So what happened? Why didn’t the political revolution show up?
This is the sort of thing that political scientists and Democratic activists are going to be examining for years. But there are at least three big conclusions that we can draw that seem relatively well-supported by polling and research.
The first is that the Sanders theory rested in part on a Marx-inflected theory of how people think about politics. A basic premise of Marxist political strategy is that people should behave according to their material self-interest as assessed by Marxists — which is to say, their class interests. Proposing policies like Medicare-for-all, which would plausibly alleviate the suffering of the working class, should be effective at galvanizing working-class voters to turn out for left parties.
But this isn’t really how politics works, at least in the contemporary United States. Political scientists have found that, as a general rule, the specifics of policy positions and campaign rhetoric play little role in mobilizing turnout for a campaign.
No matter how many times Sanders repeated his passionate defense of universal health care, no matter how often his volunteers went door to door arguing for social democratic policies, the content of the policy messages wasn’t going to convince young people and economically disaffected non-voters to show up in the way he needed.
“Most of the field experiments that I’ve seen — the published work in political science, as well as the internal tests within the progressive community — show that talking about policies and issues does not really spur turnout,” says John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.
Second, it seems that Sanders and his campaign assumed that his popularity with the white working class in 2016 was about him and his policies — when, in fact, it wasn’t.
“
The white working-class voters that Sanders won were mostly anti-Clinton voters,” McElwee tells me.
A regression analysis by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver finds support for this theory. Silver’s data shows that Clinton-skeptical Bernie supporters in 2016 were not progressives who opposed Clinton from the left, but from moderate or conservative Democrats who tended to have right-leaning views on racial issues and were more likely to support repealing Obamacare. These #NeverHillary voters also tended to be rural, lower-class, and white.
For some of these voters, Sanders may have been a protest vote against a woman closely identified with progressive social causes. When the alternative was Joe Biden, a male Democrat with working-class appeal who’s widely perceived as a moderate, they seemed to have preferred him over the Vermont socialist.
Third, the Sanders-socialist theory rested on a misunderstanding of the way identity works in contemporary American politics.
Americans do not primarily vote as a member of an economic class, but rather as a member of a party and identity group (race, religion, etc.). Trump won the overwhelming bulk of Republican voters in the 2016 general election, despite taking heterodox positions on a number of policy issues, simply because he had an R next to his name. His message resonated with working-class whites, but not working-class people of color, because it centered ethnic grievance and conflict.
This created a big problem for Sanders. His refusal to formally become a Democrat — and harsh attacks on the “Democratic establishment” — were much less likely to resonate with voters strongly attached to the Democratic Party. This effect seems to have hurt him badly.
I agreed with the part I bolded, the rest I don't know if quite understand, it didn't really make sense. I would have to read Nate Silver's analysis I think. 