The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein, a thoughtful serious analyst, has a must-read piece called “Bernie Sanders’s Successful Insurgency” and amid all the partisan and ideological noise of the campaign, he notes that Sanders’ impact on the Democratic Party will be huge for years to come. Yes, clearly, unmistakably, there is a generational shift. It’s not just about years, but also about outlook; it’s about how each generation grows up in a different culture and polity than the previous one. It’s about the t every human being undergoes in growing up. Even if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, Brownstein notes, he seems a clear harbinger of the Democratic Party to come:
Bernie Sanders’s resounding victory in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary cements his status as one of the Democratic Party’s most successful insurgents ever, even as it leaves him still facing a steep uphill climb to overtake Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination.
The math favors Clinton, who can clinch a first-ballot nomination by winning about one-third of the delegates available in the remaining five caucuses and 16 primaries through June 7. But, even if he falters, Sanders has triggered dynamics that could reshape his party for years. Most important, his campaign is crystallizing the political emergence of the massive Millennial Generation, which is poised to pass the Baby Boom by 2020 as the electorate’s largest voting block.
“This thing is not going to go away,” insisted Robert Borosage, the co-director of the progressive Campaign for America’s Future. Borosage served as a senior adviser to Jesse Jackson’s landmark 1988 outsider presidential campaign and says the party has “not seen this kind of insurgency, this kind of strength” since then. “It’s even bigger [than Jackson],” Borosage said, “because it’s this younger generation coming into politics and moving with their own energy.”
With greater success the Vermont senator now faces greater challenges. Sanders is enduring intensified criticism from Clinton and sharper scrutiny from the news media, especially after a stumbling interview with the New York Daily News editorial board in which he could not entirely explain how he would implement some of his core ideas. And for all his recent victories, Sanders’s team understands he can’t overtake Clinton just by taking predominantly white states like Wisconsin; he still must prove he can appeal to the diversity of the Democratic coalition. “We have to do that,” said Tad Devine, Sanders’s senior strategist. “I get it”
But none of that obscures what Sanders has already achieved, and how it may change the Democratic Party. At my request, the veteran electoral analyst Rhodes Cook, publisher of an eponymous political newsletter, compiled figures comparing Sanders’s performance with previous outsider challengers. Those numbers show that Sanders is on track to win more total votes, and a higher percentage of the primary vote, than any insurgent Democrat in the modern primary era.
And the figures he gives are impressive, indeed. He ends with:
Clinton’s lead rests upon her edge among Hispanics and especially African Americans, who have provided her over three-fourths of their votes and keyed her victories across most big states. Sanders must dramatically change that equation if he has any chance, as his campaign hopes, of convincing super delegates to abandon Clinton by beating her on the campaign’s final day in both New Jersey and California—two states where whites will likely comprise only about three-fifths or less of voters. “It is going to come down to California and New Jersey,” says Devine. “If we are to win this thing…we are going to have to win big at the end.”
That still seems a long shot. But with his success, Sanders has already demonstrated that “pursuing an agenda of dealing with stagnant incomes and income inequality is no longer the liberal pole in the Democratic Party but is the solid majority position,” says the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux. Even more emphatically, he’s shown that the Millennial Generation will respond to a message that swings for the fences with far more sweeping change—on issues from tuition-free public college to combating the influence of money in politics—than most Democratic leaders consider feasible in today’s polarized climate.
In the combined results of all 21 states with exit polls, Sanders has won a remarkable 71 percent of voters under 30—an even higher percentage than Obama attracted against Clinton in 2008. Win or lose, Sanders’ success in mobilizing Millennials will accelerate a generational shift in influence likely to lastingly reconfigure how Democrats define the parameters of the possible.
And I think the shift will be a good one. Overall, the leadership Baby Booomers provided in the world can’t be in any way be confused with The Greatest Generation. Baby Boomers seem inescapably imprinted by the Vietnam War polarization era (just as The Greatest Generation was imprinted by the depression and World War II).
I’ve always said our national politics will be better and healthier when all the Baby Boomers (except me) are gone from the scene.
American news and blogging (and its short form version, Facebook, where people can write a line or two and offer a post) get caught up in the broo-ha-ha of the moment, because it does get the juices going when there’s a controversy. But Sanders represents a shift that ain’t gonna vanish if he doesn’t get the nomination.
The only question remains whether the Millennials who support him will decide to teach their party a lesson if Sanders isn’t nominated and stay home, and allow the GOP to control all three branches of government and pick one or more Supreme Court justices. Just as GOPers may have to decide whether to not support a Donald Trump and risk having their party get to pick Supreme Court judges. Is the future the Millennials seek politically likely to be easier to attain after a President Clinton or a President Trump?
To the party with the bigger turnout go the political (and Supreme Court) spoils.
photo credit: Feel the Bern via photopin (license)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.