Shortly after 11:45 on Wednesday morning, Bernie Sanders announced his exit from the Democratic presidential primary, clearing former Vice President Joe Biden’s path to the nomination. “I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” Sanders somberly told his supporters in a livestream address.
“This difficult hour” was a Churchillian reference to the disease that has pushed the issues he’s been fighting for for decades to the center of the national conversation—and also, paradoxically, made his continued presence in the Democratic primary race something that could possibly impede his policy outcomes rather than make them more likely.
Some in the Sanders camp have been resisting this logic, hoping for a miracle scenario, but since his devastating losses on Super Tuesday, many in his world have been coming around to this viewpoint. Sanders’s camp, allies—including, reportedly, his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, and progressive Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal—had begun urging the senator to stand down.
For the last few weeks in Sanders world, the question was no longer “how do we win this thing?” but rather, “what is the most effective way to address the crisis while advancing a progressive agenda?” Indeed, there is a deep irony in the fact that the coronavirus crisis proved to be his presidential death knell. There has perhaps been no greater endorsement for the progressive policy ideas popularized and amplified by Sanders than COVID-19. In its destruction, the virus has exposed the rot within the U.S. health care system, the lack of a social safety net in America, and the daily vulnerability of millions of Americans. Even as Sanders’s presidential campaign faltered, he’d already repurposed his networks and his rhetoric to address the crisis and reshape the national debate. By the time he withdrew, he’d already moved on.
“Bernie says we want to make sure that we are unified in defeating Donald Trump and that we, especially at a time of the COVID-19 crisis, that we are focused on the wide gulf between how Trump has governed and how the Democrats would govern. We would listen to science, we would listen to the experts and he wants that contrast to be clear,” Congressman Ro Khanna, a co-chair of the Sanders’s campaign, told me. “That gulf has literally been life or death…. I think that when people think about it, they’ll see that yes, there are intraparty debates, but there’s such a gulf of difference between us and how we would have acted in this crisis and how Trump has.”
By the first week in February, Sanders’s policy team had already begun consulting with public health experts on policy proposals to respond to a potential pandemic. And as Super Tuesday approached, coronavirus concerns had taken hold within the campaign, often as a practical problem. Discussions were already underway about how the virus would impact the ability to organize and how to protect staff, volunteers, and supporters. With the first signs of a massive outbreak in the Lombardy region of Italy appearing across the Atlantic, the week before Super Tuesday, the Sanders campaign was in contact with local public health experts about the risks and stopped actively encouraging people to go to the polls to vote, instead urging them to vote by mail. “That was definitely a turning point for us,” Anna Bahr, the national deputy press secretary for the Sanders campaign, told me.
Sanders’s policy arm had already begun thinking beyond politics, about how the crisis could be managed. As other elected officials and talking heads zeroed in on sounding the alarm around an impending shortage of ventilators and personal protective equipment for health care workers, Sanders’s policy team was asking questions about other advanced medical supplies like intensive care unit beds, as well as ripple effects like what happens when millions of Americans lose their jobs and consequently their health care; how those Americans would feed themselves; and how the crisis would impact the millions of people who are uninsured or underinsured.