Editor's note: Xiong Tong is an opinion editor with CGTN Digital. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

After the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, the beginning battles of every U.S. presidential election every four years, many U.S. political analysts both from the conservative and liberal aisles found that the Democrats are a mess, and in one article written by The Atlantic, Derek Thompson declared "The Democratic Party of 2020 Is Broken." Truly it is, or to be specific, the party politics of the establishment in the U.S. are broken since, at least, the last four years. Now, they have no way out unless they go populist.

Before the primaries of the 2016 presidential election, many political pundits predicted that there would be another Bush vs. Clinton election, if the Democrats selected former Governor of Florida Jeb Bush and the Republicans selected former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as each party's candidate, respectively. However, it proved that the voters got enough of the usual politics in the past decades, and laid their eyes on a political layman named Donald Trump.

Thomas Patterson, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, explained the bipolar politics by attributing the changes to the U.S. media trends, "Decades ago, Americans were in an old media system of getting news to inform the public, but in an era of social media right now, the function of the news shifted to engage the public. " This means whoever gets enough entertainment interaction gets most of the votes, and the former TV show host Donald Trump had more experience than any other candidates.

As the 2016 primaries turned out to be a mess for the Republican establishment, they didn't expect it to happen, but had no choice but to accept Trump as their candidate. They accommodated the reality of populist surge first.

However, similar populist movement gained momentum in the Democrat side, too, but the populist candidate of the progressives didn't get enough credit. 

The senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders led an influential campaign to challenge the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton, but not until the internal conflict went public that the Democratic National Committee staffers had leaked emails expressing support for Clinton in the primaries, while criticizing  Sanders campaign, did the public found out that their populist candidate was dishonestly beaten by his internal opponent in the party.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the establishment in the party did not face the reality of populist surge in their party in the way as Republicans. Moreover, after Trump won the 2016 election, the Democrats together with American mainstream progressive media went further to say that it was the populists' fault that let America shift in a way nobody wanted.

Dr. Michael Parenti, a progressive political scientist from Yale University explained me in an interview that he sees this similarly. "The Rustbelt people in the U.S. feel that they have worked harder but are earning less than those professionals. Many of the working public might have given stronger support to Bernie Sanders. But after he was defeated by Clinton, they have switched to Donald Trump who gives the facile impression of being for the common people.”

In the past decades, the Democrats supported the development of African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans, but by doing that, they neglected the life of some white Americans who were also poor. It is widely seen by political analysts that Clinton got the votes from the big cities whilst Trump got the support from the farmers.

To get a glimpse of what life it is like for poor white families in the 21st century, and understand these politicians popularity among American voters, two books caught my attention: "Hillbilly Elegy" and "Educated," both on the Amazon's bestseller list, which explains the popularity of them in American voters.

Both authors were born in cities or towns that have a population of white poor families. What was striking to me was that both authors described their towns, one in Ohio and another in a mountain village in Idaho, as saying that locals still had very conservative lifestyles and opinions toward the society even in an era where America's economic power is on top of the world.

Although "Hillbilly Elegy" was published in 2016 and "Educated" in 2018, the latter was as popular as the former, meaning poor white people's lives continued to be a popular subject during Trump's first term as president. 

However, the Democrats continued to neglect this. That's why in the 2020 election primaries the establishment candidate saw a complete failure since former Vice President Joe Biden left New Hampshire without a single delegate. On February 4, former President Barack Obama's chief political strategist David Axelrod admitted in a tweet that "Iowa's Democratic Party's handling of the messaging around it has been an abject disaster."

After the 2016 election, the Democrats should have taught themselves a lesson on why they had failed and face the reality that they, too, would need to turn the tide to the populist surge in their own party. The first two battles in the 2020 primaries have already proved that they also need to have a populist reform, if they want to win the elections against Trump this time.

In The Atlantic article, the author says "Sanders is playing in the 2020 primary a similar role to the one Trump played in 2016: a revolutionary storming the castle of a shattered party establishment."

That said, if the Democrats goes populist, then there would be two populist parties in America, and when that happens, the party politics will fall into pieces.

Some might fear the populist surge in both parties, which is partly because the mainstream progressive media in the past few years had kept vilifying populist theory as a far right conservative product over and over again. 

If Bernie Sanders is going to win all the primaries before the final stage of election, it is for the mainstream progressive media people to figure out how to redefine populism, as Dr. Parenti showed: "the real populism should be in the progressives, as Trump only used it as a means to win votes that he never really cared about the common people."

What would the next stage be like in American politics is hard to imagine, as it would be another chapter in the American history.

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