How about Warren herself? She’s the smartest of the bunch, and as she proved Wednesday night, she’s also the toughest, most merciless fighter. But her anti-corruption and pro-working-class message, which I favor, continually ends up neutralized and overwhelmed by appeals to highly educated urban professionals instead. How else to explain her eager embrace of every “woke” item on the agenda of left-wing culture warriors? Or her support for a ban on fracking — the kind of policy that will win votes in super-liberal (and super-wealthy) Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Warren lives, but ensure she loses rust-belt states, like Pennsylvania, that any Democrat will need to carry in 2020?

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is better in some respects. For one thing he soft-pedals and doesn’t appear to care very much about social and cultural crusades. As the old-left democratic socialist he is, Sanders is monomaniacally focused on economic injustice, which he perceives all around him. That’s fine up to a point, but like just about everyone who studies or merely observes American politics and history for a living, I have a hard time imagining such a man — someone who’s spent a lifetime describing himself as a socialist — winning the White House.

But what if he did? If I’m honest, I have to admit that I fear a Sanders victory — not because I think he would succeed in passing his roughly $97-trillion-worth of plans for new spending, but because he almost certainly wouldn’t. Think Bernie Bros are bad now? Wait until their hero’s agenda gets stopped dead in its tracks by a recalcitrant Senate.