So -- what if it's Bernie?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a front-runner.  Bernie Sanders more or less tied in Iowa, won in New Hampshire, and then massively won in Nevada.  In delegates, he leads with 45 (Buttigieg has 26, Biden 15).  He's jumped into the lead in polling for the nomination, with 29% support to Biden's 18%.  Establishment pundits are freaking out.

Please.  Sanders won Nevada by appealing to a wide range of voters beyond his established base, notably Latinos; he couldn't have won otherwise.  His track record shows that he knows how to win.  He's not as polarizing among Democrats as conventional wisdom has it.  In fact, a plurality of Democrats now views him as having the best shot at defeating Trump.

Are they right?  Most of the polls in the RCP average show Sanders beating Trump by various (usually small) margins, which is the same as what they show for most of the other Democratic contenders.  Some have argued that this lead would not survive an actual contest in which Trump would mercilessly pillory Sanders as a "socialist".  Arguably that line of attack wouldn't work; Sanders, after all, knows how to fight back (and the Republicans would denounce any Democratic nominee as a socialist, Marxist, etc.).  One thing I do know is that while Americans have been trained to hate the word "socialist", the specific policies -- Social Security, Medicare, universal health coverage, higher taxes on the rich to strengthen social protections -- are popular.  So long as Sanders can keep the focus on specific policies, and keep hammering away at Republicans' threats to Social Security in particular, he may well defeat an attack based on mere labeling.

This Vox post argues that Sanders's electability depends on a surge of youth turnout which would be unlikely to materialize in practice.  The analysis is worth reading, but I assume that most of those polls in the RCP average use turnout models based on the conventional wisdom that youth turnout is generally low.  Yet they still show Sanders winning.  Dean Obeidallah at CNN argues that Sanders could win it all for reasons similar to why Trump did in 2016.

He still has a lot of work to do.  Biden has a big lead in South Carolina, which votes this Saturday and could re-shape the race going into Super Tuesday.  There are good reasons why black voters in particular are very cautious about an unconventional candidate like Sanders.  The world's two biggest and nastiest fossil-fuel-based gangster-regimes, those of Russia and Saudi Arabia, have ample reason to fear a Sanders presidency and thus ample motive to go all-out in interfering in the election.

But Obeidallah has a point.  If there's one guy who could bring to our side the kind of game-changing energy that Trump brought to the bad guys, it's Sanders.  He's a fighter.  He'll call out the enemy's bullshit.  He won't be genteel and play by the rules against an enemy who refuses to do so.  And he's a disruptor.  There are many voters who went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then for Trump in 2016 -- because they didn't care about ideology, they just wanted someone who would shake up the status quo.  Sanders has, a least, a chance with those voters.

We will, of course, hear a lot about 1972.  However, it's been argued that the real reason McGovern lost so badly was that the party leaders failed to give him their full support -- which brings us back to those freaking-out establishment pundits.  We can't afford such games-playing this time.  Trump is far more dangerous and malignant than Nixon.  If Sanders gets the nomination, then all Democrats must go all-out to support him.  There can be no excuses, no forgiveness, and no future role in the party for any who fail to do so -- no matter how highly-placed they are now.