But there's another version in which he's just living in a two-dimensional political space trapped with a voting floor and ceiling that are a single line. And the path between the second world and the first may be hard to traverse.
There were stark warning signs for him in each of the first two states on the primary calendar, even though he won the popular vote in both of them. The most telling trouble spot for Sanders is that he barely topped 25 percent Tuesday in New Hampshire, a state he won with more than 60 percent of the vote in 2016. With Sanders underperforming his poll numbers, it took a sudden surge from Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who bled votes from former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, to preserve Sanders' victory.
That's winning ugly.
It's not clear that he can afford to muddle along with roughly a quarter of the vote about what he got in Iowa, too if the field of Democrats narrows much, because that would leave him in the position of trying to muscle his way to the nomination without a majority or a large plurality of delegates.
That reality leaves Sanders with two basic paths: vastly expand the share of Democrats who prefer him whether candidates drop out or not or rely on the field of competitors to remain so large and so evenly matched that he can emerge as the clear light heavyweight in a class of middleweights. Neither option is easy, and neither is fully in his control.
The unique challenge for him is that he has shown little ability to attract support from other corners of the party. Voters who back faltering candidates appear to be shifting significantly between contenders but not shifting to Sanders.
Konst's construct is telling because it favors a two-candidate race and because it envisions Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, as those candidates.
There are reasons to think Bloomberg will be competitive, but he has hardly dispatched with the rest of the field at this point. He hasn't appeared in a debate or on a ballot yet, and he is polling third in national surveys. But Sanders' best shot at winning the nomination may now rest on the billionaire businessman-turned-politician wiping out the rest of the candidates between himself and Sanders on the ideological spectrum.