But for all his influence, Sanders still faces huge obstacles in his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Key among them is a history of resistance in 2016 from core groups in the party, including African Americans and voters who identify as partisan Democrats.

Sanders this week quickly demonstrated his greatest asset as a candidate: a passionate grassroots following that includes a massive base of small-dollar online donors. On Wednesday he reported that, in the first 24 hours after his announcement, he raised nearly $6 million online, far more than any of his rivals did after entering the race. He’s in a stronger position than in 2016, too, in the internal party debate. As Sanders noted in his announcement-day interview with CBS, more of the Democratic Party’s leaders, including several of his 2020 competitors, have moved toward positions he took in the last presidential campaign, supporting a single-payer health-care system and free four-year public college. “All of those ideas and many more are now part of the political mainstream,” Sanders crowed during the interview.

It’s unquestionable that more Democrats are supporting those ideas than when Sanders aired them in 2016. But all the policies remain contested: Klobuchar, for one, has already rejected both single-payer and free tuition. Other potential candidates targeting more moderate voters, such as Biden and several former governors eyeing the race, would be almost certain to follow. (It’s also worth noting that the Democratic-controlled House is unlikely to pass legislation on either matter.) Even some of the candidates who have echoed Sanders’s overall goals are likely to challenge some of his specific proposals as unaffordable or excessive, as Booker has done by rejecting Sanders’s call to virtually eliminate private health insurance.

In other words, Sanders hasn’t won the war of ideas in the party nearly as much as he’s suggested. In fact, he’s virtually certain to face tougher scrutiny over his agenda than he did in 2016, when Clinton made the misguided strategic choice not to criticize his proposals as undesirable or unaffordable, but only as unlikely to pass Congress. Sanders probably won’t receive such deference again.

Sanders was also extremely strong with primary voters who identified as independents rather than partisan Democrats. He carried them in 24 of the 27 states with exit polls (losing them only in three southern states), and won nearly two-thirds of them overall in Agiesta’s cumulative analysis. He also ran very well among white men without a college degree—carrying slightly more than three-fifths of them overall—while posting a more modest advantage among their college-educated counterparts.

But Sanders faced persistent resistance from other groups central to the Democratic coalition. African Americans led that list: Clinton carried black voters in all 22 states where they had a high enough population to measure in the exit polls. In all, the cumulative analysis found that Clinton won more than three-fourths of both black women and black men. Sanders did narrowly beat Clinton among black voters younger than age 30, but was obliterated by older African Americans. And while he performed somewhat more competitively among black voters outside the South, Sanders did not win even a third of them in any state, according to the exit polls.

Sanders, who has never formally identified with the Democratic Party, also consistently struggled among primary voters who consider themselves partisan Democrats, which is something of a hurdle for someone trying to win the Democratic nomination. Clinton won self-identified Democrats in every state with an exit poll except Vermont and New Hampshire, Sanders’s backyard, and Wisconsin, where they tied. In the cumulative result, she beat him among Democrats by nearly 2 to 1. Sanders’s weakness with Democrats partly reflected his troubles with African Americans, but Clinton posted a solid lead among white Democrats as well.

In 2016, Sanders also faced big deficits among voters older than age 45 and moderates, and more narrow disadvantages among several other groups: voters who described themselves as somewhat liberal (as opposed to “very”), college-educated white women, and white women without a college degree. And while Sanders ran better with Hispanics than he did with African Americans, Clinton still carried just over three-fifths of them.

One Sanders adviser, who asked not to be identified while discussing internal strategy, acknowledged that the groups drawn to the senator tend to be smaller. But the adviser said …

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