdelegates they spoke with opposed giving the party’s nomination to Sanders if he wins a plurality, but not majority, of delegates in the primaries.