What Happens to Bernie Sanders’ Movement Without Bernie Sanders?

David Sirota has a way of thinking about Bernie Sanders’ career that he’s been kicking around for years.

Sirota worked for Sanders in the House in the late 1990s and again on his 2020 presidential campaign, serving as a senior adviser and speechwriter for the progressive champion. And more than a decade after Sanders launched his first presidential run, improbably transforming from Vermont’s independent gadfly senator into an insurgent political rock star, Sirota has settled on a surprising historical analog for his old boss.

“Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party could be Barry Goldwater to the Republican Party,” Sirota told me earlier this year. “That’s how I’ve thought about him for a very long time.”

Goldwater was a firebrand with a crystal-clear ideology, hard right in his case, who seized his party’s presidential nomination in 1964 and lost the election — only to see one of his star campaign surrogates and ideological torch carriers, Ronald Reagan, go on to win the White House 16 years later and preside over a conservative realignment. “If 2016 is Bernie’s 1964,” Sirota said, “we’re 10 years into that trajectory.”

It is a literary, almost biblical, framing of Sanders’ career: the prophet who toils for years but never gets to the promised land himself.

Just don’t ask Sanders about it.

“It’s interesting,” Sanders told me when I asked about Sirota’s analogy, in a way that meant he didn’t find it interesting at all. “But you know what? It’s not something I stay up nights thinking about.”

What Sanders has been up thinking about is ensuring the movement he jumpstarted, and most importantly its policy agenda, has been winning primaries across the country — and right now, that fight is going better than it ever has. As the 2026 midterm primary season wraps up, it has already produced a wave of astonishing progressive victories: insurgents ousting incumbents, first-time candidates toppling the party’s stalwarts and democratic socialists winning in states the establishment swore they couldn’t.

Much of the credit for this string of political success belongs to Sanders, who turns 85 in the coming days and has spent the last year campaigning like he’s 35. Since the start of last year’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Sanders has spoken at 63 rallies and events to more than 300,000 people around the country. He has endorsed more than 90 candidates up and down the ballot this cycle, from the U.S. Senate to state legislatures, and has worked to build up the farm team — scouting candidates, meeting with them privately, coaching them, then barnstorming the country to drag them across the finish line.

For progressives, there is still, 10 years later, no other figure on the American left who commands the same excitement, and no endorsement more sought after. And he is still planning to campaign through Election Day, and will likely be back on the campaign trail in October, a person familiar with the plans said. The dynamic in some ways mirrors President Donald Trump’s endorsement power on the right, but while Republicans fret over the conspicuous absence of their own movement’s leader from this primary season, Sanders has employed the opposite strategy: omnipresence.

But the triumph arrives at an inconvenient moment in other ways. Sanders, midway through perhaps his final Senate term, has ruled out another presidential campaign, leaving the movement he built to confront a question he has little interest in entertaining: What comes after Bernie Sanders?

For a decade, Sanders promised a political revolution. Now the revolution may finally be arriving, at precisely the moment its architect is confronting how long he can lead its next phase. The irony is obvious to some around Sanders, but he wants little to do with it. He has no interest in anointing an heir or talking about an heir and rejects the very premise that the movement he built should belong to any one person after him.

And yet the Democratic Party’s future, at least in the near-term, will be determined by the battle for the 2028 presidential nomination and whether a potential Sanders acolyte is victorious. Many on the center-left are wary that Bernie-ism will win out, either because of opposition to his policies or merely fear that Democrats will go down to utter defeat in the general election. But with a wide open field and momentum building in the midterm campaign, progressives have their best shot in years to take control of the party and try to carry out Sanders’ vision.

While Sanders scoffs, deflects, even throws an insult or two when asked about his legacy or the future of the movement he ignited, nearly everything he has done this cycle — the down-ballot endorsements, the candidate training, the organizers embedded deep in Republican districts — amounts to a succession plan.

