Bernie actually made a substantial change in the Democratic Party by running in 2016.
No, he didn't. At least not for the positive. Which is why he was soundly rejected and only managed to motivate around 5% of Democrats to actually vote for him.
Half the candidates are now pushing "medicare for all".
Aside from the fact that, once again and for auld lang syne, "medicare for all" is nothing new (Hillary Clinton proposed essentially the same thing first some thirty years ago), it is not "half" of the
leading candidates, which directly contradicts your operating assertion.
He moved the overton window substantially.
Horseshit. The Overton Window is in regard to a
range that arguments fall upon and that shifts with certain monumental occurrences; i.e., that were never tolerated and now suddenly are. Nothing Bernie has talked about--especially not the idea of taxpayer subsidized, government run healthcare--was never tolerated in our lifetime. That "conversation" has been openly raging for decades, ever since, once again, Hillary Clinton raised it as First Lady. At that time on the Overton scale, it went from acceptable to sensible to popular to policy under Obama, who finally managed to get it into its initial stage.
You are confusing "wokeness" of a coincidental maturing voting generation that just happened to come of age under Obama with a
fundamental shift in the national political psyche, which most definitely has not happened due to anything Sanders has regurgitated. No policy he has ever come up with is any radical departure from the standard Democratic party platform that has been in place for at least the past fifty years. The proof is not only in the fact that Sanders has been saying literally the exact same things for his entire congressional career as well, but also in the facts that Ross Perot and Ralph Nader argued for basically the same reforms as Sanders, so his positions are not even as "radical" as someone like
Ralph fucking Nader:
Nader campaigned against the pervasiveness of corporate power and spoke on the need for campaign finance reform. His campaign also addressed problems with the two party system, voter fraud, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education including college, workers' rights and increasing the minimum wage to a living wage. He also focused on the three-strikes rule, exoneration for prisoners for drug related non-violent crimes, legalization of commercial hemp and a shift in tax policies to place the burden more heavily on corporations than on the middle and lower classes. He opposed pollution credits and giveaways of publicly owned assets.
Sound familiar? That was twenty years ago and is itself just a reiteration of standard Democratic platform policies and what Nader had also been arguing since the early nineties. Every single Democratic platform since at least Kennedy has included campaign finance reform, voter fraud, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education including college, workers' rights and increasing the minimum wage to a living wage. Literally every single one.
Iow, it hasn't been that a window has opened or anything ideological fundamentally shifted; it's been that a bunch of snot-nosed teenagers grew up and said, "Hey, what's this window in the attic doing open? I never was aware we even had this window!"
And that only in a very small percentage compared to their numbers and that only because the little black devices they relentlessly stare into every second of every day got weaponized against them.
It remains to be seen is Warren can do that.
It has nothing to do with her or any candidate and everything to do with incremental changes to existing legislation, i.e., "fixing" what the Republicans fucked over in regard to "Obama care." And that's exactly what is going to happen no matter who beats Trump, because the fact that The Affordable Care Act wasn't utterly destroyed by the Republicans in the Senate--in spite of their big show of seeming to attempt to--means that they continue to support it. That's how it was allowed to exist in the first place; Republicans supported it regardless of what noise they issued out of their asses to make it seem like they did not. That's their modus operandi.
Why you still don't understand that American politics is all about manipulating Republicans into doing good in spite of themselves is a mystery since it's literally right there in your face every day that you have been alive, but at least, unfortunately, you have ample company among some on the left who use politics as their substitute for religion.