Bernie Sanders Just Changed the Democratic Party

After a remarkable night in Iowa, one that served as a rebuke to Donald Trump and to the opinion pollsters, the Democratic Party was faced with the prospect of confronting a youthful and articulate Republican candidate come November: Senator Marco Rubio, who finished a strong third in the G.O.P. caucus, behind Ted Cruz and Trump. Before then, though, Democrats have some messy internal business to deal with: Bernie Sanders, promoting an American version of “people power,” has confirmed his capture of the Party’s under-forty wing, which means trouble for Hillary Clinton.

Strictly speaking, the Democratic caucus finished in a dead heat. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, with ninety-nine per cent of the precincts having reported, the delegate count was six hundred and sixty-five for Clinton, and six hundred and sixty-two for Sanders. (For some reason, the Democrats release only their delegate counts, not the number of votes cast for each candidate.) In terms of percentages, it was 49.8 per cent to 49.6 per cent, which rounds up to fifty-fifty. Barring something unforeseen, Iowa’s forty-four delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be equally divided.

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The age gap between Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters was huge. According to the entrance polls, which wrongly predicted a Clinton victory, Sanders got eighty-six per cent of the Democratic vote in the seventeen-to-twenty-four age group, eighty-one per cent in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine group, and sixty-five per cent in the thirty-to-thirty-nine age group. Clinton, by contrast, was largely reliant on the middle-aged and the elderly. Among forty-something voters, she won by five percentage points. Among the over-fifties, she won by more than twenty per cent.