Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

Hillary Clinton’s wispy Iowa lead may just barely prevent a Democratic establishment panic. After all, plenty of favorable terrain awaits her on the primary calendar, and Sanders is getting lapped among superdelegates.

But what should unnerve her and the party is the visceral reaction inside the Bernie Sanders post-caucus rally as her late-night remarks aired inside the hall. When Clinton declared “I am a progressive,” the Sanders crowd chanted, “she’s a liar!”


The Iowa entrance poll indicates the angry sentiment is not limited to a few rabble-rousers. Approximately half of Sanders’ voters said Clinton doesn’t “share” their “values.” That animosity reveals a deep ideological divide that will become harder to bridge the longer the race goes on.

The party establishment had a plan, of course: Clinton, a clear front-runner with token opposition, would win Iowa and go on to run the table, just like how Vice-President Al Gore dispatched Sen. Bill Bradley in 2000 after a few contentious debates. But there’s another kind of Democratic primary, one in which a long and drawn-out battle serves only to highlight a deep split in the party’s voters. It’s happened before. And that may be the one they get now.

Sanders has every reason to keep the fight alive, and the resources to do it. Iowa entrance polls show a clear base of support among younger, more liberal, voters. His campaign has cultivated a broad small-donor network that will allow him to stay on the road and on the airwaves. Even if it becomes clear he won’t be nominee, Bernie will happily keep scooping up delegates so he can make a stand at the convention for his platform. When you are building a movement, you don’t care as much about losing a nomination.

For a while, Clinton was trying to blur progressive distinctions between herself and Sanders, even lurching leftward on matters like the Keystone pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But those are issues that will almost surely be old news by the time Clinton would become president. In other words, they’re freebies.

Clinton has been far more resistant to pressure regarding Sanders’ main planks: single-payer health care, limits on bank size, a carbon tax, a financial transaction tax and anything involving a tax increase on middle-class families. These are not positions she wants to carry in a general election campaign, and she’s increasingly willing to argue that Sanders’ embrace of them proves he’s unelectable and unrealistic.

In the days of Reagan and Bush, beaten down Democrats were quicker to accept the concept of political limitations. After eight years of Obama winning elections and squeezing out legislation, expectations have been reshuffled. While some believe that Obama went as far to the left as he could and wrangled as much of the system as was possible, others contend Obama didn’t push the envelope, compromising too much and not mobilizing the grass roots enough.

Sanders has explicitly made the latter case. Much of Sanders' youthful base, which has little to no memory of life under a Republican president, readily embraces it.

Clinton’s odes to pragmatism not only rankle the Sanders faithful, they also make her seem like the reason why they can’t have nice things. She becomes the problem, instead of just the Republicans. Once Sanders voters equate Clinton with the Republicans, they start to say they won’t vote for Clinton. Ever.

But lots of things get said in the heat of a primary. Will February trash talk matter in November?

Democrats have overcome protracted, even bitter, contests before. 2008 was no love-in. Obama diminished Clinton as “likeable enough.” Clinton mocked how people believed “celestial choirs will be singing … and the world will be perfect” if Obama won. Obama supporters accused Clinton of racism. Clinton supporters accused Obama of misogyny. The delegate knife fight didn’t end until the last primary in June.

Democrats feared the lingering scars would prompt Hillary die-hards, known as PUMAs for “Party Unity My Ass,” would abandon Obama in the general election. That didn’t happen. At the end of the day, the ideological distance between Obama and Clinton wasn’t much, making it easy for the camps to unite around the common Republican enemy.

Other times Democratic rifts were negated by Republican ones. The 1992 primary pitted Bill Clinton against Paul Tsongas. Clinton, who had planned to run to Mario Cuomo’s right, swerved left to dispatch his unexpected rival whose mantra was “I’m not Santa Claus.” Clinton called Tsongas “cold-blooded.” Tsongas called Clinton “Pander Bear.” Some disgruntled Tsongas supporters later defected to Ross Perot and his deficit reduction message. But it wasn’t fatal to Clinton. President George H. W. Bush was dragged down by his own problems with Perot and, earlier in the year, primary challenger Pat Buchanan.

Jimmy Carter survived an “Anybody But Carter” effort in the 1976 primaries, fueled by those worried that the Southerner was too conservative. Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Frank Church made late entries into the race and won several primaries after Carter appeared to have enough delegates in hand. But President Gerald Ford faced a more serious ideological revolt in the form of Ronald Reagan’s primary challenge. Still, Carter eventually lost some support on his left to the independent Eugene McCarthy. He won 1 percent of the vote, and arguably tipped Oregon and Maine to Ford. But that wasn’t quite enough to deny Carter the White House.

The big worry for Democrats is that 2016 will resemble 1980. Liberal skepticism of President Carter hadn’t dissipated — like with Clinton today, Carter was deemed insufficiently committed to single-payer health care — and Sen. Ted Kennedy sought to capitalize on progressives’ disaffection.

The race was rough. Kennedy cut an ad featuring actor Carroll O’Connor saying “Jimmy’s depression is going to be worse than Herbert’s.” Carter ran ads with people on the street calling Kennedy too liberal. When Kennedy came up short on delegates, he still tried to snatch the nomination out of Carter’s hands at the convention. A few days earlier, Kennedy arranged an appearance with independent candidate John Anderson, who suggested he’d drop out if Carter would. Some speculated Kennedy would back Anderson.

He didn’t. Kennedy surrendered to Carter but upstaged him with the famous “The Dream Will Never Die” convention speech. And in the fall, Carter lost the White House. He might have lost to Reagan anyway. But the divided convention prompted some disaffected liberals to vote Anderson, helping him reach 6.6 percent of the vote.

No one expects Sanders to take matters that far; he has pledged to support the Democratic nominee if he loses. But he will likely be in a position to secure a prime-time convention speech. If that speech diverges widely from Clinton’s — and Sanders is not known for watering down his speeches — it would run the risk of magnifying the ideological divide instead of healing it.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and U.S. News’ Pat Garofalo have argued that Clinton should welcome a drawn-out contest with Sanders. Garofalo writes “a real campaign will not only make her a better candidate for the fall, but will potentially keep Democrats engaged and more likely to come out in November.”

That was true for Obama in 2008, when he was a fresh face with plenty to learn and something to prove. Democratic voters wanted to be sure he was general election material.

The Democratic left today, for the most part, is not questioning Clinton’s electability. It is questioning her convictions. It is not at all clear that outlasting 12 rounds with Bernie will “keep Democrats engaged,” if his supporters grow more firm in their view of Clinton as a tool of Wall Street.

The question for Clinton and Sanders is: Will they be able to keep their race civil enough to maximize the chances for Democratic victory in November? Their rhetoric has been fairly gentle, so far. Yet animosity is bubbling up anyway. And campaigns usually get nastier, not nicer, as they grind on.