What if Sanders and Warren ran together?

For a start, Sanders and Warren are each doing an exceptional job when it comes to fundraising and sustaining competitive placement in the 2020 polls. (Both campaigns have significantly more cash on hand than the supposed frontrunner Biden.) This is doubly impressive when you consider that Sanders and Warren are running mostly on small donations. Sanders announced in September that one million people had donated to his campaign. Two candidates who are popular enough to pull this off would make for a powerhouse White House ticket. Plus, given that Warren and Sanders’ grassroots donations mostly seem to come from college-educated, upper middle-class enclaves and working-class communities, respectively, a Sanders and Warren ticket could help bridge a rift that the Democratic Party has been struggling to repair.

Of course, if Sanders and Warren campaigned together, they’d also be breaking precedent. There would be no centrist running mate to “balance” the ticket. But is balance really the Democrats’ best shot at taking back the White House this year? Not if you’ve been paying attention to demographic changes in recent years. The most crucial voter blocs for the Democrats in 2020 will no longer be Baby Boomers, who tend to vote more consistently and conservatively — it will likely be Millennials and Generation Z, who now outnumber Boomers and who played an instrumental role in helping the Democrats take back the House in 2018. And when it comes to voting, young people tend to respond more positively to vision and authenticity then balance. In other words, is this candidate for real? Is their campaign rhetoric backed up by years of actionable service? Can I really trust them?