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.

Coming on the heels of his three-state sweep, Bernie Sanders is claiming momentum and furiously pushing back against the notion that Hillary Clinton’s pledged delegate lead is mathematically insurmountable. “We have a path to victory,” campaign strategist Tad Devine insisted this week, though he acknowledged that involves winning most of the states coming up ”by large margins.”

But to do that, Sanders has to figure out how to dramatically widen his base of support—and right away. In effect, this 74-year-old aspiring revolutionary needs to start gaining the trust of anyone older than 30. Sanders must swiftly persuade a large number of skeptical voters who are not part of his core of youthful enthusiasts, voters who are nonwhite, or middle-aged, or even his own age and older.


The statistics show incontrovertibly that a dramatic generation gap hovers over the entire Democratic race. Through the March 15 contests, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, Sanders has won 71 percent of the under-30 vote. Subtract those votes from the overall raw totals, and you find that Clinton has reaped 65 percent of the 30-plus vote. Sanders brags about his massive youth support, but the reality is that the generation gap cuts in Clinton’s favor. Age was also the difference between Sanders winning Michigan and losing the rest of the Midwest: 45 percent of the Michigan Democratic electorate was under 45 years of age, whereas in Ohio and Illinois, that share was less than 40 percent.

Those numbers tell us that Sanders can’t simply turn up the volume of the attacks on Clinton from the left, as the campaign has signaled to the Washington Post it would do. Such moves will appeal mainly to people already inclined to back him. To outperform the models and reach voters outside of his core constituencies, Sanders needs to change his game and adjust his message.

The Sanders campaign partially grasps this reality, but it seems to think the problem can be solved mainly by more exposure to the candidate. For example, campaign pollster Ben Tulchin says the plan to come from behind in New York is to “introduce Bernie to voters of color, to African-Americans and Latinos. … When we do, we make up a lot of ground and we can compete.” Well, that’s half true. Introducing Bernie to South Carolina voters with the help of surrogates Cornel West, Spike Lee and Killer Mike was a total bust, prompting the campaign to make the fateful decision of writing off the rest of the South.

The campaign has done marginally better with African-Americans outside the South, winning 27 percent to 32 percent of the black vote in his Michigan and Oklahoma wins as well as in his Ohio, Missouri and Illinois losses. Certainly, increased exposure has something to do with it—you can’t get votes without it. But youth is probably the biggest driver of these African-American gains, just as age has trumped gender when it comes to Sanders’ support among young women.

How can Bernie leap the gap? First, he should tweak his pitch and play up his pragmatic streak. Many Democratic voters already know he has a shoot-the-moon platform and wants a grass-roots “revolution” to ram it through Congress. But how many know about his bipartisan compromises to enact Veterans Administration reform and limited auditing of the Federal Reserve? How many know that his tenure as Burlington, Vermont mayor was, as the New York Times characterized it, “more pragmatic than socialist.” Sanders references this history at times, but he needs to make it central to his case, especially if he’s to win over older voters who still remember the Cold War and are skittish about the “socialist” label.

These older voters also remember the Ronald Reagan years, when Democrats were in the political wilderness and Bill Clinton resuscitated the party by shedding liberal positions that had become dead weight. In turn, they are more accepting of less ambitious, pragmatic policy goals, and the occasional use of “triangulation” in pursuit of less ideological swing voters. Carrying more memories of political disappointment, older voters are in general less interested in ideological perfection.

Many voters younger than 30 begin from a wholly different perspective. They have little to no memory of life in a Republican-dominated era. Their introduction to the Clinton administration was learning how Wall Street was deregulated by triangulating Democrats before the 2008 crash. Hence Sanders’ jabs against Hillary Clinton’s ties to Wall Street resonate resoundingly with the young while they don’t possess the same magic with the old.

Hillary’s older base is also more impressed with her on foreign policy, according to exit polls, despite Bernie’s repeated reminders of her Iraq war resolution vote. In Ohio, she beat him on who would make the better “commander-in-chief” by 17 points. In Sanders’ neighboring state of Massachusetts, she outpaced him on who voters would “trust in an international crisis” by 20 points.

