The Democratic Party is facing a serious existential question.
And if the party doesn't make the right moves in 2016 - if they don't hang onto the independent voters and first time voters who are turning out in droves to vote for Bernie and other progressive challengers to the DNC establishment - the Democratic Party seriously risks alienating an entire generation of voters.
A full 42% of Americans identify as independents according to a
Gallup poll from earlier this year- as opposed to only 29% of Americans who identify as Democrats and 26% of Americans who identify as Republicans, marking the fifth year in a row that more than 4 in 10 adults identified as political independents.
Those independents are playing a huge role in both the Democratic and Republican primaries.
They're turning out in record numbers to cast votes in open primary states, and many of them are re-registering to vote as Democrats in states with closed primaries.
So why are certain members of the Democratic establishment implying that Bernie Sanders doesn't deserve to be the Democratic nominee, just because he's been a long-registered independent?
That sort of thinking from the Democratic establishment is incredibly narrow-minded and short-sighted.
After all, what good could possibly come out of alienating independents, or from ridiculing the so-called "Bernie Bros" who are professing that it's "BernieOrBust"?
Can the Democratic Party really afford to cast aside Bernie's supporters? Can it really afford to tell independents that they are unimportant to the Party?
There's no doubt that this primary has gotten tense, both Sanders' supporters and Clinton's supporters have hurled caustic insults at each other on Twitter and around the internet.
Bernie supporters have accused Hillary of being owned by special interests, and Hillary supporters in turn accuse Bernie supporters of being politically na�ve and embracing pie-in-the-sky policy proposals.
The "Bernie Bro" has become the go-to term (often used as a slur) to describe stereotypically hyper-passionate Bernie supporters: they're typically, and often falsely, depicted as college-age white males who want free stuff and shout down anyone who disagrees with them on the internet.
But the reality is, the people who are turning out to vote for Bernie, the people who seem to endlessly share Bernie memes online, the people who are turning out by the tens of thousands just to hear Bernie speak, are mostly average, hard-working American men and women of all races and ethnic and economic backgrounds who are sick and tired of a rigged political system and a rigged economy.
What the Democratic Party needs to realize, is that many of Bernie's supporters are voting for the first time, whether they're 18, 30 or 50 years old.
And just as importantly: even if they have voted before, many of them are voting as Democrats for the very first time.
