It was late February, and Bernie Sanders was dates away from the most important debate of his political career.

The Vermont senator had finally clawed his path to the top of the presidential primary after winning New Hampshire and mashing the field in Nevada. His closest rival, Joe Biden, was reeling. Moderate Democrat were frightened Sanders could win the nomination, and the target on his back was bigger than ever before.

Two of Sanders’ top advisers — pollster Ben Tulchin and speechwriter David Sirota — told Sanders that he should pointedly take on Biden at the Feb. 25 debate in South Carolina, which the former vice president insured as his firewall commonwealth. They also said Sanders should use billionaire Mike Bloomberg as a foil, and onrush him over his record of supporting stop-and-frisk, in order to deflect from the onslaught he would no doubt face as the recently consecrated frontrunner.

The posts were high: In an email to senior staff, Tulchin said that moderate voters were beginning to unify behind Biden and that the amalgamation would intensify if he won South Carolina, according to people very well known the message.

But on the stage that night, Sanders didn’t make his aides’ advice. Instead, he primarily applied Biden a pass, bashed Bloomberg sometimes — but not over stop-and-frisk — and predominantly stuck to his standard talking details. It wasn’t the first nor the last time Sanders eschewed his staffers’ suggestions to be more aggressive with his top rival. Their warns proved prescient: Biden went on to sweep the day in South Carolina, integrate moderates, and then carry Super Tuesday.

“Knocking out Biden was enterprise No. 1. And even when he was down , no one disappeared for a knockout blow, ” said a top aide-de-camp. “That was the problem.”

Sanders’ unwillingness to go for Biden’s jugular is just one of the decisions campaign aides are fighting with since he departed the primary Wednesday. Despite being the best fundraiser in the Democratic arena, having near universal name ID, and contributing a massive voluntary military, Sanders played worse in many ways in 2020 than in 2016. He gravely lost among African-Americans yet again, and the rural and working-class white voters who were with him four years earlier abandoned him.

According to interrogations with more than 20 of Sanders’ aide-de-camps, surrogates and top collaborators, many believe he should have been more aggressive in taking on Biden, including over the idea that he was more electable in November. They too complaints about the campaign’s organizing strategy and its inability to win over black and major voters. Though nearly everyone in Sanders’ circle felt that the media and political foundations played critical roles in taking him down, they still fantasize the nomination was in his reach.

“Sadly, we did not get to a lieu of persuasion a great number of parties that he was the most quote-unquote the electable pick, ” Shakir told POLITICO this week. “It turned into a superficial media feeling of’ safe, electable Biden’ versus’ revolutionary Bernie Sanders.’ And I considered that dynamic kind of hurt.”

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It’s difficult to remember now, but Sanders was once seen as unstoppable.

After winning Nevada, where he won 50 percentage of Latino voters and finished exclusively 10 places behind Biden among black voters, moderate Democrats panicked that Sanders would roll into Super Tuesday with unrelenting force. And since he had shown significant backbone among voters of emblazon, they fretted he is likely to be make South Carolina.

Instead, Sanders lost there by 29 percentage points. In an epic display of political strong and coordination, moderates then hastened to consolidate behind Biden, a accomplishment covered by his adversaries Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out and endorsing him.

Some Sanders aides think he should have used the period between Nevada and South Carolina to appear presidential and increase his appeal, including to seniors. That was the idea behind a sit-down interview he did with Anderson Cooper on “6 0 Minutes.” Instead, “hes spent” much of his time doubling down on defending positive notes he made in the 1980 s about Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s education program.

Aides said that weakened his action on the single-most important issue to Democratic voters: beating President Donald Trump. Some advocated he firmly condemns the Cuban regime and get off the subject quickly. He didn’t make their advice and instead extorted out the exchange at the South Carolina debate, arguing that “Cuba, Nicaragua, authoritarianism of any stripe is bad, ” but that former President Barack Obama had also admired Cuba’s educational program.