A glaring example of why Sanders suffers a national security gap occurred last week. Clinton quickly responded to the Brussels bombings with a foreign policy address that laid out her counter-terrorism strategy. Sanders issued a statement and responded to Brussels-related questions during interviews, but didn’t do anything that showed depth on the subject.

Coincidentally, Sanders delivered a rare foreign policy address the day before the Brussels attack, which did discuss how he would approach ISIS. (It was little noticed because all the other candidates in both parties delivered foreign policy speeches at the well-covered AIPAC conference that day. If he had accepted the invite to appear in person, his strategy for Middle East peace might have dominated the headlines.)

Sanders is no pacifist; he supports the use of drones and airstrikes to kill terrorists. But he tends to emphasize, as he did in the last week, “The major powers in the region—especially the Gulf States—have to take greater responsibility for… the defeat of ISIS.” He has no obligation to discard his belief. But if he wants more voters to trust him in an international crisis, he needs to explain what he would do in an international crisis, not just what he wants others to do.

Undoubtedly, Sanders will be loath to make these sorts of message adjustments. “Bernie Sanders Has Stuck To The Same Message For 40 Years,” concluded National Public Radio’s Tamara Keith after tracking the history of his speechifying. He has been honing his stump for his entire adult life. He still writes his own speeches on yellow legal pads. He’s not going to blithely change his message.

It’s just that he has to.

***

How steep is the climb for Sanders? Both NPR’s Domenico Montanaro and 538’s Nate Silver have sketched out what it would take for Sanders to overtake Clinton in the pledged delegate count: winning 16 of the remaining 18 states, typically by double-digit margins. Even if Sanders’ only hope is to reduce the deficit of approximately 230 delegates by enough to convince superdelegates that Clinton is a spent force, he still needs to win a hefty majority of what’s left in the pledged delegate pool.

History says that’s not doable. Fourth-quarter comebacks in the modern presidential primary era don’t happen. Even when leading candidates suffer March setbacks, as they often do, their early delegate leads always help them muddle through to the convention.

On other hand, Sanders argues he’s already on his way to making history, with big wins in five of the last six contests. “This is what momentum is,” he said Saturday night as he was sweeping Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii. “We want to take that momentum here … if we do well here in Wisconsin, we do well in New York State, we do well in California—you know what? We’re on our way to the White House.”

In truth, evidence suggests there is no such thing as momentum in this race. Sanders’ New Hampshire landslide was followed by a Nevada loss. His Michigan upset was followed by a Midwest shutout. And Sanders’ current 5-of-6 streak is not an example of momentum, but a fluke of the primary schedule. The five, like 10 of the 14 Sanders wins, were in lower-turnout, activist-heavy, African-American-light caucuses. (Two of his four primary wins were in his home state of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire.)

Outside of his impressive yet narrow Michigan score, Sanders has yet to win a state where African-Americans compose more than 20 percent of the Democratic electorate. In Washington State, Alaska and Hawaii—his most recent wins—the nonwhite populations largely come from the Asian/Pacific Islander community.

And while Sanders has yet to encroach on her turf, Clinton has picked off states from his natural base, winning or tying with white voters in Iowa, Ohio and Massachusetts.

Now only two caucus states remain, tiny Wyoming and North Dakota, though Sanders can be expected to win some other predominantly white, midsized primary states. A New York Times model, largely based on demographics, projects Sanders will take 10 of the remaining 18—with half of the projected wins by margins of greater than 5 points. Not too shabby for a long-shot democratic socialist. But without wins in delegate-rich New York, California, New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania, his final run would yield nowhere near what he would need to prompt superdelegate defections, let alone to beat Clinton outright among the pledged delegates.

Sanders may find it exceptionally hard to offer new material to his huge rallies of fans who desperately want to hear all his old hits. The last Vermont insurgent presidential candidate, Howard Dean, shared with the Huffington Post “Candidate Confessional” podcast earlier this year that “I knew I had to make the turn” from angry insurgent to plausible president, but “I couldn’t make myself do it. … I would try to give a measured speech, and the audience would be completely flat. And I wouldn't let myself leave them flat.”

Sanders has gone much further than Dean, much further than most people expected, without making that turn. But he has not gone far enough to win, and time is running out.