A surprising, unexpected, recurring factor in partisan realignment—and what it means to the netroots

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Saturday July 16, 2016 · 6:06 AM PDT

2016/07/16 · 06:06

This is the fourth of five diaries looking at the 2016 election from the perspective of our new book Next Generation Netroots: Realignment and the Rise of the Internet Left. Take advantage of an exclusive 33% discount on Next Generation Netroots available only to readers of Daily Kos and Wolves and Sheep. Purchase directly from Routledge Publishers and type the promo code NGN16 at checkout. Link: bit.ly/...

At several moments in American history we have experienced inflection points in our political direction. 1828. 1860. 1932. 1968. In these years, the prevailing alignment of political parties succumbed to changing political, social or economic conditions and a new alignment began to emerge. These moments are complicated and are the product of a host of institutional and social forces. In our book, Next Generation Netroots, we examine one often overlooked but compelling force associated with political realignment: changes in media technology.

Technology, and specifically communication technology, are not obvious factors in explaining how successful partisan coalitions emerge, endure and eventually collapse. However, there is an intriguing overlap between the emergence of new media technology as a political tool and these moments of political instability, with parties or leaders who unlock the political potential of new technology emerging victorious.

We write in Next Generation Netroots:

[The] delay between the introduction of new media technology and the perfection of its political use has repeated throughout history in an uncanny cycle coinciding with the coalition shifts associated with most critical elections. There is a noteworthy correlation between the maturation of communication technology and the Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Nixon elections. Each of these elections and the regimes they ushered in was facilitated by the use of a new technology in a novel and creative way that would later define how that technology was used in politics: Jackson and mass printing; Lincoln and the telegraph; FDR and radio; Nixon and television.

The key isn’t simply the availability of new technology. It’s understanding how to use it for political purposes. The telegraph existed for years before Lincoln, just as radio was used by three presidents before FDR and television was ubiquitous in American households for a decade and a half before Nixon made his comeback in 1968, not to mention an essential feature in the creation of John F. Kennedy’s mystique. But no one had figured out how to maximize their political impacts before Lincoln used the telegraph for information control, Roosevelt used radio to create a sense of false intimacy with the electorate, and Nixon--learning from Kennedy’s slick use of the medium in 1960--entirely re-invented himself by fabricating a phony “New Nixon” on TV.

Interestingly, the lowest-tech instance of utilizing technology to establish a successful political coalition is the one with the most parallels to our own time: Andrew Jackson’s skillful use of inexpensive printing technology. Jackson’s story (and in this case we’re talking about his skill with the political process, not his political objectives) should sound familiar to anyone who has ever confronted the helpless feeling of being on the outside of an insular political system and trying in vain to overcome its fortresses.

In 1824, expanding suffrage made it possible in theory for a frontier candidate with popular appeal to mount a credible presidential challenge. In fact, largely due to the changing demographics of the electorate, Jackson was able to receive a plurality, though not a majority, of electoral and popular votes in a four-way contest. However, he was ultimately rebuffed when the election was decided in the House of Representatives.

Four years later, Jackson mounted an entirely different type of campaign. At the time, printing technology was improving, printing costs were falling and literacy rates were rising. Against this backdrop, Jackson built the first mass-based party operation with a web of newspapers at its core, utilizing that network to build a rudimentary grassroots infrastructure and forge coalitions across distant regions. Jackson thus applied new media technology to circumvent the congressional elites who had dominated the presidential selection process in the preceding decades, and in so doing he successfully secured of a majority of electoral votes.

Technological improvements in the 1820s allowed newspapers to reach remote frontier towns in what could be considered America’s first information revolution. It was common practice at the time for newspapers to be partisan, so there was nothing unusual about Jackson purchasing dozens of newspapers in far-flung communities around the country and establishing loyal partisans as editors. What was revolutionary was the idea to use this network of newspapers to support a national political campaign organization.

The Jackson campaign coordinated the efforts of newspaper editors with each other and with sympathetic state party organizations and local officials. The editors in turn performed the essential functions of a mass-based campaign. They synchronized campaign operations, circulated a unified campaign message, generated grassroots excitement and mobilized voters--all without a national mass medium of communication. But Jackson used the technology available to him in a way no one else had. It was relatively low-tech, but effective.

In Next Generation Netroots we contend that in 2016 we are plausibly nearing another reconfiguration of our political landscape. Once again, changes in media technology--in our case, the Internet--is helping to drive us closer to the inflection point.

