At 84, Bernie Sanders is campaigning with the intensity of a politician half his age. Across the United States, the progressive movement he helped build is producing a string of primary victories, reshaping Democratic politics and raising an increasingly unavoidable question: what happens to the movement when Sanders is no longer at its center?
David Sirota, who worked for Sanders in the late 1990s and later served as a senior adviser and speechwriter on his 2020 presidential campaign, has long compared Sanders’ role in the Democratic Party to Barry Goldwater’s influence on the Republicans.
Goldwater, a fiercely ideological conservative, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 but lost the general election. Sixteen years later, one of his most prominent political heirs, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency and helped usher in a conservative realignment that transformed the Republican Party.
Sirota sees a similar trajectory in Sanders’ career. The Vermont independent has never reached the White House, but his political ideas have moved steadily from the margins of the Democratic Party toward its mainstream.
Sanders himself has little patience for the comparison.
“It’s interesting,” he said when asked about the Goldwater analogy, before making clear that he spends little time thinking about his own place in history.
What occupies him instead is the expansion of the movement he helped create.
A progressive surge
The 2026 Democratic primary season has delivered a series of victories for candidates backed by Sanders. Incumbents have been defeated, first-time candidates have taken down established party figures and democratic socialists have won races in areas where the Democratic establishment had doubted their chances.
Sanders has played an unusually active role in the process. Since launching his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour last year, he has appeared at 63 rallies and events attended by more than 300,000 people. He has endorsed more than 90 candidates, ranging from Senate hopefuls to candidates for state legislatures.
His political operation began preparing for the current cycle well before many of those candidates entered the race. Organizers were deployed in states including Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, where they held town halls, built local networks and reported back to Sanders’ team about political conditions on the ground.
The strategy was designed not only to win individual races but also to build a deeper bench of candidates capable of carrying the progressive movement forward.
The “Fighting Oligarchy” tour became part of that effort. Some rallies attracted tens of thousands of people, while internal figures from Sanders’ team suggested that as many as half of those attending were not Democrats. Independents accounted for roughly 30 percent and Republicans for about 10 percent.
The events also provided a platform for potential future candidates.
One example was Sam Forstag, a Montana firefighter who spoke at a Sanders rally in Missoula in April 2025 about federal job cuts under Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s government efficiency drive. He had never previously run for office. With Sanders’ backing, he later won the Democratic primary in Montana’s 1st Congressional District.
Other Sanders-backed candidates have also scored significant victories, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Melat Kiros in Colorado, alongside numerous candidates running for state and local office.
For Sanders, the results demonstrate that progressive ideas have gained substantial support among Democratic voters.
A fight over the party’s direction
Not everyone in the Democratic Party sees the primary victories as a success.
Moderate Democrats argue that Sanders-backed candidates have largely strengthened Democratic support in places that are already safely blue rather than helping the party win competitive districts currently held by Republicans.
That criticism has become one of the central battles inside the Democratic Party as it looks toward the 2028 presidential race.
Some moderates fear that the rise of democratic socialists could make it harder for Democrats to win swing voters in a general election. Others argue that the progressive movement has yet to demonstrate that it can translate primary victories into victories in Republican-held territory.
Sanders rejects that criticism and insists that progressive candidates are responding to the economic concerns of working families.
At the same time, some progressives have criticized Sanders for being too selective about the races in which he invests his political capital. His decision not to endorse Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin governor’s race became a particular point of frustration after Hong narrowly lost her primary.
Sanders says he simply cannot intervene everywhere. He also insists that his endorsements are not based on a desire to protect his own reputation from potential defeats.
“If I wanted to be 100 percent in my selections, I could do that,” he said. “But that’s not what we do.”
The succession question
The biggest unresolved issue, however, is not the 2026 midterms. It is what happens in 2028.
Sanders has ruled out another presidential campaign. That leaves the movement he built facing a transition that its founder himself is reluctant to discuss.
He rejects the idea that there should be a designated successor and argues that the movement does not belong to one individual.
When asked who could inherit his political mantle, Sanders instead pointed to a generation of progressive politicians already working in Congress and in local government.
Among those frequently mentioned as potential standard-bearers is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has not ruled out a 2028 presidential campaign. Other names include Ro Khanna and a number of Democrats who have increasingly embraced populist economic positions.
Sanders refuses to say whether he wants Ocasio-Cortez to run.
He acknowledges that they speak, but declines to discuss their private conversations.
The reluctance reflects his broader opposition to the idea of political dynasties. Former advisers say Sanders does not believe political influence can simply be passed from one person to another.
The next generation, in his view, has to earn it.
Building a political bench
Despite Sanders’ refusal to frame his work as a succession strategy, much of what his political operation has done during the current cycle amounts to precisely that.
His team has contacted hundreds of potential candidates and provided them with basic political training, from fundraising and media relations to running for state and federal office.
Many of those candidates are now winning elections.
Sanders appears particularly proud of this development. He frequently hears from politicians who tell him that his presidential campaigns in 2016 or 2020 inspired them to enter politics.
That, more than any individual election victory, may ultimately prove to be his most important political legacy.
The progressive movement has also changed the Democratic Party’s policy debate. Ideas such as Medicare for All, higher taxes on wealthy Americans and restrictions on U.S. military assistance to Israel, once associated largely with the party’s left fringe, have gained significantly wider support.
The numbers illustrate the shift. Sanders once stood almost alone in the Senate on some of these issues. Today, many of his proposals have substantial backing among congressional Democrats.
“The window has moved,” former Sanders aide Ari Rabin-Havt said.
Who will be the next Sanders?
The question now is whether Sanders’ political influence can survive without Sanders himself.
The Goldwater comparison offers one possible answer. Goldwater did not personally deliver the Republican Party’s conservative transformation. His role was to establish an ideological foundation that a later generation could build upon.
The equivalent figure on the Democratic left has yet to emerge.
Ocasio-Cortez is one possibility. Khanna is another. Others could emerge over the next two years, including politicians who have not yet positioned themselves as leaders of the progressive movement.
Even some Democrats with more traditional political backgrounds could attempt to move toward populism if the current primary results continue to demonstrate the strength of the progressive vote.
For now, Sanders is focused less on who will replace him than on making sure there are enough candidates capable of carrying his ideas forward.
The movement, he argues, is bigger than any one politician.
And after a decade spent pushing the Democratic Party to the left, Sanders believes the direction of travel is becoming increasingly clear.
“More and more people are saying, ‘You know what? Bernie was right,’” he said.
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