Broadly speaking, then, populism refers to the mechanism by which the actor in question attains the goals they desire. Since what is considered right-wing in the US and what is considered right-wing in Europe differ substantially, their right-wing populist movements necessarily have different objectives. However, their political style is the same, and have been found to center around three key features: appeal to “the People” versus “the Elite”1, a disregard for political propriety, and the perception of a crisis, breakdown, or threatiii.

If populism is merely the mechanism by which a political actor attains their goals, then left-wing populism is the use of these three primary features to advance left-wing goals. To categorize Sanders’ presidential campaign as left-populist, then, we should assess whether the features of his campaign followed this populist political style.
The first feature, an appeal to “the People” versus “the Elite”, is comprised of the “dichotomous division of society between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’”, and an attempt to ‘render-present’ through performanceiv. This much is very clear when you look at what Sanders says, and how he phrases it, in his speeches. For reference, I’ll take the iconic speech that kicked off his first presidential campaign in Burlington, Vermont on 26 May, 2015v. Firstly, he clearly delineates America between the people and the elite.

Today, we stand here and say loudly and clearly that; “Enough is enough. This great nation and its government belong to all of the people, and not to a handful of billionaires, their Super-PACs and their lobbyists.”
He then proceeds to de-personify his campaign, and directly attempt to forge an affinity between his campaign, its objectives, and the American people.
Here is my promise to you for this campaign. Not only will I fight to protect the working families of this country, but we’re going to build a movement of millions of Americans who are prepared to stand up and fight back. We’re going to take this campaign directly to the people – in town meetings, door-to-door conversations, on street corners and in social media – and that’s BernieSanders.com by the way. This week we will be in New Hampshire, Iowa and Minnesota – and that’s just the start of a vigorous grassroots campaign. Let’s be clear. This campaign is not about Bernie Sanders. It is not about Hillary Clinton. It is not about Jeb Bush or anyone else. This campaign is about the needs of the American people, and the ideas and proposals that effectively address those needs.
The second feature is a disregard for political propriety. While Moffitt characterizes this as “bad manners”vi, we could possibly broaden the feature to include any form of political messaging that does not gel with what is generally understood to be politically appropriate. Thus, we can identify the difference between Sanders’ own choice of political messaging for his campaign, and the more organic messaging that occurs when his supporters spar with followers of other political factions online. Sanders’ campaign itself can hardly be said to have bad manners; after a few months, his identification as a democratic socialist no longer caused the stir in American politics that it had at the start, although it continued to be used against him. The real source of the invective and “bad manners” in the campaign came from Sanders’ supporters, creating a more informalized disregard for political propriety in contrast to Trump’s more formal and incendiary statements denigrating the political establishment. While not very well-catalogued, many of his supporters went on an all-out offensive against all other political groups on social media – a manifestation of a new movement that calls itself the “dirtbag left”vii. Just as many of Trump’s supporters on the right have warmed up to the idea of flouting social norms of politeness in politicsviii, so too have many on the left concluded it necessary to do soix.
The final feature which Moffett has to categorize something as populist would be the invocation of an atmosphere of crisis, breakdown, or threat. This is meant to be a self-sufficient cycle, in which the populist calling upon the atmosphere of crisis in itself is a performance, a dramatization which further increases the perception of crisis. Because a crisis demands decisive action, this has the effect of radically simplifying the debate, engendering mistrust in the complex machinery of modern government in favour of instrumental, utilitarian politics. This does not necessarily mean that populist candidates have a dearth of policy; rather, the policies they push and the practicality of these policies with respect to their likelihood of full actualization as well as the predicted outcomes of these policies are de-emphasized in favour of merely debating a policy on its instrumental merits. There is much less interest in the “slow politics” of negotiation or deliberationx, and a greater emphasis on swift, if short-term, action. While it is difficult to actually see which approach Sanders would have taken for his ambitious set of policies, we can get a decent grasp on his willingness to engage in this “slow politics” based on the Bipartisan Indexxi, run by the McCourt School of Public Policy in Georgetown University in conjunction with the Lugar Center. The index uses bill sponsorship and co-sponsorships of bills as its objective measures for how well members of a certain party work with members of other parties. It claims to measure “not so much the quality of legislation but rather the efforts of legislators to broaden the appeal of their sponsored legislation, to entertain a wider range of ideas, and to prioritize governance over posturing. The graph below shows a glimpse of how Bernie Sanders has fared on the index over time.