“Should we have spend lolling in the sunbathe of our Nevada win by talking about Fidel Castro? Not what I would have done, ” said one aide. “Should “were having” expended that time to really open up and become a much bigger tent or were we focused on continuing to shore up the progressive vote? ”

Some staffers guess Sanders likewise should have done more to break through on electability, an issue that was even more important to older and African-American voters among whom he was weakest. He never handled focus radicals on the questions — or the specific issues — because of a animosity of such expedition tricks, aide-de-camps said.

A few top consultants felt that Sanders would be seen as more electable once he prevailed early states and that the matter would take care of itself, while others argued that the campaign should have more directly stimulated the case.

One option they said worked well at the doorsteps was arguing that when Democrat nominated “safe, ” establishment picks, such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, they lost — and that Biden was the most recent in a long line of mainstream nominees whose look as a sure champion was a mirage. But instead, the candidate typically used his go-to arguments on the subject — that he demolished Trump in nearly every poll, and winning in November would require unprecedented turnout and exhilaration — which failed to stick.

Jane Sanders, the senator’s wife and closest consultant, acknowledged that there was more they could have done to persuade parties that he was as electable as Biden: “The points is currently in our slope. We didn’t do it well enough. That is something we should have done better.”

Bernie Sanders had expected to spend more time in South Carolina — where African-Americans give more than half the vote in Democratic primaries — in the weeks before the primary there. But the senator had to scale those means back due to the impeachment proceedings, said beings familiar with his schedule. Some of Sanders’ advisers and allies felt that specially hurt him because he tended to do better with voters who realise him up-close.

“We’ve got to do better at house relationships with the African-American community, ” said Ro Khanna, Sanders’ campaign co-chair, of the progressive movement. “I don’t think we have done enough.”

Ja’Mal Green, a former Sanders surrogate, said that while the senator brings with it a more diverse group of aides than in 2016, and his 2020 crew included African-American advisers such as campaign co-chair Nina Turner and national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders needed additional elderly pitch-black staffers.

“The problem was in 2016 and 2020 he had some of the same top aide-de-camps that obligated information campaigns conclude some wrong decisions, ” he said. “There wasn’t enough coin put into talking to black older voters who didn’t have an opinion on Bernie or didn’t like Bernie.”

Around the same time that Biden was consolidating moderates behind him, Sanders attempted to bring the progressive wing of the party amply behind him. He talked to Warren over the phone multiple times after she dropped out after Super Tuesday, a top aide said. He asked for her acceptance, as well as for a nod from Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer, the staffer said.( Yang said Sanders “called the night I suspended, congratulated me and invited me to meet with him, ” but did not directly application an affirmation .) None threw their weight behind him.

“He was deeply disappointed that she didn’t endorse afterward, ” said a person familiar with his talks with Warren. “It shaped him question her progressivism. Now maybe that was temporary, but I think he was very hurt by that because he ought to have been endorsed her in a heartbeat if it was the other way around.”

Some Sanders staffers said the campaign’s polling made a bad statu worse. A Tulchin survey registered a close race in South Carolina in the weeks before the primary. At one point, Sanders developed so disheartened with Tulchin’s polling that he considered moving polling in-house, said an aide.

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In total, Sanders’ team reported beating on more openings and calling more voters than any other candidate in the race — and hitherto he still lost to Biden, who didn’t even campaign in some states where he coasted to victory.

That lopsidedness has led to soul-searching among progressives about the value of field organizing. But some Sanders aides is our opinion that the impressive voter contact crowds information campaigns exhausted obscured depth disagreements over organizing.

Some senior staffers were skeptical about the organizing team’s experiments. Iowa aide-de-camps said they predominantly stopped use the “Bern” app, an organizing implement procreated in-house, for some time because it wasn’t fully developed and absence district twinned datum. Staff also deplored that some canvassing scripts in the days before primaries were focused on persuasion for undecided voters, instead of solely getting out the vote.

At a meeting with top aides a few months before the Iowa caucuses, elderly adviser Chuck Rocha raised concerns about the fact that they lacked precinct commands for hundreds of caucus sites in the territory. Some staffers felt that was partly due to the fact that they required officers to go through in-depth training. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, while the vast majority of caucus sites were covered, the campaign had no precinct captains in some rural areas, said several aides.

“We had a lot of last-minute work in shipping out-of-state voluntaries to act as precinct skippers in rural areas, ” said an Iowa Sanders staffer.