Since the turn of the millennium, we have repeatedly seen digital-fueled campaigns challenge established political norms. In 2003--the dawn of the netroots--MoveOn.org, the progressive blogosphere and Howard Dean all bootstrapped themselves from obscurity to national prominence by using new social media platforms and email-based organizing tactics to harness the significant anti-war sentiment that the media and political establishment had dismissed. In 2008, Barack Obama used cutting edge email, SMS texting, and online to offline community building tactics to defy expectations and become the first African American President of the United States. Social protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter utilized social media to create massive new cultural and political waves despite starting from effectively zero. In just the last 12 months, Bernie Sanders rode a tsunami of digital organizing and social media buzz to rise from being an obscure progressive folk hero into a serious contender for the White House.

For better than a decade, the netroots have repeatedly used the Internet to build the networks and structures necessary to compete in the political process. Like Jackson, the effort took place on the outside and required doing things no one had done before or even thought possible, such as using vast quantities of small-dollar donors derived from email-based organizing to surpass the fundraising capability of candidates with closer connections to large Democratic donors.

Like in Jackson's time, our party system and electoral demographics are in flux. Historically, these have been moments of opportunity for groups, movements or individuals that are strong enough, well positioned enough and savvy enough to understand how to find maximum advantage in a new or emerging communication technology. Are the netroots capable of using digital media to break through as a majority partner in a new political alignment? We will consider the possibility in our final diary tomorrow.

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Purchase Chris Bowers and Matt Kerbel’s book Next Generation Netroots and take advantage of an exclusive 33% discount available only to readers of Daily Kos and Wolves and Sheep. Purchase directly from Routledge Publishers and type the promo code NGN16 at checkout: Link: bit.ly/...

Previous blog posts in our series about Next Generation Netroots:

Cross-posted at Wolves and Sheep.

Bernie’s Loss Highlights the Progressive Movement’s Greatest Liability

Chris Bowers and Matt Kerbel

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday July 15, 2016 · 5:06 AM PDT

2016/07/15 · 05:06

This is the third of five diaries looking at the 2016 election from the perspective of our new book Next Generation Netroots: Realignment and the Rise of the Internet Left. Take advantage of an exclusive 33% discount on Next Generation Netroots available only to readers of Daily Kos and Wolves and Sheep. Purchase directly from Routledge Publishers and type the promo code NGN16 at checkout. Link: bit.ly/...

Bernie Sanders’ remarkably strong challenge to Hillary Clinton speaks to the strength of the progressive movement. The reason why he fell short speaks to the movement’s foremost weakness.

Notwithstanding primary postmortems about process issues such as debate schedules, caucus vs. primaries, open vs. closed primaries and the role of superdelegates, the demographic reason for Sanders’ loss is clear: he underperformed against Clinton with voters of color, stringing together lopsided wins in largely-white caucus states while performing poorly across the delegate-rich South where the Democratic electorate is heavily African American. While numerous explanations have been offered for this disparity, from a longstanding allegiance between the Clintons and African American voters to Sanders’ clumsy approach to matters of race, this is not the first time we have seen a progressive candidate stymied by the limits of the progressive coalition.

In our new book Next Generation Netroots, we note that the netroots, which supports a coalition that has ballooned in size to equal about 30 percent of the nationwide Democratic vote for Congress in midterm elections, is nonetheless unrepresentative of the Democratic Party base. Specifically:

Whereas the Democratic Party tends to be disproportionately female, non-white and working class compared with the country as a whole, the netroots are disproportionately male, white and well educated. As a result, the netroots do not yet have a wide enough reach to take over the reins of the party.

These disparities have been evident since Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and stem in no small part from the racial, economic and educational disparities which formed the digital divide in the early days of broadband, when the netroots emerged as a nascent movement.

The result of these demographic disparities is an electoral cul-de-sac that progressives will need to exit in order to become the dominant force in the Democratic Party. In fact, this is probably the largest obstacle facing progressives in the electoral arena.

In Next Generation Netroots, we examine the relatively obscure case of Zephyr Teachout’s 2014 primary challenge to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, which despite its lopsided outcome bears eerie similarities to the Sanders-Clinton contest. Like Sanders, Teachout was an obscure figure challenging an overwhelmingly popular establishment-friendly incumbent from the left. She started off few resources and little name recognition, and was therefore written off as a nuisance candidate by mainstream political observers. Her roots in the netroots derived from her work as Director of Internet Organizing for the Dean presidential campaign, and she was endorsed by netroots organizations like MoveOn and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Teachout won only 34% of the vote, but where she won is instructive. Teachout and Cuomo actually won the same number of counties, but her vote was concentrated in the Hudson Valley and capital regions of upstate New York while Cuomo prevailed in the urban centers of New York City and Buffalo. Teachout won sparsely populated Columbia County with better than three-quarters of the vote; Cuomo won The Bronx by similar margins. Teachout prevailed in portions of the state where the population was whiter, more rural and/or higher income but lost badly in populations of minority and/or working class voters.