From the very beginning, Sanders seems to not have had much interest in bipartisan cooperation. As stated by the description of the index, “a consistently low score on this index will be a very strong indication that a legislator is viewing is or her duties through a partisan lens”. Sanders’ greatest effort at bipartisan cooperation was when he was fresh to the Senate, and it has been on the decline since. In fact, he has been noted to be the least bipartisan Senator in the 115th Congress, being comparable to the divisive figure of Ted Cruzxiii. While this is not absolute proof that Sanders would be unwilling to engage in the politics of negotiation and deliberation, a solidly non-bipartisan working style in the Senate certainly forestalls any prediction that he would be bipartisan as President.
This naturally blends together with the rather pessimistic view of the state of America that Sanders tends to take. Many of his speeches focus on the breakdown of justice in the American system. Particularly during the Trump administration, he has begun to frame many issues in a much more urgent tone, and taken an openly oppositional tone to Republicans. In an interview with PBS regarding the possibility of bipartisan solutions to the healthcare issuexiv, Sanders stated:
Well, what went wrong, Judy, is [the Republicans] brought forth a disastrous health care bill that had the support of all of 12 percent of the American people, that was opposed by the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the AARP… Well, if [President Trump] wants to blame me for helping kill that bill, I accept that responsibility completely. This bill was an absolute disaster. Its goal was primarily to give tax breaks to the rich and to large corporations, rather than to address the needs of the American people. If the president wants to blame me and anyone else for preventing 22 million Americans losing their health insurance, I accept that criticism.
There are much more features of the Bernie Sanders campaign style that justify its classification as a populist one. Thus far, I have only considered his 2016 presidential bid; given the background of the Trump presidency, these features are far more accentuated in his 2020 presidential bid. In fact, his populism in 2020 managed to reach beyond the left-right spectrum, even touching the Joe Rogan Experiencexv, a podcast which is hard to categorize into a particular political denomination but seems to primarily fight off challengers from the leftxvi. This then raises the ultimate question of why Sanders did not seem to take on among the Democrats as well as Trump did among the Republicans.
If you actively follow American politics then the campaign of Bernie Sanders was either the most exciting revolution just waiting to happen in American politics, or just the agitations of some upstart young people who did not know how the world of politics worked. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, many mainstream Democrats found a scapegoat in the political constituency colloquially called “Bernie Bros”, believing that they had refused to vote for the Democratic candidate out of a misplaced sense of childish indignation and idealism, thus preventing a coalescing of support behind Hillary Clintonxvii. A smaller faction would continue to state that this constituency refused to vote for Clinton because they were, in fact, sexistxviii. While it is not within the scope of this analysis to ascertain the merits of these highly contentious allegations – they are, after all, related to Clinton’s defeat and not Sanders’ defeat – it is still important to understand how the Sanders campaign and base was generally perceived by the Democratic establishment to fully realize why his campaign failed to find its base in the primaries, where Trump struck gold in his.
I would like to start with the structural differences between the Democratic National Convention (DNC) and the Republican National Convention (RNC). These two organizations are the primary mechanisms by which the respective parties choose the contender for the presidential race, and as such the difference in the amount of control the party’s elite are afforded in choosing their candidate directly affects the measure of success their campaigns can have.
