For months, Sanders has talked about “taking on the Democratic establishment.” He ran on that message in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then, after becoming the front-runner, he went around the country boasting that his critics were right to fear him. At a rally in California on Feb. 17, he gloated that his enemies were “trembling” and “crying on television.” On Feb. 21, the day before he won the Nevada caucuses, he tweeted, “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”

Running against the establishment is standard populism. But to win with that message, you have to define the enemy narrowly. The more people you denounce as part of the establishment, the more you scare politicians and voters. If you’re proposing single-payer health insurance, for example, the smart move is to stipulate that you’re just targeting insurance companies. Instead, Sanders has threatened the whole medical sector. “We will take on the health care industry,” he vowed at a rally last week. On Monday, he repeated that line to a crowd in St. Louis. On CNN, he blasted the industry for supporting Biden: “The health care industry that is taking out their checkbooks? That is the establishment. We are taking them on.”

Sanders also attacks the press. Voters don’t care about the press, but they get antsy when a candidate sounds paranoid. Instead of playing to reporters’ liberal sympathies, Sanders depicts them as puppets of “the corporate media.” He accuses them of “freaking out” over his success and hurling “venom” at his campaign. Last week, when MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pressed Sanders about his failure to turn out new voters, he insisted he was doing well, given that he was “taking on the corporate media.”

Sanders’ first defeat, on Feb. 29 in South Carolina, was a warning that he needed to assuage fears about his candidacy. Instead, he celebrated those fears as proof of his success. On March 1, he proudly told a crowd in San Jose, California, that the turnout at his rallies was alarming the establishment. The next day, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he repeated that message. When Sanders was informed that fellow candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar were dropping out and endorsing Biden, he said it was no surprise, since the corporate elite was out to get him. And when Maddow asked Sanders whether he was specifically running against “the Democratic Party establishment”—not just a generic “political establishment”—he replied: “Democratic establishment. Yes.”