The day after the election, Daily Kos's brooklynbadboy produced an excellent diary loaded with maps and data detailing the demographics of Teachout's vote share in New York City.

The bottom line was that even though Teachout waged a populist, progressive campaign to Cuomo’s left, she failed to attract support in the very places where the netroots have long assumed a populist, progressive message would be most appealing.

Sound familiar?

The geography and demography of Teachout’s support closely tracks the geography and demography of Sanders’ support, while both closely track the demography and reach of the netroots. We examined the rate of New York state traffic to Daily Kos in the month leading up to the gubernatorial primary. Not surprisingly, most of it came from New York City. But the second greatest source of traffic came not from any of the mid-size cities of Upstate New York--Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany--but from the tiny university town of Ithaca, home of Cornell University and Ithaca College. With a population of 30,000 but over 18,500 unique visits to Daily Kos, its readership was seven times as dense as in the Cuomo strongholds of New York and Buffalo. And Teachout received 69% of the vote in Tompkins County, where Ithaca is located (Tompkins was also one of Sanders' best counties in 2016, as he won 62.3% of the primary vote).

Like Teachout’s supporters, DK reader demographics skew heavily toward well educated white liberals when compared with Democratic voters as a whole, and across the state its readership density overlaps with areas where Teachout won her highest percentage of the vote. We see the same phenomenon elsewhere in the progressive ecosystem. Audiences for such progressive mainstays as Think Progress, Salon and Raw Story are disproportionately college educated. In fact, at the time when our book went to press, possession of a graduate degree is the most distinct characteristic of Think Progress and Salon readers. As of this writing, it is the second most distinct characteristic of Daily Kos readers.

In Next Generation Netroots, we conclude:

The netroots have organized a large constituency of Democrats around an independent media and activist nexus that is entirely free from the control of the existing Democratic Party machinery. Netroots-based campaigns that charge aggressively at the Democratic establishment can, with few resources and little institutional buy-in, do well enough to give their supporters the illusion that they are close to seizing control of the Democratic Party in a grand, populist digital epiphany. At the same time, the progressive movement faces a significant demographic challenge to future growth, as the remaining 20-25% of the Democratic base that these campaigns need in order to form a majority consistently proves to be beyond their grasp. The primary reason for this continued frustration is that the grassroots networks which form the backbone of netroots media and activist organizations are not connected on a day-to-day basis to working-class and minority communities that make up the rest of the party rank-and-file.

Although Sanders actually did perform quite well among younger voters and working class whites, demography was still why he and so many progressive movement candidates and organizations continue falling short. However, we have seen progressives build effective coalitions in government and among advocacy allies, and while it may be a greater challenge to build electoral coalitions, the success progressives have realized with their inside game can be a model for what they need to do if they are to assemble a winning coalition of voters. The roadmap is there for progressives to become the dominant political force in the Democratic Party, and there are abundant clues from the failure of Sanders’ efforts about what needs to be done to get there. As we will argue in our final two diaries, the political plates are shifting and the possibility of a progressive majority coalition is not out of the question.

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See part one of our series, "The unmistakable lesson of the Sanders campaign: The left-wing is ascendent in the Democratic Party," and part two, "The biggest difference between Clinton and Sanders wasn't policy. It was something more important."

Cross-posted at Wolves and Sheep.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Sanders wasn't policy. It was something more important.

Chris Bowers and Matt Kerbel

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday July 14, 2016 · 5:06 AM PDT

2016/07/14 · 05:06

This is the second of five diaries looking at the 2016 election from the perspective of our new book Next Generation Netroots: Realignment and the Rise of the Internet Left. Click here for part one: The unmistakable lesson of the Sanders campaign: The left-wing is ascendent in the Democratic Party.

At its core, the Bernie-vs-Hillary dispute was as much, if not more, about how political power is best organized in order to achieve progressive outcomes as it was about ideological or policy differences. Their clash over who is the better progressive, on display during the primary debates, often boiled down to this distinction: Clinton believes you have to know and work within the system in order to achieve progressive outcomes, while Sanders believes you have to organize new power from outside the system in order to achieve progressive outcomes. This is why both candidates can claim agreement on 90% of their policy objectives and still engage in such a bitter contest, and why we find self-described progressives on both sides of the debate.

