How can progressives enthusiastically support Booker in a Dem primary?

[Chief Justice Keef]

He can't. He's all the problems with Clinton (too close to corporatism/Wall Street, too centrist to win over left-wingers) maximized. He's not going to be able to appeal to progressives in the primary, and if he wins the nomination he'll lose to Trump in the general election and help the GOP retain their majorities in the House and Senate.

Democrats need to realize that Clinton's popularity with white suburbanites and college grads was a one-off thing, and even then it cost the Democrats a lot of down ballot races. You shouldn't be trying to appeal to disenfranchised Republicans who vote. You should be trying to appeal to working-class voters and Millennials who typically DON'T vote and maximize turnout among those groups.

[Chief Justice Keef]

He can't. He's all the problems with Clinton (too close to corporatism/Wall Street, too centrist to win over left-wingers) maximized. He's not going to be able to appeal to progressives in the primary, and if he wins the nomination he'll lose to Trump in the general election and help the GOP retain their majorities in the House and Senate.

Democrats need to realize that Clinton's popularity with white suburbanites and college grads was a one-off thing, and even then it cost the Democrats a lot of down ballot races. You shouldn't be trying to appeal to disenfranchised Republicans who vote. You should be trying to appeal to working-class voters and Millennials who typically DON'T vote and maximize turnout.

If Hillary Clinton of all people can win a Democratic primary, why shouldn't Booker be able to win? And the Sanders wing is clearly a minority of the Democratic primary electorate.

Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in 2016 because pretty much every other major Dem in the invisible primary decided not to run in 2016. Sanders ended up becoming the only real opposition to her nomination, because everybody else in the establishment didn't want to challenge her. Now that Clinton's out of the picture, things are more divisive when it comes to establishment-friendly candidates (Booker, Cuomo, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Klobuchar, etc.), so it's harder for the entire base to coalesce around one candidate when there's several other credible choices. That also makes it easier for one or two progressive "insurgent" candidates to take over the primaries when the establishment vote splits. That's pretty much what happened in the Republican primaries this year with Trump.

Just a hunch here, but probably because the only realistic chance Democrats have of retaking the House is through the suburban seats that Clinton won + the marginal Trump seats. D's have virtually zero chance of gaining back the House by running a bunch of Bernie Bro purists and by cranking up the college vote. That's not enough to win these seats. And I lol at the idea that educated whites are a one-off thing. For the past decade, that group has been trending Democratic, largely as a result of Millennial college grads being predominantly liberal and displacing old-school educated whites. Trump only exacerbated that. So no, I strongly disagree about this being a one-time fluke. Maybe for some of those voters, but I bet the group as a whole is going to be pretty close to evenly split for abwhile due to the trend I mentioned above, which was there before Trump even became a thing.

I'll concede to you that if you run moderate Democrats in those suburban seats Clinton won you can win them, especially in a Democratic wave year. But I don't agree with the premise you can't "crank up the college vote" and win the House. When you look at the excitement of these young voters for progressive policies, you could easily trigger some wins in the Midwest and Northeast if you appeal directly to their concerns and maximize turnout.

The way I see it, Democrats are now pretty much split into two factions; the moderate, center-left "Clinton" wing and the progressive, left-wing "Bernie" wing. Of course taking the Bernie strategy and applying that to a wealthy suburban district isn't foolproof, but the best course of actions is to take both avenues, basically unify the two groups into one giant coalition, and run candidates whose concerns and policies appeal to the voters in the district they're running in.

[Chief Justice Keef]

They are objectively bigger than the "Trump wing" of the GOP, dude, but that wouldn't allow you to phrase our politics as an elitist Democratic Party vs. a Heartland Republican Party, would it?  They faced ridiculously centralized/organized support for his rival that is HIGHLY unlikely to be duplicated in 2020.  IMO, it is far more likely that the "Sanders wing" gathers around one candidate than it is that the "Clinton wing" (not sure such a thing exists, TBH, they just loved Hillary) does the same.

Nice try, but the only one who cares about that is you, since you desperately want the GOP to be an "Orange County style" party of rich White suburbanites. And no, the Sanders wing of the Democratic party is not "objectively bigger" than the Trump wing of the GOP, haha. Just look how badly Kasich (who I supported) did in the Republican primaries.

If the Sanders wing of the party is that strong, well.. why didn't he win the nomination? The fact that they loved Hillary tells you all you need to know about where the party is headed in the future. And while Booker could very well turn out to be a bad candidate, he would still be a lot better than Clinton or maybe even Warren.

The future of the Democratic party lies in states like Georgia, Virginia and Arizona and not in the Midwest, whether one likes it or not.

LOL, no, I don't.  However, you take any opportunity possible to slyly and implicitly insinuate that Democrats are coastal elites, minorities and not much else; that's just ridiculous.  Then, if I ever call you out on it, you (technically correctly) act like you never (explicitly) said anything of the sort and pivot the accusation.  Bernie Sanders won a higher percentage of Democrats than Trump won of Republicans, did he not?  As for your question, we have all given you several reasons why Hillary defeated Bernie, none of which you're interested in hearing besides, "The Dem Party is represented by Hillary-type voters, not populists," because it's blatantly obvious you think that's true.  It's not.

As for your last statement, that is ridiculously debatable.  The Democratic Party of 2016 offers "rich, White suburbanites" absolutely nothing, and - as 2016 proved if you look at the exit polls - they offer them even less than TRUMP, who's the worse fit ever for them.

Do you realize that they don't really have to? A lot of these people are wealthy, white, latte liberals who place higher premiums (or pretend to care) on social justice issues. Or yuppie Millennials who have been liberal their whole lives who are entering the workforce. The GOP doesn't really offer them much of anything except tax cuts, and that's not as big a voting issue for this group anymore.

But that's basically saying "what else are you gonna do?", and in that case, they don't vote.