Was it really all down to Obama and the endorsement game? Is there anything we can learn from it, or is the lesson "Dems will never accept even simple reforms and should be let go"? Most importantly: how do you answer when people say "you mean the same Bernie that couldn't even win the primary?" Other than the truth which is: Dems couldn't accept someone the party was completely hostile to, had the field been level we'd have sweeped.
It really should've been his to win.
There are a lot of reasons why Bernie failed based on campaign fundementals, but I'm going to completely ignore all that because these were all concerns that should've been understood as being a threat from the beginning.
It's that people still didn't turn out to vote in the numbers he needed them too. Youth turnout was still higher during the Obama primaries than it was this time around. Latinos still vote at a lower rate than most other demographics. While he did fantastic within these groups that did vote, the majority of them still didn't vote.
Now, this wasn't really as true within the earlier states. But that was because they invested a shit ton of time into ground game in all of these places that simply didn't exist in any of the super Tuesday or later states outside of California.
Does your low turnout theory take into account the voter suppression?
Voter suppression is a real problem, but I don't think it was everything, we would've seen tighter margins if that was the deciding factor.
Additionally his success in the early states signaled to me that a lot of it was not making enough contact with their voter block in some of the later states.