That part is absolutely mind blowing to me, not only because tge policies are popular, but because they chose to snuff out their own popular candidate. The Bernie Bro movement was real. Maybe Bernie himself wasn’t viable — he’s pretty old — but there was genuine grassroots support and excitement for the politics Bernie was selling. But there democrats as a party chose to deliberately kill it off. They conspired to keep the only candidate to really get people excited to vote for them off the federal stage. Then they’re all wondering why nobody wants to vote for a party that doesn’t even bother with common people’s problems, kills off their most popular candidate, and insists on acting like it’s 1994 and the biggest problem is that we pollute too much.
It's been ten or more years now since some wag compared the average age of the cabinet, president, supreme court and heads of Congress and Senate to the age of the Polituro in 1986 to point out that the body that elevated Gorbachev is substantially younger than the body that elevated Hilary Clinton. If you look at both bodies as sclerotic organs of self-preservation, the Republicans attempted to sideline their populist and failed; the Democrats attempted to sideline their populist and succeeded. The Republican party is winning but is an organization virtually unrecognizable from 2015 while the Democratic party is losing but would be perfectly familiar to Tip O'Niell.