John Edwards. Jimmy Carter to some extent.
But the absence of a test case for economic populism is information, don't you think? I mean, look, I want to win. I want to get rid of the fascists. I would vote for Bernie over any Republican. There's not a single Democrat I wouldn't vote for over their Republican peers as the parties stand now.
And Democrats also want to win campaigns. Badly. That Democrats almost never run these campaigns tells you something, doesn't it? The people who know the most, deem the strategy a waste of time. They can be wrong. The old GOP was wrong about Trumpism. But this pattern goes back a long ways. Before the Dems were courting corporate money (they started courting the corporate money because they got crushed in 1984 and 88).
You're right that it hasn't exactly been tested. But our transformative leaders have never been populist. Obama could have been, but he chose a different course and it worked.
Bill Clinton often takes a lot of shit for interrupting his campaign to oversee the execution of that black man. But he won. He won with the so-called Bubba vote. He understood the importance of race. Liberals never forgave him for it, but it was true. Jesse Jackson was an electoral disaster for the Democrats. He needed to show America that he was different, that he was one of their white folks and not one of Jesse's white folks.