Buttigieg’s ultimate victory in rural parts of the state facilitated him run up the delegate composition and earn Iowa. Claire Sandberg, Sanders’ national organizing lead, felt that campaign leadership should have hired more field personnel earlier in 2019 across countries, including Iowa, according to a person familiar with her think. Others was indicated that Sanders should have visited more rural areas there. A scheduled expedition swing in rural Iowa was scrapped because of impeachment.

Conflict between major aides and the organizing enterprise culminated in February when Sandberg was layered by Misty Rebik, the onetime Iowa state director who was named the team’s national conductor of organizing and field.

Even commentators of the organizing platform concede that the best-run field operation can only move a few extents in a close scoot. But Sanders lost to Biden by double-digits in at least a dozen states.

Many in the campaign partly condemned cable TV for that, with the media-tracking service Critical Mention estimating that Biden enjoyed roughly $72 million in almost completely positive deserved media in the working day between South Carolina and Super Tuesday. But some of Sanders’ aides and allies also think they could have done a better occupation handling the press.

They think the campaign should have had more substitutes on MSNBC and other cable news directs. Staffers were also told at times not to slope opponent research on contenders — a standard job for the communications shop on most expeditions — due to the fact that Sanders shunned negative campaigning. And Sanders sometimes rebuffed the press: Harmonizing to an MSNBC spokesperson, the network had a longstanding invitation for Sanders to participate in a town hall, but he declined.

Some of Sanders’ allies felt he should have brought on longtime professionals who knew and could better deal with the mainstream media.

“He needed to hire somebody who could talk to the corporate media and could call in favors, ” said a surrogate.

Sanders’ team zeroed in on the liberal system MSNBC early on in the campaign as a particular problem. Even more than CNN or Fox News, his aides felt that its pundits is tremendously negative and unfair toward Sanders. During the summer, Sanders and his top brass sat down with network president Phil Griffin in what MSNBC described as an off-the-record editorial board meeting.

“I thought we strolled out of there without a good common understanding, ” said Shakir. “My big point to them was this is Bernie Sanders, the human person. This is not the incensed, wailing, finger-up-in-the-air Bernie Sanders as you guys often show. Now he is, the human being. Talk to him.”

But any confidence was short-lived. “It precisely didn’t feel like it ever essentially deepened, ” said Shakir. “We tried such an approach. Didn’t change.”

Mike Casca, an experienced operative who had worked for Bill de Blasio and Sanders in 2016, was brought onboard in September as the telecommunications administrator to improve the operation, and he became a respected representation among the press corps that handled Sanders.

In August, Sanders’ campaign likewise talked with his former TV ad firm, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh, about returning. In addition to being behind the notorious 2016 place “America, ” the business had sufficed as a link between the Sanders movement and more mainstream Democrats and the press. But an aide said Sanders balked at what he saw as too steep a price, leading him to believe that the conglomerate was more concerned with money than the cause.

“It was Bernie’s campaign that reached back out to us, ” said Mark Longabaugh, development partners at the business. “We situated a fairly standard contract on the table. It was not out of fixes in any way. It was in fact a smaller commission than we are genuinely received during ’1 6. ”

Despite the campaign’s attempts to deal with MSNBC, the network’s emcees and pundits blared Sanders the working day he won the Nevada caucuses — the type of campaign development that might have resulted in other campaigners triumphing a slay of positive media. Chris Matthews likened Sanders’ victory in the caucuses to the Nazi invasion of France. James Carville said a Sanders nomination would be political suicide, and that Russia President Vladimir Putin was “the happiest person right now” about the news.

“The media between Nevada and Super Tuesday was more negative than anybody could have ever forecasted, ” said Jane Sanders. “That’s something I hope the media would look at.”

Shakir, Sanders’ campaign overseer, contacted Griffin after the demo and required an defense for Matthews’ observes, which Sanders was deeply offended by as a Jewish man whose family members died in the Holocaust. Matthews declared on aura it was a mistake and later parted spaces with MSNBC on the eve of Super Tuesday.

But by then, the damage had been done.

Read more: politico.com