Though Sanders remains likely to lose, his ideology may prevail in the long run. Illustration by Barry Blitt

On February 8th, the day before the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton stepped onstage to introduce his wife at a rally in Manchester. “I have to be careful what I say,” he told the crowd, acknowledging his tendency, over the years, to eclipse her with a loose remark that sends the news cycle churning. The former President seems diminished since Hillary Clinton’s last race, in 2008—he is thinner, more soft-spoken, less energetic. And yet Clintonism—the ideology, the tactics, and the record of his eight years in the White House—still looms large in the Democratic primaries. The subtext, and often the center, of Bernie Sanders’s campaign to upset Hillary Clinton is that too many of the signature achievements of her husband’s Presidency were a series of betrayals—the deregulation of Wall Street, an obsession with deficit reduction, the Defense of Marriage Act, his crime bill, the North American Free Trade Agreement—and that she was an enthusiastic partner in passing that agenda. At times during the Democratic primary campaign, the nineteen-nineties have been so central to the debate that one expects to hear Weezer or Rage Against the Machine playing softly in the background.

Despite Sanders’s surprising victory last Tuesday in Michigan, where polls showed him trailing by an average of some twenty points, his odds of winning the nomination are slight. But his candidacy has exposed deep tensions within the Democratic Party. Long before Barack Obama attacked Hillary, during the 2008 campaign, for her “triangulating and poll-driven positions,” Sanders, who was elected to the House in 1990 and to the Senate in 2006, has been making the case against Clintonism. In the nineteen-nineties, he was a gadfly leftist in a party that was trying to seize the political center after twelve years of Reaganism. As Sanders noted in the debate in Flint, on March 6th, when Hillary was First Lady she publicly supported NAFTA, while he “was on a picket line” protesting it. Today, both candidates oppose the agreement—and many other aspects of Bill Clinton’s record.

Clinton’s 1992 campaign and his Administration reflected two political strains that still define the Party: one is populist, anti-Wall Street, and pro-regulation; the other is more austere, more oriented toward the New York financial world, and more laissez-faire. Clinton’s Labor Secretary, Robert B. Reich, pressed for more government spending, but the top economic adviser in the White House, Robert Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive and later the Treasury Secretary, ultimately persuaded Clinton to abandon many of the liberal spending priorities that he championed during his campaign and to focus instead on reducing the deficit. Later, Rubin also pushed to deregulate the financial industry. That polarity remains. Hillary Clinton is surrounded by Rubin’s acolytes; Reich, an old friend of Bill Clinton’s from their days together at Oxford as Rhodes Scholars, recently endorsed Sanders.

During Obama’s years in office, Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, stood for the populist left, and Timothy Geithner, Obama’s first Treasury Secretary and the former chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, replaced Rubin as the ally of Wall Street. Although Obama enjoyed two years of major liberal victories, including the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, such achievements ended after the Republican takeover of Congress in 2011.

As a long stalemate began in Washington, the activist left began to support movements such as Occupy Wall Street, which began in 2011, as a response to economic inequality, and Black Lives Matter, which arose in 2013 and addresses criminal-justice reform and institutional racism. Both movements are sharply critical of the Clinton era. Occupy points to Clinton’s deregulation of the financial industry, and Black Lives Matter has highlighted the fact that Clinton’s crime bill, which introduced the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, sparked a rise, in the past two decades, in imprisonment, particularly of young African-American men. Last year, Bill Clinton told the N.A.A.C.P., “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”

Neither movement is a great deal more sanguine about the Obama years. By the time Sanders made his decision to run, last April, there was a restless base ready to support a candidate who broke with the perceived centrism of both the Clinton and the Obama Administrations. While the Republican Party establishment has been blindsided by the populism behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, a similar sentiment has existed on the Democratic side. Hillary’s campaign was slow to grasp the scale of that movement and to acknowledge the momentum of the Sanders campaign. “We have two ‘change’ electorates,” Neera Tanden, a longtime adviser to Hillary and the president and C.E.O. of the Center for American Progress, told me. “One is just smaller than the other. The problem on the Democratic side is that the strong support for Barack Obama hid it from everybody.”

Sanders “is tapping into something that is very deep and very profound inside the Democratic Party, which is this discontent with the system that is no longer producing for everyday people,” Simon Rosenberg, a Hillary supporter and the head of NDN (formerly the New Democrat Network), a liberal think tank in Washington, told me. “He has characterized Hillary as a champion of that system and as somebody who is actually a leader of the system, while he is the one that wants to change it.” Rosenberg added, “He’s not being perceived as a leftist. He is being perceived as somebody who is deeply in touch with a sense that something has gone wrong and that the system isn’t working.”

In Manchester, Bill Clinton tried to make sense of the uprising. “I understand people who get madder every day when they keep reading we’re the best-performing economy in the world,” he said. “We’ve grown fourteen million jobs in five years and yet eighty-four per cent of the people haven’t had an increase in their income since the crash.” Wages have been stagnant for so long, he said, that it was a wonder that it had taken this many years for the electorate to erupt. In New Hampshire, Sanders received sixty per cent of the vote and Clinton thirty-eight per cent—one of the worst electoral defeats that either Clinton had ever suffered.

Lately, Hillary has sounded less like a Clinton Democrat and more like a Sanders Democrat. Since the campaign began, she has modernized her positions on trade, the economy, and criminal-justice reform. (She came out in support of same-sex marriage only in 2013.) A few days before the primary in Michigan, where her husband’s free-trade agenda is highly unpopular, Clinton gave a major economic speech, in which she asked, “How do we raise incomes and create the good jobs of the future?” She then said, “I don’t think we can answer that question by refighting battles from twenty years ago.” She blamed some problems in the economy on “Wall Street and some of our corporations,” and noted that the purpose of banks “is not to create huge riches for a select few at the expense of everyone else.”

Sanders doesn’t buy the transformation. “It doesn’t matter what her policies are,” he told me last Tuesday, as he waited for the primary results from Michigan and Mississippi to come in. “What matters is whether or not, if she is elected President—and we’re in this to win—if she’s going to stand up and fight. And I think there are many people who will tell you, look, that will not be the case. Look, anybody can give any speech they want tomorrow—somebody writes you a great speech—but the day after you’re elected you say, ‘Well, you know, I talked to my Republican colleagues and they think this is not acceptable.’ ”