The seeds of what would bloom into the 2026 primary romp were planted more than a year ago, in early 2025 — before most of the candidates Sanders would go on to endorse had even decided to run. Sanders had a hunch about where the fight would be, and placed full-time organizers in Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, with part-time staff scattered across other swing seats around the country. His staff in those states held weekly meetings, organized town halls, passed out signs and built lists, and reported back to the senator and his team what they were seeing on the ground, which ultimately shaped the operation’s primary strategy and its endorsements.

“We were laying the groundwork before the candidates even jumped in the race,” said Jeremy Slevin, Sanders’ communication director and senior adviser.

One of the candidates who emerged from that early investment was Rebecca Cooke, running in GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s western Wisconsin district, where Sanders’ operation had an organizer on the ground starting that spring. Sanders was holding a town hall alongside Cooke in Viroqua, Wisconsin, more than a year before her primary win.

Sanders’ team realized they could harness the energy bubbling up around the country following Trump’s return to power and launched the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, a series of arena-scale rallies that drew crowds as large as 35,000. Internal numbers from the Sanders team showed 40 to 50 percent of attendees weren’t Democrats at all — roughly 30 percent were independents and 10 percent were Republicans.

That tour also doubled as a talent pipeline. Sanders’ team worked each stop to feature working-class speakers, people they would like to see represent the future of the movement — and several of them went on to become candidates themselves.

In April 2025, at a Fighting Oligarchy rally in Missoula, Montana, the campaign invited local union leaders to address the crowd. One of them was Sam Forstag, a National Forest firefighter and smokejumper, who told the 9,000 people gathered there how Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE had just fired thousands of federal employees, including many in Montana. The crowd’s response was electric — enough that Forstag, who had never run for public office in his life, decided to run for Congress. On June 2, with Sanders’ backing, Forstag won the Democratic primary in Montana’s 1st District.

As the primary season went on, Sanders’ endorsees saw major wins across the map: El-Sayed in Michigan after being outspent 10-to-1, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota’s Senate primary, Melat Kiros in a Colorado House race. And dozens of down-ballot endorsees in statehouse and local races across the country. Sanders talks to every federal candidate personally before endorsing and keeps in touch afterward; he speaks with El-Sayed regularly.

So is it the left’s own Tea Party moment?

“I don’t know how to phrase it, whether it’s a Tea Party moment or not,” Sanders told me. “I think that progressive candidates are speaking to the needs of working families.”

But the results, according to Sanders, suggest the long-running argument over where Democratic voters want the party to go is settled. “I think so,” he told me.

Not everyone in the Democratic party agrees with Sanders and some feel the movement he is pushing, and the wins it produced this primary season, spell trouble for Democrats heading into November and beyond.

“What Bernie’s people do very, very effectively is turn blue places bluer,” said Matt Bennett of the centrist Democrat-aligned think tank Third Way. “They have won nothing, nothing in places where we’re trying to turn red to blue. So when they start helping build majorities, I will be a little more impressed.”

Bennett, whose group launched a $15 million effort to target the Democratic Socialists of America ahead of 2028, calling DSA a “mortal danger,” said that he’s already seeing moderate candidates being impacted by progressive wins during the primary. “These DSA candidates are being used against Democrats in swing districts. It was inevitable that this would happen.”

“I just think that Bernie declaring victories without having flipped a single seat is laughable,” Bennett said.

Still, despite the left’s wins and all of Sanders’ campaigning, it hasn’t been enough for some progressives, who view Sanders’ decision to stay out of certain races as playing it too safe when the wind is at their backs. That criticism was on full display when Sanders declined to endorse Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin governor’s race. Hong, after a damaging news cycle over past comments — including about Thanksgiving — lost by less than half a percentage point, a margin some progressives argue she could have overcome had Sanders’ operation gotten behind her.

