Warren could then step in as his progressive heir and possibly ignite a contentious battle for leadership. Or it could be 1972 all over again when the crushing defeat of progressive George McGovern set the stage for some of the very Third Way centrist Democratic Party reforms that Sanders and Company rail against now.
It's a point worth raising and discussing, but ultimately it just won't happen like McGovern. The country is different, and in ways that couldn't make us more different than 1970. Then, Gen X (which is one of the most conservative generations in their youth ever, even more pro-conservative than the Silent Generation was when they were young) combined with the then very conservative Silent Generation, and the aging Boomers had began to settle down and were naturally slightly more conservative. That meant (very unfortunately) that there just wasn't going to be sizeable demographic to support the New Deal established order politics. And so it's not surprising that Neoliberalism then became the established-order political philosophy.
In 2016, we have the literal opposite phenomena, and actually even stronger. The Silent Generation is now dying off, Boomers are contain a larger and more vocally left-wing (or at least sympathetic to left-wing politics), Gen X'ers have started to become a little skeptical of Reaganomics, and Millennials are off the charts Left-wing. Further more, we have some polling on the "iPad generation"/Generation Z, and they are just as off the charts Left-wing because they're looking at the exact same economic prospects as Millennials. So far, the political views are a carbon copy of Millennials. By the next presidency,
these 18 years olds will only have memories of living in an economic recession.
The traditional conservative Republican party, Neoliberalism/Reaganomics, the Middle-Way Democratic party,
et al, are all dead. They just don't know it yet.
On the other hand, if he makes good on his oft stated pledge to do everything possible to help the Democratic nominee beat Donald Trump, and Hillary still loses, then Sanders returns to the Senate with a lot of party goodwill and a working coalition of establishment progressive party leaders and, most likely, a boatload of party rule reforms that Hillary will most certainly approve of to get his enthusiastic convention endorsement and/or VP nomination.
Well, there's an obstruction to this happening, and their name is Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is slightly to the left of Bill, but she's a die-hard neoliberal, a die-hard interventionist, and while she's committed to specific progressive capital investments (for instance, HBC's) and a few social justice issues (e.g. equal pay for women), she definitely is
ideologically opposed to virtually all of Sanders' policies. I don't believe that Hillary is just corrupt (There's definite cases where she has been, mind you, like her bankruptcy bill vote), but on the whole I think she and Bill get the Wall Street money because they're True Believers in neoliberalism, etc. So there's basically no chance whatsoever that Hillary will compromise with Sanders, particularly because she's surrounded herself with yes-men and yes-women who have collectively seem to believe that Hillary is "owed" the presidential nomination, and view Sanders as being an illegitimate candidate and a literal "usurper." I don't think they used that language merely to be provocative, I think they genuinely view Hillary as the "heir" to Obama and think Sanders is an "illegitimate bastard" in the formal sense of the term, and so she will not make any concessions with Sanders.
If there's any doubt of this, it's noteworthy that her speech language has changed wildly over the months, but her policies haven't changed one iota since August of 2015. A little bit Sanders but largely Warren (because there was serious DNC support for a Warren bid) made Hillary change two policies; the first is that she's now said she's against TPP and she's said that she's against KeystoneXL. Her policies have not changed one iota since August of 2015, which matches basically everything else she's said since 2013 (her change on gay marriage) and before. She's had months to "evolve" on a few key policies that would have probably shut down Sanders campaign months ago --but she just won't do it. That's been the most noteworthy thing of the 2016 Democratic primary. If she didn't do it then, I see no compelling reason why she's going to do it now. Not unless the DNC (which a few key large players are starting to) tells her to wrap it up and make peace with Sanders or else they will throw Bidden in because the fact that she's trailing Trump is worrying the **** out of them.
