But when hiring for a job, you don’t only have two choices you have an entire pool of candidates which you can vett.
This is like your recruiter telling you that they narrowed down all the candidates for you, you have no say in that process and you can pick between the two worst candidates.
You are ignoring the fact that political parties and donors pick our leaders, primaries are just a formality. There is documented evidence that the DNC actively worked against Bernie in both 2016 and 2020. So what is popular actually doesn’t matter.