(snip)

In fact, some of Sanders’s campaign promises have already come true in Chicago. Marijuana is legal as of January 1, and the minimum wage will rise to $15 an hour next year.

The fact that Sanders commands so much support among young people — he won a majority of voters under 45 in the Illinois primary — means his ideals will become laws when today’s Sanders voters win tomorrow’s election. Ironically, Sanders has been compared to former Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, who was as far to the right as Sanders is to the left. Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election was nonetheless the beginning of a conservative ideological movement that finally came to power when Ronald Reagan won the White House 16 years later.

“The Sanders coalition is in a very real sense the future of the Democratic Party,” wrote Noah Millman in The Week. “And that’s a reason to take notice of his primarily class-based politics, because they have shown far better ability to energize the demographic future than any of his opponents.”

Even as he’s losing, Sanders is winning — not in Washington, but in Chicago, and plenty of other blue cities.


http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/March-2020/Bernie-Sanders-Lost-Illinois-but-He-Changed-Chicago/