Sanders has said, in response to the backlash, that he can’t be everywhere. But when I pressed him on whether there was also a political calculation involved — whether he worries about spending capital on a race that he might lose, knowing any major defeat will be spun as a verdict on where the party is headed — he rejected the notion.

“I beg to differ with you,” he said. “We are putting political capital. For example, we just announced our support for Angie Nixon, who’s running for the U.S. Senate in Florida. Does anybody think she is — to say the least, a real underdog?”

“If I wanted to be 100 percent in my selections, I could do that,” Sanders said. “But that’s not what we do.”

One of the other sharper criticisms of this year’s Sanders-backed primary winners: that some of the democratic socialists breaking through, particularly in New York, come from privileged, Ivy League backgrounds — that the movement is not yet as working class as it claims to be, or needs to be. Sanders said it’s something they’re working on.

“I want to see more of that,” Sanders said. “I want to see people from the trade union movement, young people, working-class people get involved in the progressive movement. Absolutely.”

But ask Sanders about the future of this movement — who inherits it, where it goes when he’s gone — and the conversation changes entirely. It becomes an exercise in watching a man swat away question after question.

When I asked who he sees taking up the mantle in the next generation, he accused me of “sounding like an inside-the-Beltway media pundit.”

“That is precisely the wrong question,” he said. The right question, he insisted, is how many good people the movement has already produced, before naming a few he views as standouts of the movement: Rep. Greg Casar, now chairing the Progressive Caucus; Rep. Pramila Jayapal; Rep. Rashida Tlaib; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; progressive mayors in New York, Seattle and Washington.

“The media is focused on personality,” he grumbled. “‘Oh my God, what will Alexandria do? Is she going to run for president? Run for the Senate? Stay in the House? Let’s talk about that for 14 years.’ How often do we talk about the fact that we’re the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee health care to all people?”

Ocasio-Cortez, of course, has told POLITICO’s Adam Wren that she hasn’t ruled out a 2028 run. It’s an enormous decision, one Sanders happens to have made twice himself. And he has apparently reconciled himself to the fact that there will not be a third.

“Well, I am 40 years of age now,” Sanders deadpanned, “and I think having reached the golden age of 40, it’s hard, you know. So yeah, I think it’s unlikely that I will become president of the United States.”

As for whether he and Ocasio-Cortez have discussed her decision: “Do I talk to Alexandria? Yes, I do. Am I going to tell you what we talk about? Of course I won’t.” Does he want her to run? “No comment. That’s her decision.”

It was as close as Sanders gets to acknowledging what he won’t discuss: that the movement’s future will eventually belong to someone else who will carry it into 2028 and beyond. Yet he lights up when talking about the generation of political talent he has inspired.

“One of the things that gives me, I think, more satisfaction than almost anything else, is I go out around the country and somebody who’s in the state legislature somewhere says, ‘You know what? I got inspired by your race in 2016 or in 2020,’” he said.

Sanders’ operation has reached out to hundreds of would-be candidates and put them through a kind of political boot camp. “How do I run for office? How do I run for state legislature? What is a press release? How do I raise money? Kind of basics, politics 101,” Sanders said. “A lot of those folks are now getting their feet wet. Many of them are winning. And in a few years, you’re going to be hearing from them as they run for Congress or Senate or whatever.”

So, I ask him, it’s a bench, built to ensure the movement continues beyond his own career?

“Well, that’s exactly it,” Sanders said.

Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who emerged this cycle as arguably the movement’s most influential independent voice, told me Sanders’ campaign influenced him and gave him a proof of concept.

“I realized that there was an opportunity to convince Americans on the argument of socialism because of his electoral success against an establishment figurehead like Hillary Clinton,” Piker said. “That there was appetite for this kind of thing.”

A decade later, Piker has become a version of what Sanders proved possible — a socialist with a mass American audience who put his platform to work this primary season by helping to get progressive candidates elected across the country. And he still looks up to Sanders. “I hope I can make him proud with the things that I am trying to do,” Piker said. (Piker’s own influence has grown so much, in fact, that he has become a lightning rod in the Democratic Party, for his staunch criticism of Israel and past controversial comments.)

