Sorta a moot point now, Clinton would have to be arrested to not win the nomination at this point. But what the hell.
Been musing more on Sanders as a thing. To a certain extent, he's benefiting from general anti-establishment sentiment, and spent most of his time in the senate as a nominal Independent (basically, he isn't technically a democrat but he backs them up on major party votes and they include him for consideration on committee seats.) But he's less anti-establishment and more has a mild contrarian streak; he's very much a politician and has been in the game a long time, just not often in the national spotlight. Now that votes are in, we can say with confidence what some noticed from the start, that it comes down to demographics.
That is, the Democratic Party, if you wanted roughly-equal sized factions, could be broken down thusly:
1) White Conservatives- basically the more centrist holdouts from the pre-Nixon Democratic party OR refugee Republicans from the post-Reagan GOP. Center-Right-to-Center overall.
2) White Liberals- Center-left-to-left, the sort of folks who envy European style socialist states.
3) People of Color- Blacks in particular, but Asian and Hispanic democrats tend to vote more similarly to them than the other two (they also tend to be less overwhelmingly Democratic because... well, the GOP didn't abandon them to the wolves in the late '60s.) Run the full Center-right-to-left Democratic zone, but thanks to The Goddamned Patriarchy have a distinct set of priorities from the other two groups.
And in simplest terms Bernie overwhelmingly wins 2, gets some token votes from 1, and utterly whiffs in 3. This seems mostly to be a particular strength of Hillary Clinton's; her political image is very no-nonsense, let's-get-shit-done. She's someone who can plausibly get her hands dirty and knock sense into people, also the sort of image black community leaders project. That they also tend strongly to be women doesn't hurt.
But we're more interested in why Bernie does so well with the white liberals. And sure, he's a much better ideological fit there than Clinton, but the devotion and "REVOLUTION" aspect of it feel off, even allowing that hey, some of these are kids that weren't voting age in 2008 and want a movement too.
So my best guess is actually pretty straightforward-
He's the first candidate that our White Liberals group has had within our (that is, typical DLer age, ~30-35) political lives, and possibly lifetimes.
Bill Clinton's particular Democratic style has been the basic for the ideologies of every major candidate since (his VP Al Gore, Hillary Clinton who doubtless was right there formulating the brand, and Barack Obama draws no small portion of his personal ideology from that school, and has governed even more heavily in Clinton's style). Being all of 10 when Bill Clinton took office I couldn't even tell you what his primary competitors were like, or earlier folks like Dukakis, but even if they were quite liberal, that gives us a nearly 25 year run of fairly conservative Democrats, and that's before remembering both Clinton and Obama faced extremely hostile congresses which pushed their successful legislation even further right than where it started.
While the liberals remain part of the Democratic coalition, there hasn't been much to hang their hats on. Basically the only major success in the Obama presidency from the progressive perspective was Obergefell vs Hodges. None of the more liberal Democrats have been party leaders in that time, so the more progressive end of the party hasn't even had their voice in the conversation in a meaningful way in a very long time. So Bernie Sanders basically represents the first time in 20-odd years that voting for Democrats has been meaningful for anything besides "beat the other guys" and "try to fix the unholy mess Reagan made of the Supreme Court" (which yes, is important and is a good reason to not protest vote. But holy shit it's disheartening.) So yeah, it's not surprising that people are getting way too into it and are downright eager to take down Clinton just as much as [whoever the Republican is].
That said there is a lot of work to do now because that bracket now has a 90% chance of reading "Donald Trump". And no, I don't care how corrupt you think the Clintons are or how much wall street bribe money they take, DONALD IS BASICALLY A FASCIST TRUMP.
And let's face it liberals, this is the US, the numbers are in, liberals only make up about 15-20% of the population. It's depressing as hell to not even be in the conversation, but we were never going to get THAT much even if we were.
