Bernie Sanders is the future of the Democratic Party

[Jefferson23]

Updated by Matthew Yglesias on February 9, 2016, 8:05 p.m. ET


Fresh from his win in New Hampshire, it's now clear that whether or not Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination outright, he's already won in another, perhaps more important way: His brand of politics is the future of the Democratic Party.

Sanders is the overwhelming choice of young voters, scoring a staggering 84 percent of voters under 30 in the Iowa caucuses and projected to do better in New Hampshire.

Any young and ambitious Democrat looking at the demographics of the party and the demographics of Sanders supporters has to conclude that his brand of politics is extremely promising for the future. There are racial and demographic gaps between Clinton and Sanders supporters, but the overwhelming reality is that for all groups, the young people are feeling the Bern.

Whether the first Sanders-style nominee is Sanders himself or Elizabeth Warren or someone like a Tammy Baldwin or a Keith Ellison doesn't matter. What's clear is that there's robust demand among Democrats — especially the next generation of Democrats — to remake the party along more ideological, more social democratic lines, and party leaders are going to have to answer that demand or get steamrolled.

Young Democrats want a different kind of party

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/9/10940718/bernie-sanders-future-demographics

[99th_Monkey]

1. K&R nt

[Ferd Berfel]

2. ...and the DNC damn well better start getting used to it.

[BillZBubb]

3. "Young Democrats want a different kind of party"

A lot of us older voters do too!

[Jefferson23]

4. Of course you do, we know that. We all should want one free of corruption, as much as possible.

How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy

Business didn't always have so much power in Washington.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/

on edit: The self-reinforcing quality of corporate lobbying has increasingly come to overwhelm every other potentially countervailing force.

One has to go back to the Gilded Age to find business in such a dominant political position in American politics. While it is true that even in the more pluralist 1950s and 1960s, political representation tilted towards the well-off, lobbying was almost balanced by today's standards. Labor unions were much more important, and the public-interest groups of the 1960s were much more significant actors. And very few companies had their own Washington lobbyists prior to the 1970s. To the extent that businesses did lobby in the 1950s and 1960s (typically through associations), they were clumsy and ineffective. “When we look at the typical lobby,” concluded three leading political scientists in their 1963 study, American Business and Public Policy, “we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all.”

Things are quite different today. The evolution of business lobbying from a sparse reactive force into a ubiquitous and increasingly proactive one is among the most important transformations in American politics over the last 40 years. Probing the history of this transformation reveals that there is no “normal” level of business lobbying in American democracy. Rather, business lobbying has built itself up over time, and the self-reinforcing quality of corporate lobbying has increasingly come to overwhelm every other potentially countervailing force. It has also fundamentally changed how corporations interact with government—rather than trying to keep government out of its business (as they did for a long time), companies are now increasingly bringing government in as a partner, looking to see what the country can do for them.

[politicaljunkie41910]

5. If true, I guess that condemns us to being a party of losers than.

If Bernie should win the primary, he will never win the GE.

[RobertEarl]

6. You have a bad attitude?

What is curious is that the actual D party members split about 50-50. Independents said NO to Hillary and hell YES to Bernie..

The only way we lose the GE is have a candidate that Independents won't vote for, and that loser is Hillary.

You may read this, pj, but I doubt you will be able to recognize the simple math and truth therein.

[Jefferson23]

7. Maybe they'll change their mind before it's too late. n/t