By the time the fix was in there was nothing that could be done. Spiking the election by running as an independent would have kneecapped the growing leftist sentiment we've seen since. Not every situation has a winning move.
Indulge me in a silly fantasy but what if he comes out the day after Iowa and announces he is running as a candidate for a new labor party, along with a call for funds and a membership drive backed by his massive infrastructure? Or runs as DSA?
It doesn't matter anyway, it's all water under the bridge, it's pointless to waste time on hypotheticals
Bernie definitely still loses, gets called out as splitting the vote etc, and there's a good chance Trump wins because the election was so narrow which would just be giving the libs more left-bashing ammunition (does this matter materially? No, but they'd be more annoying).
I think you're right about the results but a labor party with national recognition I think would just collapse the democrats, who have no constituency, this would be the interesting part of the question in my view. Oh well, we are in hell world anyway lol
Dems do have a constituency (boomers who own their home and are pretty racist but not extremely racist), but more importantly they have legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Largely due to propaganda, but counteracting that propaganda machine is difficult, if not impossible. Bernie brought in a decent amount of money from normal people, but you have to consider that between them, the DNC and GOP control all of the mainstream media in the country, and have enough capital to do a decent job at controlling social media as well. Remember the coverage of Bernie during the primaries, and consider that it would just get even more malicious if he was running as a third party.
It's way too late. Even pitted against the absurdity of the parties dismantling their entire campaign infrastructure and rebuilding it every four years, it still takes more than four months to set things up.
Or what if he makes phone calls to all the people Obama called, saying "if you all rally behind Joe Biden, I will mount a 3rd-party run"?
Libs would cry about it but they wouldn't do anything. There's a chance the candidates would be successfully goaded into maintaining/resuming their campaigns.