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The Democratic presidential primary is over. Joe Biden is the presumptive nominee heading into the election. And this week, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed their former competitor.

On the left, the question is: What went wrong? How did Sanders lose to Biden? Why didnt Warren catch fire? But too few of these postmortems have had sufficient data to build out their theories. And too many of them explain away strategic and tactical failures as media or establishment conspiracies.

Sean McElwee has a different perspective. McElwee is the co-founder and executive director of Data for Progress, an organization that utilizes cutting-edge polling and data-analysis techniques to support progressive causes. His aim is to fashion an agenda that is both progressive and popular. But he also sits atop mountains of data that let him test hypotheses with a lot more rigor than most armchair pundits.

As a result, McElwee has a fascinating, heterodox view of the 2020 primary, the Sanders and Warren campaigns, and what it will take for progressives to build power. We discuss the critical mistakes both major progressive candidates made, which progressive ideas are most popular with the American people, how the lefts theory of class politics interferes with its most obvious path to electoral victory, why maximalist policy agendas fail even when they look like theyre succeeding, what good (and bad) Overton Window politics look like, how progressives can shape Bidens presidency, and much, much more.

You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As a teaser to our discussion, here are some of McElwees findings:

Theres a lot more where that came from. You can listen to our full conversation by subscribing to The Ezra Klein Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Read more from the original source:
Why Bernie Sanders lost the presidential nomination and how progressives can still win - Vox.com