LOS ANGELES — Bernie Sanders drew a rapturous crowd in his return to California on Saturday. But for the progressive movement he inspired, the biggest state that Sanders won in 2020 today looks more like the wilderness than the promised land.
Efforts by progressives in California to enact single-payer healthcare and other sweeping policy priorities have fizzled. Prominent Democrats, from Gov. Gavin Newsom to an ambitious crop of big city mayors, have tacked to the center, and on Tuesday in Oakland, the progressive icon Barbara Lee is confronting an unexpectedly tight election for mayor against a more moderate Democrat.
“Bernie’s victory in California was huge,” said Mike Bonin, a progressive former Los Angeles city council member and incoming director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University Los Angeles. “But it hasn’t had a permanent impact on California politics.”
The sprawling crowd in Los Angeles on Saturday — Sanders put the number at 36,000, which he boasted was the largest he has ever drawn — delivered a potent display of the Vermont senator’s enduring popularity. But as he arrived here this weekend, to the site of arguably his biggest political triumph five years ago, it also laid bare the movement’s limitations.
In the nation’s blue bastion of California, the influence of progressivism during the Trump era has waned. Progressive priorities are being challenged not just by conservatives, but centrists who cast the left as contributing to problems around homelessness and crime. And Democrats in California now find themselves merely trying to hold onto gains they have made amid major threats to federal funding from President Donald Trump, an escalation of deportations and aggressive rhetoric on crime.
Scanning the throngs of supporters who packed Los Angeles’ Grand Park and spilled onto the steps of City Hall for the latest stop on Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Neel Sannappa, a senior organizer with the Working Families Party, urged Sanders to help to translate the outpouring of support into a more durable progressive movement in the state.
“Come to the Democratic Party convention, be our guests at the progressive caucus and really stir some stuff up,” said Sannappa, who is running to chair the party’s progressive caucus. “Because we need to be doing something different. It’s very obvious that we haven’t done enough, we haven’t built enough, we haven’t reached out to communities.”
In Sanders’ rise from irascible Democratic socialist and party outsider to progressive standard bearer, winning the 2020 California Democratic presidential primary was a capstone achievement — both for the independent senator and his movement.
“It showed the party and the world that his message and his appeal, with a populist economic progressive message, can win a large, diverse state and can draw a broad, diverse coalition,” said Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster who worked on Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 bids. “It was hugely important.”
Sanders’ rise jolted California’s political establishment. It saw an influx of new party activism from the left, with progressives sweeping low-level party elections that were typically insider affairs. In an echo of Sanders’ call for Medicare for All, single-payer healthcare dominated the 2018 governor’s race, where then-candidate Newsom seized the progressive mantle as the left’s healthcare champion.
But multiple bills to establish a statewide single-payer system fell flat, and Newsom quickly pivoted from his campaign pledge once in office. Statewide rent control, another signature issue pushed by Sanders’ allies, sputtered as voters rejected multiple ballot measures to enact more renter-friendly policies. And progressives came up short in elections to oust many entrenched Democrats — or to punish politicians like Newsom for their moderation. Progressives failed twice to elect one of their own to the top post in the state Democratic Party. They threatened primary challenges to Democrats who blocked single-payer bills, but lost. And in the process, they alienated many voters in the state, who installed a more moderate mayor in San Francisco last year and ousted progressive district attorneys in Oakland and Los Angeles.
“California is much more a machine state than people realize. Bernie Sanders broke through on a presidential level with his vision and conviction,” said Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, a former co-chair of Sanders campaign who is seen as one of the few national potential heirs to the Vermont senator’s movement. “That has not translated yet on a local or state level. It’s going to take more people winning at the congressional level, at the state Assembly level, at the governor level.”
That’s proved enormously hard for progressive Democrats in California, however.
“The formula we haven’t figured out in California is that while our values are progressive, we have a lot of big money here,” said Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, who chairs the progressive caucus in the state Democratic Party and who faulted the influence of deep-pocketed interest groups.
Iqbal-Zubair, who ran twice against an incumbent Democrat for a Los Angeles-area Assembly seat and lost resoundingly, said the biggest challenge for upstarts like herself is ousting candidates who have commanding fundraising advantages. This year, with the incumbent termed out, she’s running for an open seat but still sees it as an uphill battle.
“I’m running as a progressive in a district with a lot of industry, oil, and police interests,” she said.
There have been exceptions to progressives’ backsliding, particularly in some local elections; in Los Angeles, a left-leaning bloc of city councilmembers, two of whom appeared on-stage with Sanders on Saturday, have grown their influence by knocking off a succession of incumbents.
Rallying the crowd, Sanders joined in broadsides against Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk, a favorite target of the left. But many of his remarks about wealth inequality and the influence of special interests could’ve been delivered at any point of his decades-long career: a consistency that has given Sanders a singular credibility among progressives.
In an interview with POLITICO after his rally, Sanders insisted that the progressive movement was durable beyond his own brand — “I am not a modest person, but it’s not me. It is millions of people who are angry” — and attributed the movement’s disappointments in California and elsewhere to the powerful forces arrayed against it.
“Look, the opposition to Medicare for All, to lowering the cost of prescription drugs is enormous. What can I say? These oligarchs have enormous power,” he said. “Our job is to grow a movement to make them an offer they can’t refuse. We’re going to win.”
Still, Jane Kim, who leads the left-leaning Working Families Party in California and ran Sanders’ California campaign in 2020, conceded that the “million dollar question” for progressives is how to scale up their victories “beyond the rock stars” such as Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez. And in California, that effort would appear to require rehabilitating a sagging brand.
Lorena Gonzalez, who leads the California Labor Federation, said progressives “absolutely” squandered the momentum from the early years of Sanders’ rise.
“We had a supermajority. There was so much we could’ve done and so often, it felt like I was fighting over my own colleagues over trying to move forward an economically-progressive agenda,” said Gonzalez, who was in the Assembly at the height of Sanders-inspired activism.
Even in the liberal beacon of San Francisco, said Sal Rosselli, the Bay Area-based founder of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, the label “progressive” has gotten a bad rap, as a more centrist, business-friendly faction of the Democratic party has taken over the city’s political establishment.
“They took over the Democratic party with huge dollars and made the word ‘progressive’ a huge negative, pinning it to allowing crime,” Rosselli lamented.
Public safety and crime — which had never been a central tenet in Sanders’ economy-focused platform — has emerged as a major vulnerability for progressives in the state. The Covid-era crime spike led to the ouster of progressive prosecutors in blue hubs such as San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles, and a statewide ballot measure to increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes passed overwhelmingly last year, providing one of the starkest examples of California’s rightward shift in 2024.
Progressives could flex some muscle in next year’s gubernatorial elections. But so far, no one in the crowded field of Democratic contenders is assertively carrying the banner for Sanders’ movement.
Katie Porter, the former Orange County representative, is perhaps the most Sanders-adjacent, with her close alliance with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her consistent message rejecting corporate influence in politics. But in her campaign launch video, Porter also pitched herself as a pragmatic consensus builder who supports “working with businesses and protecting workers” — starkly different from Sanders’ more adversarial tone.
Kim, of the Working Families Party, predicted that most Democrats in the race will tack eventually to the left, copying the winning formula that elevated Newsom into office. But, she cautioned, “what they’ll do when they’re in office is very different from what they will campaign on, and that is the challenge.”
“It’s not like we’re gonna suddenly see the next Bernie Sanders of the governor’s race of 2026 in California,” she said. “I think that will take time.”
