On the animated TV show Rick and Morty, mad scientist Rick Sanchez has a device that he hooks up to his family’s TV set to allow them to watch cable channels from alternate dimensions. If this sort of device really existed, it would be fascinating to see how news channels covered the election in timelines where Bernie Sanders was the Democratic nominee. I’d like to think that in most such timelines, Bernie would have won decisively on Tuesday night.

Instead of any of those, though, let’s imagine one where the election had been such a nail-biter that the networks hadn’t been able to call the presidential race for Bernie until Saturday — and that even during an economic recession and a brutally mismanaged recession on their watch, the Republicans had actually managed to pick up seats in Congress. How would centrists on that dimension’s cable news networks have talked about the result?

We don’t need to strain very hard to imagine how that would have sounded, because we’ve been hearing it anyway. The nominee wasn’t Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren but Joe Biden, a candidate so implacably opposed to the Sanders agenda that even during the initial panic of the coronavirus crisis, he infamously suggested to an interviewer that if he were elected president and Medicare for All somehow made it onto his desk, he would veto it. As late as September, he was crowing, “I beat the socialist.”