Moderate Democrats are celebrating Joe Biden’s big Super Tuesday, but their joy may reflect a short-term triumph of the party’s past over its longer-term future. The sudden consolidation of the moderate vote around Biden, paced by the relative inability of Michael Bloomberg to spend his way into relevance, has elevated the creaking former vice president to the top of the pack, mainly as the most likely alternative to socialist senator Bernie Sanders. Moderation may have triumphed for now, with help from African-American and older voters, but the Sanders–Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party remains the choice of rising demographic groups of the future, namely Latinos and voters under 30.
The Democrats’ leftist future can be glimpsed in the country’s two biggest and most important states, Texas and California. These economic powerhouses are the nurseries of the new America, with Latinos constituting 30 percent of the eligible electorate in each. One state leans red, while the other is, for now at least, solid blue, but each has developed political models—one conservative, the other progressive—that now compete for America’s political future.
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