The Official List of Bernie's Successors

A look at the potential futures of the electoral left under Trump 2.0.

In August of 2023, I published an article titled The Official List of Bernie’s Successors. In it, I took a direct look at an unfortunate fact of great importance to the future of U.S. politics: that Senator Bernie Sanders, the most electorally successful left-wing American politician in several generations, was far too old to ever lead his movement in a presidential campaign again and also lacked an immediately obvious heir. Considering that, I took it upon myself to speculate who such successors could be and where they could come from. Would they be ideologically pure, or would they represent a revisionist version of his politics? Would they be someone coming from the federal level, the state level, or some other place entirely? Would they even come to pass at all, or would his movement end up as a fluke, unable to be replicated by someone other than him?

All of these questions were important, but they also felt somewhat academic in the context in which they were written. At the time, Joe Biden was president, and he was running for a second term in office effectively unopposed by his own party. Every left-of-center politician in America, very much including Sanders himself, steadfastly supported him, which meant that the left had no clear long-term gameplan outside of serving as junior members of the Brandon coalition. To come back to the national stage, we needed to either somehow sideline a sitting VP Kamala Harris in the 2028 election or wait for a Republican presidential victory to reset the board. With neither option either feasible or desirable, we found ourselves stuck in a strange limbo incapable of long-term planning.

But as it turned out, Republicans did end up winning the 2024 presidential election, and they completely reset Democratic presidential politics in the process. Because of this, the question of who will succeed Bernie Sanders has become immediately relevant and quite urgent, especially in the light of his own continued political strength at the start of Trump 2.0. Less than two months into this new administration, the 83-year-old Senator has already proven capable of drawing presidential-election-sized crowds in swing states during an odd-numbered year. So, who out there in the political world stands ready to take up that mantle in 2028—and how does my early analysis from 2023 still hold up?

Midwestern Populist(s)

To start, we have a very strong case study in how dramatically things can change in politics over the span of just one and a half years. While I began my article in 2023 by focusing on the most straightforward of Bernie’s possible heirs—i.e., the Squad—the heart of that piece focused on a new archetype that appeared to have made itself known in the 2022 midterms. Labeled by me as “Midwestern Populists,” they represented an application of Bernie-style politics distinctly different from that of the Squad and the institutional post-Bernie left. Rather than taking left-wing stances across the board, these figures only resemble Bernie (if they do so at all) by taking progressive positions on the economy and advertising themselves as political outsiders. On other issues like immigration, energy, and foreign policy, they either work to reduce their salience (at best) or just outright move to the right (at worst). The theory, to the extent that there is one, is that such tactics can allow any politician with a reasonably compelling background to redraw the playing field in the way that Bernie’s 2016 campaign appeared primed to. From there, that candidate would be set to not only match but dramatically outperform the rest of their party, finally vindicating at least some form of Bernieism in practice.

You can probably tell the exact politician I had in mind when I wrote this section. It was Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who in the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks chose to disavow his own self-given label as a progressive and position himself as a leading Kahanist voice in American politics. Far from any possible heir to Bernie and his movement, Fetterman is now nothing less than a pariah on the left, regularly mentioned in the same breath as our most bitter enemies. All of this makes it quite remarkable, to say the least, that Fetterman was the strong fan favorite among our readers when we published the first edition of this article in 2023.

One may assume that this was because some chose to be willfully ignorant about his right-wing positions until they became impossible to ignore, but that was not at all the case. In Fetterman’s section, I mentioned that he had taken right-wing positions on fracking, policing, and Israel/Palestine, all of which contrasted with the Squad’s across-the-board consistency. It was the sheer strength of his numbers in 2022 relative to the Squad’s consistent weakness that proved to be impossible to ignore, at least until he transformed into an extra-large version of Ben Shapiro later that fall. But while it may be tempting to simply write off Fetterman as simple proof of the importance of ideological consistency, one could still argue that his past electoral success still stands as proof-of-concept for the left even if the man himself is not on our side. After all, Fetterman ran his actual race as a Berniecrat outsider, only making his sharp turn to the right once he took office. Could it be possible to find a successor in someone who can pull off the Fetterman model without being, well, John Fetterman?

While there are some signs that it might be, there’s one big problem with all of them: none of the candidates we’ve seen successfully pull off this kind of appeal are actually in office. Wisconsin’s Mandela Barnes, for instance, was another 2022 candidate with a progressive background who outperformed in a race against an incumbent. But that overperformance was not enough to actually win; due to a lack of fundraising, he narrowly lost his race by a single percentage point. Sherrod Brown, the three-term Senator from Ohio, also reaped dividends by leaning hard into economic populism in his bid for re-election, but the environment leaned towards Republicans, so he lost his seat. The same was true to an even more extreme degree of Dan Osborn in Nebraska, an outright independent candidate who essentially ran as a Republican on everything besides economics. He outran the fundamentals more than any other Senate candidate in the country last year, but he still lost anyways because of how red his state was.

As strong as each of these examples may be, it is hard to say that the strategy they represent still stands as a clear path forward when none of its practitioners are actually in office. And even if it did, we would still be forced to reckon with the very real perils of compromising that have been made so abundantly clear by the example of John Fetterman. As things stand, this already-risky path is simply unviable for the immediate future, leaving us to consider both familiar and unfamiliar paths.

Urban Left-Wing Activists (‘The Squad’)