As pressure mounts for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to abandon his presidential bid, a narrative seems to have taken hold among his supporters and on cable TV, and it goes like this: Sanders may have all but lost the nomination fight, but he won the larger ideological argument, and he’s fundamentally changed the Democratic Party. His movement must be reckoned with.

To which I can only say: If this is what it looks like to win the argument, I struggle to imagine what it would look like to lose. In any way that counts, Sanders’s vision for the party has been soundly and consistently rejected....

This idea that Sanders has somehow won, even while we all thought he was losing, seems to rest on two assertions: one, that exit polls tell us the voters actually agree with his proposal for nationalized health care; and two, that he changed the conversation to the point where all the candidates were forced to adopt his agenda.

Neither withstands much scrutiny.

Let’s be real. Exit polls are all fine and good, but votes are votes. If Democrats really sided that strongly with Sanders on the issue they routinely say is the most important in the campaign, he’d be winning.

A raft of other polls on health care will tell you that it all depends on how you ask the question. According to one conducted last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation, most people who say they support Medicare-for-all also think they’d be able to keep their own insurance. (Under Sanders’s plan, they wouldn’t.)

And if you ask them to choose between building on the foundation President Barack Obama laid or a Sanders-style overhaul, a strong majority chooses the more moderate approach.....

And in his second run for the nomination, Sanders has performed not better but worse, failing to turn out the huge numbers of younger voters he predicted. In fact, you could say Sanders’s trajectory is the exact opposite of Reagan’s; while much of the media (me included) assumed he and Warren spoke for an ascendant wing of the party during the Trump years, it turns out the uprising was more limited than we thought.

Sure, Biden should say all the right things to unite his party. Sure, he’ll be willing to give some things away in the party platform, which has about as much influence on governing as I do on the Yankees’ lineup.

But hard as this may be for some millennials to accept, there’s only one winner here. Sanders doesn’t get a participation trophy.
The only thing he’s owed is a chance to exit with grace.