Overall, however, I think there is a decent case that the left was always going to have a hard time defeating a center left in 2020.

“The Sanders/Warren wing is smaller than the Obama/Clinton/Biden wing of the party, even though the Sanders/Warren wing tends to be more active and visible, especially online,” said Benjamin Knoll, who teaches American politics at Kentucky’s Centre College. “The Sanders wing of the party is hugely popular among younger Democrats, and time and time again they simply don’t show up to vote in primaries at the same rate as older voters.”

He added, “In 2016, the ‘establishment’ wing coalesced around a single candidate, Hillary Clinton, and was able to beat back Sanders. This time it may have been possible for Sanders to follow the 2016 Trump route by having a core third of the party and splitting the establishment vote, allowing him to emerge with a plurality. But the Democratic primary electorate coalesced around Biden after South Carolina.”...

Of course, that’s not to say you can’t make a compelling argument that 2020 represented a golden opportunity for the left and they simply fumbled it.

The left embraced two Northeastern liberals with entirely predictable weaknesses with older black voters, and neither Sanders nor Warren did much to connect with those voters.

Sanders and Warren did not focus enough on convincing voters that they were as electable as Biden, even as polls showed Democratic voters were obsessed with picking a candidate who could beat Trump.

Sanders and Warren embraced getting rid of private insurance in favor of Medicare for All, a position that is controversial even among Democrats and was easy for the center left to cast as both impractical and a barrier to defeating Trump.

Neither Sanders nor Warren had effective strategies for defending themselves from attacks from the party’s center left after they surged in the polls.

After his win in Nevada, Sanders did little to engage Democrats who didn’t already support him; in fact, he antagonized them.

Warren was unwilling to drop out and endorse Sanders before Super Tuesday, even as the weaker center-left candidates consolidated around Biden.

Sanders’s campaign apparently planned to win the nomination by getting a plurality of the vote (30 to 35 percent) in a crowded field and it didn’t appear to have a real plan for a one-on-one contest against Biden.

…...Finally, some of the more campaign-centric narratives seem clearly contradicted by the structural case I laid out above. Biden’s support among black voters was strong before he formally started his campaign, and none of the other candidates — including two prominent black ones (Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris) — ever really dented it, so it’s hard to say that flawed black outreach was a particular failing of Sanders or Warren.

Unsurprisingly, the NYT found no evidence that Biden sexually assaulted Reade and, what’s more, they “found no pattern of sexual misconduct” by Biden, despite years of claims of unwanted harassment and touching by multiple women.

“The Times interviewed Ms. Reade on multiple days over hours, those she told about Mr. Biden’s behavior and friends,” the lead reporter on the story tweeted Sunday. “The Times also interviewed lawyers who spoke to Ms. Reade; nearly 24 people who worked with Mr. Biden in the 1990s and 7 women who criticized Mr. Biden last year.”

“No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation,” she added. “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.”

The Times does admit that Reade made contemporaneous complaints about the assault to friends, and that she didn’t simply “discover” that she’d been assaulted by Biden in the last several months or years, as Biden’s name surfaced as a potential presidential contender. In fact, the Times does go out of its way to catalog Reade’s claims, made several times over the course of several years — not dissimilar claims made against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by a former high school classmate.
“A friend said that Ms. Reade told her about the alleged assault at the time, in 1993,” the Times reports. “A second friend recalled Ms. Reade telling her in 2008. Ms. Reade said she also told her brother, who has confirmed parts of her account publicly and her mother, who has since died.”

That should give the Times pause — after all, it all but declared Brett Kavanaugh guilty of sexual assault over a similar, largely unsubstantiated claim last year. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, in contrast, did not make any contemporanous reports of her assault, and the only friend who had any recollection of high school summer parties with Kavanaugh and his friends, a woman by the name of Leyland Keyser, said she remembered nothing.

Instead, the Times goes out of its way not just to clear Joe Biden of responsibility in Reade’s incident — but in all incidents, in a shocking statement.

Obama mostly stuck to his pledge not to interfere in the race, but in 2019 there was one enormously important exception. In mid-November at a Democratic donor event he weighed in forcefully on the left vs. centrist argument that was then dominating the race. He warned Democratic candidates not to confuse actual voters with “left-leaning Twitter feeds.” He said that voters “don’t want to see crazy stuff,” that America is “less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” and that politicians pushing immigration policies that deny the existence of a border “may be in for a rude shock.”

If there was a casualty of Obama’s comments, it might have been Elizabeth Warren, who lost her lead in both Iowa and New Hampshire (to Pete Buttigieg) that same week and never regained it. Obama’s warning about the electoral consequences of leftism may have been the most important moment of the 2019 pre-primary season. At the time of those comments, several of Obama’s closest advisers, who all opposed Sanders, told me in interviews that Sanders was a spent force, a mistake that many observers made at the time. Obama was publicly silent for the remainder of the campaign. But one of his closest advisers issued a warning: “If Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we would all have to say something.”...

But some of his aides now concede that behind the scenes Obama played a role in nudging things in Biden’s direction at the crucial moment when the Biden team was organizing former candidates to coalesce around Biden.

“I know he did a few things,” said one longtime close adviser to Obama. “He was talking to Biden regularly in that period. I don’t know exactly what he said, but you can speculate! It’s noteworthy that he called Klobuchar and the others right when they got out.”

A person with knowledge of Obama’s conversation with Buttigieg after the former Indiana mayor exited the race explained it this way: “Obama talked to Pete the night that Pete dropped out. When Pete told Obama that he was 99.9 percent of the way there in terms of endorsing Biden, I would say that Obama was encouraging. But I would also say that Obama was very careful not to be seen as putting a thumb on the scale. He and the people close to him are very careful about the optics — the 2016-style optics. Sanders and his supporters had reason to believe the party put the thumb on the scale for Hillary in 2016 and he wanted to avoid that. Obama wasn’t the driving force, but he was encouraging of people who had those instincts to rally around Biden. But he was very cautious and discreet in how he operated.”