Hillary is the epitome of the philosophy that change is best accomplished by working from within established power structures. She describes herself as an ultra-qualified, experienced and knowledgeable incrementalist, someone who can effectively implement practical solutions within the system to produce real accomplishments for average Americans. Further, she has used that characterization to suggest that Bernie is an idealistic dreamer whose self-described revolutionary ideas are bound to dissipate upon contact with reality.

This philosophy is reflected in how her campaign is organized. Her endorsements from virtually every Democratic elected official in the country, as well as an extremely wide range of progressive advocacy organizations, spoke to her ability to work in coalitions with colleagues, allies and established power structures. Progressive think tanks, policy makers and allied academics almost unanimously preferred her policies over Sanders', often finding them more knowledgeable and practical. Further, while she had a robust small-donor operation, bringing in nearly $45 million in small donations through June, she also was able to appeal to the existing large donor class of the Democratic Party, from which she raised most of the money for her campaign. What's more, in every department, her campaign staff glistened with the leading names in their field, giving the entire operation a sense of extreme professionalism. To top it off—and to the chagrin of many Sanders supporters—her campaign often directly coordinated with local Democratic parties in swing states to prepare for the general election and assist down ballot candidates. If there was a way to work with the Democratic establishment, Hillary Clinton made it happen.

For his part, Sanders characterized the political system as rigged against middle and working class Americans, and Clinton as an ill-suited agent of progressive change because of her cozy ties with Wall Street and the political establishment. As with Clinton, the organizational structure of Sanders' campaign fit with his message. Rather than contesting the inside game, he asymmetrically countered Clinton's formidable organizing within established bases of Democratic and progressive power by building a grassroots-fueled campaign of explosive size and scope. Instead of working within established power structures, Sanders argued that what was needed was a revolution outside of those structures—a people-powered organization strong enough to overcome them.

He came close to pulling it off. Bernie Sanders built the largest grassroots operation in the history of Democratic presidential primaries, surpassing even the famously netroots-driven campaigns of Barack Obama in 2007-8 and Howard Dean in 2003-4. He raised more money, with his $132 million haul from people who gave less than $200 surpassing what Obama and Dean were able to achieve among small donors during their primary runs. He had more donors (over 2,200,000 in the end), more people attend his rallies, and possibly even more campaign volunteers.

This was the model of a political campaign fueled by digital grassroots energy that was first established by Howard Dean. It operates on the guiding principle of Internet politics: that a successful campaign can emerge from the ground up, outside established centers of political power, around a leader with a message that resonates broadly who understands how to grow support by empowering his followers. This principle is the opposite of the top-down, consultant-heavy model that dominated politics in the television age and, with adjustments for social media, still typifies non-movement candidacies.

Sanders critique of the Democratic Party as suffering from outsized corporate and financial interests that render the party impotent to advance the concerns of the poor and middle class fits squarely with over a decade of mainstream netroots and progressive social media thought. In fact, as we note in Next Generation Netroots, the contemporary progressive clash with entrenched Democratic Party interests is “a battle about participatory democracy aimed at reducing the power wielded by corporate patrons by reinvigorating democratic processes,” that itself echoes an even earlier era:

In the mold of progressives from the first gilded age, [contemporary progressives’] ultimate goal is reforming what they see as a damaged political process to make the political class responsive to the interests of those who can’t afford to write large checks for political campaigns. It is fundamentally a process-oriented struggle because progressives view organizational power as a prerequisite to making policy shifts that would help the middle class and the poor.

By tapping into this sentiment, which has become reinvigorated in our new gilded age, and by utilizing his status as a folk hero within netroots circles, Sanders was able to draw on the surprisingly well-organized networks that have been incubated in the progressive online space over the past decade.

To that end, Sanders was overwhelmingly endorsed by the memberships of the foundational netroots organizations MoveOn and Democracy for America. Further, over 275,000 people signed up for his campaign through Daily Kos emails or directly on the website. This included many early signups that were crucial to jumpstarting his campaign: 100,000 people who joined his email list from mid-2011 to early 2015 through joint petition actions with Daily Kos, and over 66,000 who signed up for his campaign through just two sponsored emails in early July 2015. According to Revolution Messaging, the consulting firm that handled Bernie's online fundraising operation, the 175,000 people who ultimately signed up to Bernie's campaign through sponsored Daily Kos emails were by far the best performing, highest yield supporters who came to Bernie's campaign from any paid source. Overall, the netroots were essential to Bernie Sanders' success.

