Bernie's organization, in the name of his movement, will then immediately have to turn to destroying the Democratic Party as we know it and replacing it with something else. Bernie would have to undertake a thoroughgoing creative destruction of the party, including purging all of the personnel like those identified by Gostzola, around which the party organization and financial base is built, and replacing them with dedicated progressives and an entirely different financial structure. The fight, and Bernie, will go on.
It will be a hell of a fight, it has to happen, and it has to start right away, for two reasons: A) Because, left intact, the current Democratic Party personnel and organization will work assiduously to undermine Bernie's presidential campaign, and B) Because it's the same kind of fight that will have to happen in the structures of government if Bernie Sanders becomes president, and if he's not willing or capable of doing it in the party, he won't be in the government.
I love to see that fight happen because it would again open up new political possibilities. It is also the fight that Bernie Sanders has been unwilling to undertake over the past decades and through two presidential campaigns. If he refuses to make it again, his "not me, us" movement will be defeated and/or co-opted by the plutocratic, imperialist Democratic Party. The revolutionary Bernie will disappear into the reactionary party and both will become irrelevant and despised and politically dead to the millions of people who were energized by the movement.
Given all the variables, I rate the chances of Bernie winning a majority of pledged delegates and the nomination on the first ballot at 10-15%-which is 10-15% higher than I would have said a month ago.
The more likely scenario is Bernie (and everyone else) coming to the convention with less than a majority of delegates. In that case, the chance of Bernie would win the nomination is exactly zero.
Though we assume in that case that no one will win on the first round of voting, we should not exclude the possibility of the wily DNC arranging deals to combine other candidates votes behind the DNC's favorite on the first ballot (Yes, they can do that!), in order precisely to be able to say that the nominee won a majority of votes on the first round without the intervention of super delegates.
At any rate, that's what the DNC will do in a second round of voting, with the superdelegates included. All the other candidates (save Tulsi and maybe Yang) will instruct all their delegates to vote for Biden, Bloomberg, or whoever is the DNC candidate. (That, of course, includes Elizabeth Warren, who never was going to endorse Bernie.) "After all," they will say, "What's wrong with not nominating someone who did not get the majority of votes/delegates?"
The political optics of that will depend on who has the plurality of delegates and how large that plurality is.
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