It’s a risky move, not least because he has some convincing to do — among his 2020 Democratic field and the whole country. “Should the Democratic Party embrace socialism?” is at the heart of its debate about what kind of candidate can beat President Trump.

Let’s start with the whole country. Less than half of Americans say they’d vote for a socialist for president. More say they’d vote for an atheist or Muslim, according to a Gallup survey in May. That’s the same as 2015 when Sanders first launched his presidency, despite his efforts during that campaign to warm Americans up to socialism. A Monmouth University survey in April finds 57 percent of Americans think socialism is not compatible with American values.....

“If we’re not careful, we’re going to end up reelecting the worst president in American history,” said former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper. (He got booed by a gathering of Democrats in San Francisco for saying that.) It’s also notable that the most vocal proponents of dropping socialism from the campaign trail are at the bottom of the polls right now....

Republicans are downright giddy about all this. What’s a scarier term to the American public than “socialist”? And with one of the leaders in the Democratic Party embracing it, their pitch to voters that Democrats want to radically change the country to something unrecognizable just got a lot easier.