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7 August 2026 - 7:15pm
In interviews this week, Bernie Sanders proved that despite what his critics say, he’s far from a Left-wing purist. The cantankerous senator is fully capable of showing savvy and making strategic statements that often anger the online Left.
On CNN, Abby Phillip asked him about Hasan Piker, specifically about Piker’s old line that America “deserved” 9/11. Sanders called it a dumb statement. Then, without pausing, he said that the streamer has an audience of millions and that Democrats “have to get above cancel culture”, so that the party could be a big tent. Then, a day later, when asked on Pod Save America whether he’d endorse Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist running for governor of Wisconsin, he said: “I don’t think so”, adding that he was focusing on Senate races (despite stumping for Zohran Mamdani last year).
Much of the Left discourse on social media read this non-endorsement as a betrayal, but it’s actually triage. Wisely, Bernie is hedging, pushing back against the moderate wing of the party, but also trying to rein in the worst impulses of the DSA activist class — something he learned the hard way on his two presidential campaigns.
It’s worth remembering what his influence was built on. In the 2016 Democratic primary, Sanders won all 55 counties in West Virginia, beating Hillary Clinton there by 15 points. He took 71 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. He won Michigan outright in one of the great primary upsets of the century. These were not college towns. A great many of them voted for Donald Trump six months later — which is exactly the point. Sanders was reaching people who were genuinely persuadable in both directions.
Now look at the map. El-Sayed took Michigan by a single percentage point on the strength of what Bridge Michigan’s postmortem summarised as “big turnout, liberal towns, walkup votes“. Mamdani won New York, a city that would have elected a socialist bodega cat over Andrew Cuomo. The insurgent Left of 2026 has become extremely good at winning places that were already going to vote for a Democrat. It has not yet shown it can do what Bernie did in Mingo County, West Virginia.
There is no question that the Left’s centre of gravity has quietly relocated from the rumpled Vermonter to a group of insurgent Millennials. There’s surely some temptation for the Left’s rising class to file Sanders — who turns 85 next month — under “respected elder”, thank him in the acceptance speech, and stop returning the calls.
That would be a mistake, however. Not because he’s owed deference, but because he is the only person in the coalition with decades of electoral experience and learned the hard way what works and what doesn’t.
Which brings us back to Piker. The strangest thing about Hasan Piker is how small his reach actually is despite his ballooning reputation. Over the past 30 days, he averaged roughly 27,000 concurrent viewers, peaking around 61,000. His all-time record, 313,000, was set on election night in November 2024. Three million Twitch followers sounds enormous right up until you remember that Sanders drew 36,000 people to a park in Los Angeles on a single Saturday afternoon last spring, and 34,000 in Denver three weeks before that. Piker’s typical audience — global, largely unregistered, many of them not old enough to rent a car — would leave two-thirds of Little Caesars Arena empty. He is a successful podcaster, which hardly amounts to a constituency.
For this election cycle, the Left should see Bernie as something like its Yoda — ageing and cranky, yes, but a wise old sage worth listening to. Like Yoda, Bernie may no longer swing the lightsaber very often, but he still knows the difference between expanding a movement and merely enlarging a fandom.
