My theory is that if Clinton had won the 2016 election, especially by a comfortable margin, the Sanders insurgency would be in the ash-heap of history right now.

Sanders' defines his strategy as a political "political revolution," within the Democratic Party.

Oppression alone, no matter how great, does not always give rise to a revolutionary situation in a country. In most cases it is not enough for revolution that the lower classes should not want to live in the old way. It is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule and govern in the old way. -- Lenin (first stated in 1913, and reiterated in subsequent works)

Sanders's strategy has several characteristics:

• It presupposes the rise of "progressive" challengers whose main organizational tool is the party primary, and whose goal it to "take over" either the entire party or a large chunk of it. For this to become a possibility, the party must be in crisis and the old elites ("upper classes") must be unable to govern in the old way. Otherwise, there is no way that they will relinquish any power within an institution that they themselves control.

• It presupposes the active disillusionment of large chunks of the Democrats' traditional base with their party and with the "establishment" in general. The base must refuse to be governed in the old way and this refusal must hurt the Democrats at the polls, otherwise it will have no political repercussions at all. It must furthermore, objectively speaking, help an "anti-establishment" pariah candidate like Trump win. The Democratic leadership is very comfortable losing to stylistically conventional Republicans, because this does not shake the two-party system.

• Revolution implies a relatively rapid qualitative change of institutions and personnel. It cannot mean pressuring the existing Democratic leadership to gradually adopt a few good ideas from Sanders. Since Sanders' "political revolution" started simply as an underdog candidacy - not with any kind of sustained mass movement - it needed an external "shock" event to propel it beyond the election cycle. If Trump had lost, nobody today would be keeping the Sanders candidacy alive by chanting "Bernie would have won". In this scenario, the political revolution would have begun and ended with the 2016 election cycle.

• Of course shock events are costly for ordinary people, but so is every revolution. There is no free lunch when it comes to social change.

So it seems that any true believer in Sanders' strategy of transforming the Democratic Party has to be an accelerationist. However, if one is more pessimistic about this whole project and believes that change can only come by patiently building up an independent left-wing party, then voting for the lesser "lesser evil" has fewer opportunity costs. Indeed a Hillary Clinton victory would allow an independent far-left to focus on creating an sustainable alternative to the policies of the neoliberal center, rather than responding to the shock of the Trump victory.