Hillary didn’t leave the center as much as she saw the center leave American politics. “There has been a hollowing out of the center, whether you’re talking about the center-right or the center-left,” says Galston. “You’re witnessing it up close in New Hampshire. The center of gravity in the parties has shifted.” As a result, many Democratic strategists feel it is now effectively impossible to go too far left and remain viable in a general election—and some even feel that dramatic leftward lurches are imperative to keep peripheral Democratic voters engaged. Conservative Democrats who just a few years ago agitated for caution around fractious cultural issues are now resigned to the fact that there is little electoral case they can make about the risk of alienating swing voters. “America is more polarized than it was then—you have a harder right and a harder left,” said former Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, whose predecessor and father, David, was Bill Clinton’s most prominent out-of-state campaign surrogate during the 1992 New Hampshire primary.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton opposed gay-marriage rights, wavered on whether she thought undocumented immigrants should be issued drivers licenses, and cast herself as such a fan of guns that Obama mocked her for “talking like she’s Annie Oakley.” This year, her enthusiasms have swung her in an opposite direction. Even before she had to take seriously Sanders’s challenge, Clinton had committed herself to full legal equality for transgender people, mused that an Australian-style gun-confiscation program is “worth looking at,” and said she thinks immigrants should be eligible to buy medical coverage on exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act regardless of their legal status. “A lot of wedge issues in ’92 just aren’t there anymore,” says Kamarck. “It’s been amazing to me how much the cultural issues have fallen off the table. The new generation coming into the electorate just doesn’t care about those issues.”