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.

Bernie Sanders has a political revolution all dressed up with nowhere to go.

The Oval Office is not available. If the delegate math isn’t clear enough after Hillary Clinton’s South Carolina blowout, it will be after Super Tuesday. Clinton holds wide leads in most of the March 1 states, and Sanders is barely contesting the southern part of the map.


The next battleground for Bernie’s brigades is the convention, where, depending on the size of his delegate haul, he may be able to make a claim for the heart and soul of the party. In the run-up, Sanders could try to influence Clinton’s vice-presidential choice. On the convention floor, he could force platform fights that reveal the breadth of support within the party for his agenda. At the podium, he could point to his dominance among young voters as proof that his vision is the party’s future.

And … then what?

The Sanders campaign has exceeded all expectations, tapping into a democratic socialist vein in the electorate that many thought did not exist. But losing campaigns typically fade away. If Bernie’s backers want to see their revolution live beyond the arc of Bernie’s candidacy, they will have to adapt to new terrain. They will have to wage battles less exhilarating than a presidential campaign but strategically necessary for lasting change. The general election marks the first test of Sanders’ ability to lead his own revolution when the immediate goal is no longer revolutionary.

That goal at first will be just accepting Hillary, the candidate that Bernie’s supporters have fled. Assuming he follows through with his promise to back the eventual Democratic nominee, he will be asking his movement to get behind the person that a few months ago represented everything wrong with the status quo, while she hopscotches from fundraiser to fundraiser.

If Sanders can prevent too many of his backers from defecting to the next closest socialist (the Green Party’s Jill Stein) or the next closest populist (a significant risk if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee), then comes the hardest challenge of all: accomplishing something—anything—in Congress.

It’s easy to look at the power and energy of Bernie’s movement and conclude that Clinton and the Democratic Establishment can no longer ignore the democratic socialist rumblings in their ranks. But a President Hillary Clinton will almost surely face another gridlocked Congress. (Democrats have a shot at taking back the Senate, but little hope of winning the House.) Washington will be, once again, consumed with finding elusive bipartisan common ground. There will be no talk of breaking up the banks, free public college tuition, single-payer health care or a trillion-dollar infrastructure investments, either in Clinton’s inaugural address or her initial speech to her first joint session of Congress. The Revolution won’t be able to play offense, only defense: pressuring congressional Democrats to reject any concessions the Clinton Administration offers Republicans.

Trying to torpedo as many unsavory bipartisan deals as possible can keep Sandernistas occupied, but the never-ending grind of obstructionism can also be demoralizing. Sanders may want to consider shelving his most grandiose ideas and picking a relatively attainable policy goal—a financial transaction tax, lowerng student loan rates, empowering Medicare to bargain for lower drug prices—to rally his forces behind and, just maybe, pocket a spirit-lifting win.

When the revolution butts up against Congress, it will find a generational disconnect. Sanders’ demanding, impatient troops are mostly composed of voters under 30. But today, there are only 11 Democrats in the House 40 or younger, and only four of those are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus founded by Sanders. The average age of the congressional Democrats is about 60. And that won’t change much after this election; only 15 Democratic House Representatives are retiring or running for another office.

Over the course of the Obama Administration, these battle-scarred, jaded Democratic elders have been increasingly willing to push back when Obama veers rightward; last year they withheld their votes on “fast track” trade agreement authority (but could not stop it) and forced the White House to withdraw a nominee for Treasury Undersecretary on the grounds that he was too close to Wall Street. But they haven’t copied their Republican backbench counterparts in repeatedly making maximalist demands followed by government shutdowns or leadership coups.

One possible outlet for the pent-up progressive frustration evident in the Sanders campaign would be a concerted effort to change Congress itself by electing more Bernies, but so far it’s hard to see a movement like that afoot. The Washington Post found only 30 candidates for House seats this year who have endorsed Sanders, and only four with a shot at winning. Very few incumbent House Democrats are facing ideologically motivated primary challengers. While some progressive infrastructure exists to support candidates running to the left in Democratic primaries—including the organizations Democracy for America, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Blue America PAC—it can only do so much without more candidates, and it has not been supercharged by the Sanders operation.

At least, not yet. Sanders could decide in 2017 that a campaign to change Congress is the logical next step for his revolution. He could join forces with those groups or start his own. But if he hopes to seed a leftist version of the Tea Party for the 2018 congressional elections, he will need his young voters to do what they didn’t do the last two midterms: show up. In presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, the under 30 vote made up nearly 20 percent of the electorate. In 2010 and 2014, it was 11 percent and 13 percent respectively.

History isn’t exactly on Sanders’s side. The track record of movement building by failed insurgent presidential candidates is mixed at best. Perhaps the most successful attempt came from conservative evangelical leader Pat Robertson. He built the Christian Coalition out of his 1988 campaign mailing list, which exerted great influence over Republican candidates through voter guides distributed in churches—until its political activities prompted the IRS to revoke its tax-exempt status in 1999. And Democracy for America, founded by Howard Dean after his 2004 bust, is still kicking, though Dean handed the reins to his brother shortly after its inception.

Even less impactful was Ross Perot’s attempt to build a sustainable third party in the wake of his 1992 campaign: His Reform Party couldn’t move beyond being a cult of personality and disintegrated after letting Pat Buchanan lead its 2000 ticket. Other ideological activists-turned-presidential-candidates, like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ron Paul, returned to the nonprofit operations they previously built, but largely stayed away from electoral politics. Sanders still has a job in the Senate, and unless he chooses to retire, he won’t be able to dedicate himself full-time to movement building. Though he could, like Dean, tap a trusted ally to take his supporter list and forge ahead.

If Sanders were a few years younger, perhaps he and his revolution would find inspiration in Ronald Reagan’s 1976 insurgency against President Gerald Ford, which whetted the appetite of the Republican base and laid the groundwork for the “Reagan Revolution” four years later. But Reagan, the oldest person to be sworn in as president at age of 69, was a spring chicken compared to Sanders. By Election Day 2020, he will be 79. This revolution can’t survive as a cult of personality built around its current leader.

The youthful Sandernistas do have time and demographics on their side. As the years march on, Baby Boomer members of Congress will retire and a Millennial generation, whose views were shaped by the Iraq War and the 2008 market crash, will replace them. The challenge for the budding revolutionaries is how to stick together for many years without much hope of immediate morale-boosting policy victories, without many lockstep allies in Congress, and without the singular character who brought them together for a brief, thrilling time in the 2016 primaries.