The rapid development of Bernie's campaign as a grassroots phenomenon fueled by motivated volunteers fits a model of online political activism which dates back to Howard Dean’s upstart presidential campaign. Viewed through this lens, the Sanders campaign is not a discrete phenomenon, but instead the latest iteration of a decade-long movement to wrest control of the Democratic Party from powerful interests. It was built not just through his campaign, but by tapping vast networks that developed over many years from self-generated social action originating online. The structure of Bernie’s campaign is of a piece with this type of activism, where supporters find the messenger in a bottom-up fashion consistent with the decentralized nature of the Internet. Its ultimate goal is to organize powerful enough networks to control the direction of the Democratic Party and with it the power to move the Overton Window to the left, widening the range of acceptable solutions to economic and social problems and then enacting them as public policy.

Still, Bernie lost the nomination, falling short in the pledged delegate race by a count of 2,204 to 1,847, the equivalent of a 9 point defeat (54.4% to 45.6%). When we look closely at the reasons for Sanders’ defeat, we can also see clear parallels to obstacles facing the progressive movement—in this case, what it has yet to do in its ongoing quest to come to power in the Democratic Party. We’ll take a look at that in our next diary.

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Cross-posted at Wolves and Sheep.

The unmistakable lesson of the Sanders campaign: The left-wing is ascendent in the Democratic Party

Chris Bowers and Matt Kerbel

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday July 13, 2016 · 5:39 AM PDT

2016/07/13 · 05:39

Purchase Chris Bowers and Matt Kerbel’s book Next Generation Netroots and take advantage of an exclusive 33% discount available only to readers of Daily Kos and Wolves and Sheep. Purchase directly from Routledge Publishers and type the promo code NGN16 at checkout. Link: http://bit.ly/29E6FMr

This is the first of five diaries looking at the 2016 election from the perspective of our new book Next Generation Netroots: Realignment and the Rise of the Internet Left.

Is America on the verge of a long-term progressive realignment? Or are we about to enter a period of sustained reactionary politics? This is the key question we ask in our new book Next Generation Netroots. And we believe we can find clues to the answer in the way the 2016 campaign is unfolding.

In a series of five diaries over the next five days, we will consider the state of the progressive movement in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ challenge to Hillary Clinton and what it portends for the future of the Democratic Party. In Next Generation Netroots we view what is happening in the Republican and Democratic parties as interrelated, with the political party system being shaken by what we see as a power struggle on the left between progressive and traditional forces in the Democratic Party and by an ideological struggle on the right between the conservative and reactionary factions currently tearing apart the Republican Party. We thought we would focus here on the Democratic side of the equation in light of the vigorous and often heated sentiments expressed on DK during the primary campaign.

We start with a fundamental premise that probably everyone can accept: the broader political world didn’t see Bernie coming.

But they should have.

The progressive left--fueled by an increasingly liberal Democratic rank and file and a well-coordinated network of maturing netroots groups and established progressive issue advocacy organizations--is ascendant in the Democratic Party. The competitiveness of the Sanders campaign was shocking to the political world because, generally speaking, it did not recognize this ascendancy was underway. However, if they had been paying attention, the signs were all there, years beforehand.

Increasingly liberal Democratic rank and file

Over the past decade and a half, the Democratic rank and file has become much more liberal. The trend has been so pronounced that Democrats have transitioned from being a party dominated by self-identified moderates to one dominated by self-identified liberals. As we write in Next Generation Netroots:

Not long ago, self-identiﬁed liberals were a small minority of all Democratic self-identiﬁers. At the start of the previous decade, not only were moderate Democrats a clear plurality within the Democratic coalition, there were almost as many self-identiﬁed conservative Democrats as there were self-identiﬁed liberal Democrats. According to Gallup, liberals in 2000 constituted a mere 29% of rank-and-ﬁle Democrats, barely edging out conservatives (25%) while being swamped by moderates, who made up 44% of the party base. The share of liberals began to rise in 2003 and has been increasing ever since. By 2007, liberals had caught up to moderates, and in 2011 surpassed them. In 2014, fully 44% of Democrats were self-described liberals, while only 36% claimed to be moderates. At 19%, conservative Democrats have become an endangered species.

