Judging by the current polls, Tuesday's so-called Acela primary – during which five Northeastern states will vote – is not going to be kind to Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who already holds a substantial lead in pledged delegates, is ahead by wide margins in the day's biggest prizes, Pennsylvania and Maryland, while also holding smaller leads in Delaware and Connecticut. Only the Ocean State, Rhode Island, currently has Sanders ahead.

Sure, the polls have been wrong before – like in Michigan – but at this late date in the primary calendar, Sanders needs more than just wins to chip into Clinton's pledged delegate lead. He needs blowouts, and there don't seem to be any coming.

But if the present is Clinton's, the future of presidential politics may very well be Bernie's. More and more evidence, in fact, is pointing to the conclusion that the heir to the Sanders' campaign, whomever he or she is, may be the one to complete his oft-mentioned but currently insufficient revolution.

As FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten noted on Friday, the Democratic electorate has gotten more liberal since 2008, which has helped boost Sanders' effort. "Moderate and conservative voters, meanwhile, are a much smaller part of the Democratic primary vote than they were eight years ago," Enten added. "It wouldn't be surprising to see the moderate/conservative portion of the Democratic primary electorate become a minority in the next 10 years." Where once the centrist New Democrats and conservative Blue Dogs reigned, the more liberal left, associated most strongly with Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is ascendant.

Add to that the results of a Harvard Institute of Politics poll released Monday. It shows that not only do millennials – who now make up the largest share of the voting age population – clearly prefer the Democrats to the Republicans, but they're drifting left on some of Sanders' signature issues, including universal health care. "He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left," polling director John Della Volpe said. "Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation – the largest generation in the history of America – thinks about politics."

And Harvard's numbers jibe with other polls showing millennials are more liberal than their predecessors and more inclined toward an activist government. In 2014, for instance, the Pew Research Center found that "Millennials are considerably more liberal than other generations," and not just among self-identified Democrats. Sanders, of course, has found his strongest support in state after state among young voters who Feel the Bern. Without them, his campaign would have actually become a quixotic protest candidacy, as it was initially portrayed.

Two questions, then, arise from all this. The first is whether millennials will stay liberal, or whether they'll, per the line attributed to many a statesman over the years, become conservative as they get older. The second is whether they will consistently vote, which we millennials are not super great at doing currently, in numbers large enough to matter.

Sanders has a role to play in providing the answers. As I said after he got walloped by Clinton in New York's primary last week, he could harness the energy his campaign built into some really productive ends: helping other candidates who share his vision win elections, affecting the Democratic Party platform, pushing for reforms to some of the lousy voting systems across the country and continuing to pull Clinton to the left on policy, keeping her honest as she turns toward the general election. He could build the revolution into something that continues to effect politics long after his campaign ends.

Or he could burn the whole effort down around him via thinly veiled accusations of chicanery and corruption on the part of Clinton and the Democratic establishment, thereby souring his supporters on electoral politics writ large, convinced that the game is now and forever rigged against them.