Bernie Sanders is back from the brink, surging again as a write-in candidate in his home state of Vermont.

Vermont is among the top states where write-in candidate inquiries are getting the most traction on Google. Vermont is also one of only seven states where write-in candidates are completely allowed and counted as equal to the actual candidates (along with New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Iowa).

That means Sanders threatens to peel off Vermont’s three electoral votes in the same way that Trump could pick up an electoral vote in Maine’s second district, where he is leading big league.

In September 2012, this reporter wrote of “The Northern Strategy,” a concerted effort by Northeastern conservatives to shore up electoral support on the Senate, House, and gubernatorial level in the aftermath of Scott Brown’s historic 2010 Senate victory in Massachusetts. Brown is a strong Trump supporter.

Trump’s campaign stop at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut shortly before Steve Bannon’s hiring as campaign CEO was notable for its attacks on the Monica Lewinsky scandal and for Trump’s Ross Perot-style poster props.

Breitbart News reported from Manchester, New Hampshire the night of Sanders’ New Hampshire primary win:

With 4.7 percent of the precincts reporting, Sanders had 7,548 votes (53.3 percent) to Clinton’s 6,315 (44.6 percent).

Sanders’ win was fueled by a massive turnout by independent voters and non-Democrats.

41 percent of Democrat voters were independents and only 55 percent were registered Democrats…

…The line was out the door at Sanders headquarters at Concord High School in Concord, New Hampshire prior to the announcement.

…Clinton’s loss comes just one year after she led Sanders by 56 points in the polls. Sanders is now the first Jewish candidate to win a major presidential primary.

What happened?

Clinton suffered bad optical defeats here in recent days. There was the rally where Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that women have a “special place in Hell” if they don’t support fellow woman Hillary Clinton. There was the remarkableFreudian slip by aging feminist Gloria Steinem, a Clinton supporter, who said that young women gravitate toward Bernie in order to meet “boys.”

The leftist uproar was swift and devastating. Clinton surrogate and Massachusetts state treasurer Deb Goldberg even hopped on a Clinton conference call to demand that the campaign make sure that Albright and Steinem are “kept away” in the future.

How jarring all this must be for the Clintons.

In the debates as in her awkward interview with Black Lives Matter protesters, Clinton resorts to dredging up the feminist victories of her past. She was, after all, a Vietnam-era radical, a Wellesley College campus idealist. As First Lady she went to China and gave a speech at a pro-woman summit in 1995 that featured a tent devoted to the cause of lesbianism. Doesn’t anyone remember? Her campaign is selling T-shirts about it in its online store.

Bill Clinton, as he did against Obama in 2008, stumped around New Hampshire to dwindling crowds railing against Sanders. How dare Bernie supporters attack his friend Joan Walsh, the Salon editor, another relic of his bygone decade?

“She and other people who have gone online to defend Hillary and explain — just explain — why they supported her have been subject to vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane often — not to mention sexist — to repeat,” Bill Clinton said.

The progressives didn’t buy it. Internet social justice warriors don’t respect campus legacies. They just wonder why “New Democrat” Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and didn’t do anything about mass black incarceration. An entire progressive movement happened while the Clintons were palling around with Goldman Sachs. And the new movement is hostile to anything in American culture that came before it.

The cultural Left is done with the Clintons. As evidenced by Sanders’ cameo opposite Larry David on the last Saturday Night Live, Bernie is the new Obama. Even Chelsea Clinton slipped up and referred to Bernie as “President Sanders.”

Cachet, at least in politics, can only be gained once. And even if the Clintons manage to win the delegate count against Bernie in the end, they’ve lost a commodity that can never, ever be returned.