One lesson of recent presidential primaries is that Democratic voters are transfixed by identity politics, having elected the first black president and chosen the first woman presidential nominee. Another is that there’s a large constituency for left-wing candidates

What they haven’t been interested in is cisgendered white male liberals. The largely forgotten John Edwards fell by the wayside quickly in 2008, and Martin O’Malley, with credentials similar to those of Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis, attracted zero support in 2016.

That leaves them with no obvious choices if Clinton loses this year. Their most visible and attractive left-wingers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, will be over 70 in 2020. Prominent black and Hispanic officeholders tend to represent overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies and have made few of the bows to moderation that made Barack Obama a plausible national candidate in 2008.

It’s possible that a post-2016 Democratic Party could look like Britain’s Labour Party, which abandoned the New Labour posture of Tony Blair after it produced three landslide victories in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and which under its current far-left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn seems headed for landslide defeat in 2020.