When asked who was in line to take over Sanders’ movement after he leaves the stage, Piker bristled at the question. “It’s not his movement, nor my movement, nor Zohran [Mamdani]’s movement,” he said. “It’s all of our movement.”

It’s a similar view, not surprisingly, in the close-knit Sanders world. Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders’ former deputy campaign manager, said the entire framework of succession, of a torch being passed to a chosen one, misunderstands the man.

“Bernie just doesn’t believe in dynasties,” Rabin-Havt said. “He doesn’t believe you get to inherit your power. If you want Bernie’s movement, go out and earn Bernie’s movement.” The image of Sanders anointing an heir, he said, would be “so antithetical to who he is as a person.”

There is a similar aversion to any discussion of Sanders’ legacy, even in private. Aides have learned not to discuss it as he will quickly dismiss the topic. “He’s not looking back and reminiscing about his own accomplishments,” one Sanders aide, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, said.

When I suggested that Sanders seemed to be running through the tape, the aide quickly pushed back: “I don’t think he thinks the tape is there yet.”

The Goldwater comparison lands the same way. “It’s for the historians and the pundits to interpret,” the aide said. “He’s like, ‘I’m Bernie Sanders. I’m in the battle. Other people can interpret.’”

And yet there is a wistfulness among Sanders’ team, a feeling that he is at the peak of his game — stronger at messaging and campaigning and organizing than he ever has been and would be well positioned to finally seize the presidency if he were just 10 or 15 years younger.

Yet he’s not. So sometimes even those close to Sanders can’t help but speculate: If Sanders does indeed turn out to be the Democrats’ Goldwater, then who will be their Reagan?

“That’s the big question,” Sirota told me. He pointed to the candidates already jockeying in what he calls the populist lane, familiar names like Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ro Khanna chief among them, while cautioning that the eventual standard-bearer may be someone “we’re not thinking of yet.” He also sketched how even some ambitious Democrats with more establishment résumés — name-checking Pete Buttigieg, Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen — might try to reposition themselves as populists after sensing where the wind is blowing this primary season. Whether voters would buy it is another matter.

Rabin-Havt similarly said the mantle is up for grabs. Ocasio-Cortez, if she runs, “obviously has a lot of love, respect, admiration and support among Bernie world — but I think it would be underselling her to suggest that is the limits of her support.” Khanna, he added, “has done a lot of work building himself as a progressive leader” and taken courageous stands on pushing a wealth tax and advocating for strict conditions or cuts on U.S. military aid to Israel.

Piker said “AOC seems to be the one with the highest likelihood of taking that mantle, but there could be a dark horse. You never know.” What matters between now and then, in his telling, is proving “to the broader electorate that we’re here to stay.”

The evidence is easy to find, Rabin-Havt argued. Before 2016, he said, the last genuine left candidate to seriously contest a Democratic presidential primary was Jesse Jackson — a nearly 30-year gap in which the party’s “left” flank was played by the likes of center-left types like Howard Dean and Bill Bradley. Medicare for All, he noted, has gone from a bill Sanders sponsored essentially alone to legislation co-sponsored by roughly a third of the Senate Democratic caucus and more than half of House Democrats. Sanders’ first Senate resolution restricting arms sales to Israel drew 11 votes; the most recent drew 40. Taxing the wealthy, once a leftist tell, “is now pretty middle of the road in the Democratic Party,” Rabin-Havt said.

“The window has moved.” The movement, as Rabin-Havt put it, “is entering its teenage years.”

At the end of our conversation, Sanders acknowledged the party’s ongoing shift, in the nearest thing to a victory lap he permits himself.

“I think over the years, for a variety of reasons,” he said, “more and more people are saying, ‘You know, Bernie was right.’”

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