I feel like progressives should be talking more about what the Democrats' strategy is for a) keeping control of the House & winning the Senate & b) who the next generation of their leaders will be post-Pelosi and Schumer. Presidents are important, but they don't pass legislation.
Accomplishing the sorts of long-term structural change that progressives desire will be the work of a generation, not one administration (assuming the current rules and structure of the US gov't remain the same).
Building the sort of broad and deep coalition capable of making such change will be hard work. Look how baggy and oftentimes divided Reagan's coalition was...but they made it work for long enough to dramatically shift the course of American politics.
It required Scalia and Gingrich, Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, Bob Dole and Sarah Palin. A progressive resurgence will require equivalents of all of these, and more.
The future of progressive politics in America does not ride on who the nominee is in 2020. That will certainly have an impact on the trajectory of American politics, but it's only one piece of a much larger and longer-term puzzle.
In 1976 when Reagan decided not to challenge Ford for the nomination some conservatives thought "oh well, there goes our chance to really transform American politics." They were wrong...because the forces in motion were far bigger than just one Presidential candidate.
The most important thing that the most effective conservative activists of the 1970s understood was that their movement needed to transform the Republican Party if it wanted to transform American politics.
It's exceedingly hard to make meaningful change in a diverse democracy with a political system intentionally designed to thwart rapid change. When you take the long view, the stakes of one presidential nomination process come to look far less astronomical and dire.
So there's my subtweet of the subtweets of the NYTimes' endorsement. If you care about beating Trump, any of the major candidates can do that if people get behind them. And if you care about progressive politics, that fight won't be won in 2020 regardless of who the nominee is.
The old man will now sit down. Apologies for the rant.
