Yes, it will be necessary to unify behind one candidate to beat Trump...but it's not just that...

[Ken Burch]

42. The party could stop Bernie from running by adopting most of his economic agenda

And by making the party a place in which people were welcome to work for the kinds of things his campaign was about.

MY own theory was that he never actually wanted to be president in 2016, he just saw the need for his message to be part of the 2016 agenda and that, once Warren committed to not running, there was no other way to get that message out there and have it have a place in the Democratic message for that year.

That's why he hadn't established the contacts in the African-American, Latinx-American, LGBTQ and women's sections of the Democratic base-not disinterest, simply the fact that his campaign was late-starting, improvisational effort that simply hadn't had the time to do the groundwork a normal Democratic candidate would have had in place at the declaration.

What he had was mainly young people, with some older Left activists-this included much greater supporter among younger members of all the factions of the Democratic base.

Had HRC's campaign taken the ideas the Sanders movement presented seriously from the start, and had it acknowledged that there was a real and broad-based level of support for those ideas, and incorporated them from the start to go alongside the best of her own campaign's ideas, I truly think Bernie would have withdrawn much earlier and that much of the toxicity of the '16 process-toxicity produced on both sides, to be fair-would have been avoided and HRC's fall campaign would have generated a much greater level of support and enthusiasm and been able to withstand much of the Trump-Russian trickery.