The real reason Bernie Sanders failed

He had a lot of popular ideas, but no real plan of action for bringing them to fruition

Bernie Sanders speaks in California
(Image credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Bernie Sanders is vowing to carry on his fight for the Democratic presidential nomination all the way to the Democratic National Convention in July. He may just do that, too, but he won't win. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton secured enough pledged delegates to win the nomination even without the help of superdelegates.

Nobody can really be surprised that Clinton clinched the nomination by this point. Certainly Sanders' top aides weren't. Postmortems were already being written before Tuesday about the Sanders campaign, and how Bernie could have beat Hillary if only he had attacked her on her "damn emails" (The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza), or hadn't spent "months painting Democrats as corrupt corporate sellouts" (Amanda Marcotte at Salon), or learned to connect with black and Latino voters earlier (John Wagner, Philip Rucker, and Robert Costa at The Post). Surely more diagnoses will come in as soon as Sanders bows out.

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.