Liberals are not only increasing as a percentage of Democrats, they also far more likely to turn out to vote in Democratic primaries than moderates and conservatives, thus increasing their influence beyond their numbers. As Harry Enten wrote for fivethirteight.com back in April, liberals made up 46% of Demcoratic primary voters in 2008, and an astonishing 61% in 2016:

Moderate and conservative voters, meanwhile, are a much smaller part of the Democratic primary vote than they were eight years ago. In 2008, they made up 54 percent of primary voters in the states that have voted so far this year. That’s down 15 percentage points and generally matches the decline of self-identified moderate and conservative Democrats we’ve seen in national surveys.

What's more, as Enten notes, this trend toward an increasingly liberal Democratic Party is likely to continue, as "it’s the youngest Democrats who are more likely to identify as 'very liberal.'"

Instead of being shocked by Sanders competitiveness, political observers should have been aware of the rise of liberals among the Democratic rank and file. A change of this magnitude is bound to have major political implications, as a liberal-dominated Democratic rank and file will act differently in Democratic primaries than a moderate-dominated one. Sixteen years ago, Sanders would have been dispatched without much of a fight, but not anymore. If you were surprised by this change, then it is because you weren't paying attention.

Mature progressive infrastructure

Another key trend in the Democratic Party that political observers should have noted to prevent being caught off guard by Bernie Sanders’ strength is the repeated victory of the party's left-wing in virtually every major intra-party struggle during President Obama's second term.

Progressives are so used to losing--and political observers are so used to watching them lose--that neither of them seemed to notice when the losing stopped. But in 2013, it really did begin to stop. As we write in Next Generation Netroots:

During President Obama’s second term, the netroots and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party began to emerge victorious in several major intra-party ﬁghts: Senate ﬁlibuster reform, Net Neutrality, diplomacy with Iran and leadership of the Federal Reserve Board, as well as Social Security beneﬁt levels. A pattern has emerged from these victories, with netroots organizations, established progressive advocacy operations and a handful of elected progressive Democratic leaders working together in “inside–outside” coalitions that combine large-scale grassroots activism with inside-the-beltway lobbying expertise.

Stopping Larry Summers, winning Senate filibuster reform, passing Net Neutrality, securing the Iran nuclear agreement, preventing Social Security cuts and getting virtually the entire Democratic Party on record in favor of Social Security expansion--again and again, progressives are winning the big intra-party fights among Democrats. This trend continued after Next Generation Netroots went to press, with $15 minimum wage bills--considered a distant pipedream only a few years ago--passing in California, New York and D.C.

The only exception to this trend of progressive victories in major intra-Democratic fights was the battle over fast track trade authority in 2015. However, even that fight was a nail-biter, and came only after an initial shock defeat in a June 2015 vote in the House of Representatives due to surprisingly fierce resistance from labor, the netroots, and the broader progressive advocacy ecosystem. Further, Congress hasn’t actually passed the actual trade agreements, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that fast track trade authority was designed to secure. The fight over TPP rages on, and progressive defeat is far from certain.

Progressives simply stopped losing major Democratic Party fights in 2013. Combine this with a dramatically more liberal Democratic voting base, and Bernie Sanders should genuinely not have been a surprise. Even if someone had missed those trends, more than four months before Iowa, in September 2015, Sanders was already ahead in the New Hampshire polling averages (a lead which he never relinquished), was drawing bigger crowds than Barack Obama had done in 2007 (a sure sign of volunteer and caucus state strength), and had demonstrated he could equal Clinton in fundraising. That was a clear recipe for a competitive Democratic nomination campaign, a full four months before Iowa. All the signs were there.

It’s certainly true that reporters and political leaders commonly downplay phenomena which cut against established scripts for how things are supposed to work (see: Trump, Donald). But we would contend that progressive politics in particular are discounted by political elites who continue to view the United States as a center-right nation. Media narratives are sticky, and it became almost second nature for elites to accept the framing of America as a red state country (a frame the right actively promoted) during the long arc of center-right governance stretching back to the Reagan administration and arguably to Richard Nixon.

It is time for people to accept that we live in a new world. In the digital age there have been several Internet-fueled, progressive insurgencies. Howard Dean's presidential campaign, the rise of the netroots and the progressive blogosphere, Occupy Wall Street, and the 2011 #WIunion protests and recall elections are all examples. Viewed individually, they all failed--or failed to bring about the changes they promised. But viewed collectively they contributed to the growth of a movement now strong enough to have a prominent seat at the Democratic Party table. The Sanders campaign is the latest step in this lineage, and there will be more to come after him.

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Cross-posted at Wolves and Sheep.

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