Here's what's going to happen

I’m putting a marker down: it is Tuesday, 16 April, 1:57pm, I’m sitting in my office at Bowhunting State Technical University, and I predict that Bernie Sanders is going to win something like 18%-28% of the pledged delegates and be nominated as the Democratic Party’s 2020 candidate for president, a contest that he will go on to lose badly against Trump.

My argument is based on how his candidacy is shaping up: whom he’s hired (there’s… an uncomfortably high fraction of new campaign hires who are twitter poisoned cultists, like Sirota and all of his JV team), Bernie’s absolutely undisguised fury at Neera Tanden and CAP (which very clearly serve as a proxy sink for his rage against Clinton and the Dem establishment he became deeply unhinged about late in the 2016 primary — I think this is the mid-mortem article I’m remembering , but I haven’t reread it to make sure: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/bernie-sanders-campaign-last-days-224041 ), his generally vituperative attitude… if I add more elements to this comma-ed off list, it will make this sentence into even more of a run-on, and make it look like I have my own Bernie-esque rage problems (sure, fine, whatever). We will draw a curtain of charity over the rest of the list to conceal both his & my Issues.

To return to the thesis: his campaign is not going to expand his base. It’s going to lose some of it, in fact, but that doesn’t matter in the calculus for 2016 — what matters is ensuring that his most committed supporters never waver. If the Dem field stays this large, it’s easy to imagine Sanders marching into the Fiserv Forum (someone’s going to say something about the serendipity of a firm named Populous serving as architects for the Milwaukee arena, but decent people who can still get into heaven will disregard them, close their eyes, & think of Giannis) with a higher number of pledged delegates than any other candidate. I cannot see him getting anywhere close to a majority; he has essentially 100% name recognition but doesn’t get above the mid-20%s in the early primary states that have had a significant number of polls, so he doesn’t really have much room to build a majority. He doesn’t need one; he needs his plurality. If no candidate can win on the first ballot, and if Sanders has a plurality, his supporters would riot before they would let any other candidate accept a brokered nomination. I don’t mean this hyperbolically. I served as a delegate to the state convention in Maine in 2016, and his supporters in the Cross Insurance Arena (I can’t quite connect the dots on a bad pun about Certainly Were Cross!, mostly because insurance gets me nowhere along any kind of wordplay axis, I guess) in Portland were completely unhinged. They largely had no real civics education, favored a couple of mankind’s favorite dysphemisms for Hillary and other prominent Dem women, and yelled some pretty gross things at Barney Frank, the guy Bernie mostly pretends to be. Their political aesthetic was essentially indistinguishable from the ads you see for CBD oil on highway medians.

So. Don’t worry about shooting the moon in a field of something approaching twenty candidates. Bernie can win by showing up with the largest delegation, and threatening to burn down the party if he isn’t named on the second ballot. There’s a very good chance he’d do the same thing if he had the third largest number of delegates, or the fifth. His supporters are not going to be deterred this time, and the party is not built to permit any faction to put down and to subsequently reassert control over a rebellious wing. He’ll be beaten handily in the general, but his supporters are not going home without winning the nomination in Milwaukee. It may be that in summer 2021 Trump will order all remaining dogs to be vivisected and burnt in offering below the unfinished carving of his face on the south side of Denali — executive orders for these projects to be found in communiqué #3, written with menstrual blood from a failed chaos clone of Salma Hayek —, but Bernie’s the 2020 nominee. We can’t stop it/(he can’t win in 2020).

CAVEAT: I thought Scott Walker was going to be the GOP nominee in 2016.