"All of this is hypothetical, of course, because the 79-year-old Biden insists he is running again. If he does, no Democrat can defeat him. And if Biden bows out, the front-runner for the nomination will be Kamala Harris. Harris cannot clear the field like Biden can, but she will carry a decisive edge as the sitting vice-president. The trouble for liberals is that Harris is at least as unpopular as Biden, and her prior campaign for the presidency was a disaster. Against Donald Trump or Florida governor Ron DeSantis, neither Biden nor Harris inspire a great deal of confidence. But all of this has obscured, for the most part, another dispiriting reality for the many progressives and leftists who have grown used to having one of their own run competitive races for the presidency: There is no obvious heir to Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator, now 80, will almost certainly not run for president a third time. Sanders is an unabashedly left-wing democratic socialist who won major states in both of his presidential bids. If 2020 was a step back for Sanders — he won far fewer votes against Biden than he did against the polarizing Hillary Clinton four years earlier — he still broke through on major terrain, beating the field in enormous states like California and growing his support with working-class Latinos. He was wildly popular with voters under 30. Outside of perhaps Jesse Jackson or George McGovern, there was never a presidential candidate like Sanders in modern American history: someone who contested a Democratic primary from the far left, against the full brunt of the political Establishment, and finished runner-up each time."