Eh, not "drawing the same blood out of Biden that he drew from Hillary" seems like it's independent of what the actual consequence will be. Running a no-chance campaign just to criticize Biden gives the signal that voters should be unhappy with Biden, & that's a lot of the same element that affected Hillary. Not only that, but his fleet of Twitter followers are parroting & ingraining all of the attacks that Trump will need to really undermine Biden to the point that they might as well just be stumping for Trump at this point.
Meh. I don't really think Sanders is going out of his way to criticize Biden, much less to tank his campaign. Most of his media right now is about promoting $15 minimum wage, M4A, etc. There's a chance it backfires in getting people who decided they would support Biden before March to stay home because they think he's not far enough left, but I think that's overstated.
Of course, campaign staff buffoons like Gray and Sirota are still trying to attack Biden and others, but at this point they're discrediting Sanders much more than they are harming Biden, and nobody is paying attention to them anyway.
Sanders is mostly getting drowned out by COVID coverage. Biden's is also getting drowned out by COVID, but that's his (campaign's) fault, not Sanders.
And the army of twitter trolls would be attacking Biden no matter what. Outside of 2008 and maybe 2012 these people never were reliable D voters, and the limited audience they are reaching is probably not persuadable. Even still the "bernie bro" media narrative has done enough to make sure that most of the people who these idiots do reach are more likely to treat them with derision than them points seriously.
How is losing Wisconsin by 30 points going to push Biden left? He is doing more damage than good by staying in, there was a time for him to cash in his chips and that was a while ago. After each crushing defeat he is only going to lose more and more relevancy.
Meh, I didn't say I thought it was a particularly effective strategy. Unsurprisingly, Elizabeth Warren is apparently doing much more to effectively push Biden left than Sanders is. But, Sanders is probably (rightly) concluding that within his style of politics, staying in the campaign will have a larger effect than sitting on the sidelines, even if the effect is marginal.
I certainly wouldn't fault Sanders for wanting to promote his policy viewpoints, but his staying in the race seems to be a suicidal mission to me, at this point. His staying in until the Convention provides no benefit for the Party as a whole, or for its prospects in the general election. However, just because Sanders has decided to stay in doesn't mean that Biden has to give him the light of day. Biden will probably just ignore or downplay Sanders for the rest of the campaign.
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