I'd like to think she will cause incalculable harm to the democrats. Yet I am not so sure. The democrats are going hard left in 2020. It's nice to think the democratic candidate will be rejected in a landslide. I'm not convinced that will happen. There are too many things that can occur between now and then.
I do fear what she stands for - an increasingly powerful role for govt across every level, but particularly at the federal level. She has latched on to a movement just like trump did. She is being helped by the media, which have promoted her far more than any typical first term representative. She is an entirely natural outcome of our current political culture.
What scares me is she could easily appeal to the voters that claimed they would accept either bernie or trump in 2016. On the surface these people should not exist. The gap between a sanders administration and a trump administration is so wide one wonders how anyone could possibly express that opinion. Yet the one thing sanders and trump had in common was their 'outsider' status. If the only criteria is a subjective assessment of being either in or out of the establishment then people can be easily swayed. It is therefore possible for a hard left person to get elected on the national ticket based primarily on an image. It wouldn't matter to the democrats how they won - they would proclaim the victory as a mandate for all of their crazy ideas.
She is easy to ridicule. But I think we dismiss her and people like her at our peril.