The RNC hosts 2472 delegates, with a simple majority of 1237 delegates voting in favor of a candidate required to make that candidate the official presidential candidate for that cycle. The delegates, and the manner in which they are to vote, is decided by the presidential primaries and caucuses that occur throughout the election year. The vast majority of delegates are bound delegates, i.e. bound to vote for a specified candidate based on their state’s primary, either in a first-past-the-post fashion2 or proportionally. Only 130 delegates were uncommitted, which meant that they could vote freely during the first ballot. If the first ballot fails to produce a suitable candidate, then subsequent ballots are held with progressively more candidates becoming uncommitted. What this means in practice is that the RNC’s choice of candidate, especially on first ballot, is extremely dependent on how the primaries and caucuses turn out. Only 5.26% of the delegation is allowed as a buffer against what the party elite might view as a bad choice by the voter base. At the point of the RNC, Donald Trump had already secured 1457 bound delegates, which meant that even if all the uncommitted delegates had voted against him, he would have still won by a majority of 1327 delegates. His victory was truly a populist one; even after it became clear that he would win no matter what, many elite party members and figures continued to oppose his presidential bidxix. Even after they reluctantly coalesced around him in the wake of the RNCxx, outrage continued to be communicated, with one notable instance being the outrage as a result of the leak of the Access Hollywood tapexxi.
On the other hand, the DNC functions rather differently from the RNC. There are three forms of delegates in the DNC: at-large pledged delegates, allocated at the state level; district pledged delegates, allocated at a congressional/state/legislative district level; and add-on pledged delegates, reserved for party leaders and elected officials (PLEO). At-large and add-on delegates are awarded proportionally on a state-by-state basis based on the results of the primaries/caucuses in that state, with a 15% minimum vote required in order to earn any delegates at all. District delegates are proportionally awarded based on the primary results in their districts. Beyond these delegates, there are a group called the superdelegates; basically, the elite members of the party including elected members, governors, current members of Congress, and distinguished members of the party. This group of 712 superdelegates in the DNC made up 15% of the total delegates in the Democratic party, effectively providing the elites a strong buffer against the outcome of the primaries within the party.
It is well-established that voters have a tendency to vote strategically in order to ensure the best outcome possible. What this means, functionally, is that for the 2016 election (and many other elections), many voters did not simply base their voting choice on how preferable the candidate was compared to other candidate; rather, many also factor in “electability” into the decisionxxii. When it seems equally likely that either party will win the election – which is a common assumption that is made given the US two-party political system – it has been found that a significant factor in how primary voters vote is the belief about the position of the population median. In other words, if a Democratic voter believes that the average voter is pro-laissez faire enough that they will reject Sanders’ radical economic reforms, then it is more likely that they would have cast a vote for Clinton in the 2016 primaries rather than for Sanders in the belief that his reforms would be too radical for him to win the elections. This in itself is a function of the median voter hypothesisxxiii, which asserts that the outcome of a majority vote will be decided by what the median voter, i.e. the voter in the center of that system’s political spectrum, will prefer. While the median voter hypothesis is rarely referenced by name in media, it is the theory that undergirds the “silent majority” comments that were so ubiquitous during the 2016 presidential election cyclexxiv.
Given the superdelegate system which entrenches the interest of the elite in the party’s decision, and given the increasing level of existential threat which the party faced as the prospect of Trump being the opposing candidate increasingly became clear, many voters began to switch to strategic voting in the belief that it was necessary to win this election to prevent a Trump presidency, and that a more moderate candidate like Clinton would have a higher chance of winning. Even so, the close victory which Clinton won over Sanders during the DNC speaks volumes of the mass appeal which he managed to obtain through a mostly grassroots, populist campaign. It also speaks to the entrenchment of elite interest in the Democratic party provided through the superdelegate systemxxv.
When speaking about populism, we often only see the movements that succeed and bring that vigor into political office, for better or for worse. These movements are, after all, the ones that managed to canvass enough social support to reach critical mass and come closer to achieving their political objectives. However, the unique two-party system of the US which necessitates party primaries shows how, given strong elite control over a political faction, a populist wave can effectively be hamstrungxxvi – not because the members of the political faction do not believe that the populist represents their interests, but because of a need to factor in the interest of the political elite and a need to vote strategically to ensure that minimally some of their interests will be represented in office. The only difference between the Sanders primary defeat and Trump primary victory was which group of people were forced to vote strategically: the elite, or the public.