(2) She ran as a progressive. I understand that progressives are Warren’s base, but for precisely that reason, she did not need to position herself as a progressive darling. Many of Warren’s policy proposals are more populist than progressive and she could have offered herself not as a revolutionary, but a reformer there to finish Barack Obama’s work. Someone who wasn’t running to change the system, so much as fix it.

Instead, she ran as Bernie’s wingman in the burn-it-all-down primary. She should have been his chief antagonist.

By deciding to run as a progressive, Warren entered into a bidding war against a socialist. This was an unwinnable proposition. There was no redistribution she could offer, no government expansion she could propose, that Bernie would not be willing to top.

This isn’t science or anything, but I suspect that if you could sort the Democratic electorate by its voters’ attitudes toward how the party should exist today in relation to how it was four years ago, it would look something like this…