Political scientist: Bernie isn't the future of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama is.

[Stellar]

Bernie Sanders may have lost the current battle for the Democratic nomination. But he's winning the war for the party's future.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom about Sanders's campaign — that while the Vermont senator may go down to defeat in this presidential cycle, his young supporters can expect sweeping victory within a generation or two.

US News, for instance, declares that "The Future is Bernie's."
Sanders himself certainly thinks so.
Vox's Matt Yglesias has argued that Sanders's "brand of politics is the future of the Democratic Party," citing his runaway support among young voters.
"Whatever Sanders’s fate as a presidential candidate ... his campaign is the harbinger of a deep change in the Democratic Party," wrote the New Republic's Jeet Heer after Sanders won New Hampshire. "In coming years, Democratic politicians will have to echo Sanders’s slashing critique of Wall Street and his call for a far more robust welfare state if they want to hold on to the rising generation in their party."

But Dave Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, thinks these kinds of interpretations may be overstating the long-term significance of Sanders's insurgency.

Much more: Vox

[MADem]

1. This article is really interesting--so I am kicking it back up.

Worth a look, friends!!!

....the key for understanding the future of Democratic politics is still Obama. Obama has shown you can win nationally as a Democrat not as a liberal crusader, but not as someone who takes on the left of the party to prove to the swing voters that you're not a liberal, either.

It seems like he will go down in history as the key figure in current Democratic Party politics — he showed how the party's new demographic coalition could come together. If you want to talk about the future of the Democratic Party, that's where it is — a future that's not as dependent on white southern voters and much more dependent on non-white, non-Christian, and well-educated metropolitan voters.

It seems to me that is the key shift — Hillary is running not as a 90s-era Bill Clinton Democrat but as an Obama Democrat, and she won. That suggests to me that Obama’s version of the party is likely to stick around for a while.

[The Polack MSgt]

2. A late K&R is better than no K&R ( I hope)

[Stellar]

3. Always friend!