The U.S. presidential race is getting interesting - perhaps more interesting than it has been for the past 80 years or so. I'm talking about the Democratic primary, although the Republican side is always interesting in its own special way. Beltway pundits are beginning to think that Bernie Sanders has a real shot at the nomination. And it may be even bigger than they think.

A New York Times/CBS poll released late Wednesday showed  Hillary Clinton leading Bernie Sanders by a margin of 48 to 41 percent, down from a 20-point lead a month ago. Sanders showed a nearly 2-to-1 lead among voters under 45 years old. A Monmouth University poll released on January 12 showed Sanders ahead of Clinton in New Hampshire by 14 percentage points (53-39). A Quinnipiac poll released the same day showed Sanders had erased Clinton's lead in Iowa and was now ahead by 5 percentage points.

The standard political story is that victories in Iowa and New Hampshire could provide momentum for Sanders and change the dynamics of the race. But the way in which this happens is also important for understanding the present situation. The Iowa caucuses will be held on February 1, just 18 days from now. New Hampshire Democrats will vote on February 9. The voters in these contests are the ones who have been paying the most attention to the candidates and to the issues. And Sanders is leading in both of them. This means that the national polls, which still show Clinton in the lead, may be skewed by the lack of engagement of these voters. The numbers could change quickly once people get to know a little bit about Clinton's challenger.

This is what happened in 2008, when a freshman senator from Illinois named Barack Obama scored an upset victory against Hillary Clinton, whose nomination had been considered inevitable. In fact, two-and-a-half weeks before the Iowa primary - which is where we are now, Obama was trailing Clinton by 6 points there, and was about even in New Hampshire. And he was down by as much as 29 points nationally.

At that time in the 2008 presidential primary race, Obama was not quite even with Clinton in South Carolina. But after Obama won Iowa, and voters got a closer look at him, he beat Clinton there by a landslide 29 percentage points.

History could repeat itself, and it is clear from Hillary Clinton's escalating criticisms of Sanders that she is worried about it. Another hefty chunk of déjà vu: MoveOn.org, one of the most powerful grassroots/netroots forces in the Democratic primary - or the country for that matter - voted overwhelming on Sunday to endorse Bernie Sanders. MoveOn was a key player in the 2008 primary and mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers, as well as money, for Obama. With their endorsement this week they have pledged to organize their 43,000 members in Iowa and 30,000 in New Hampshire. This could easily make the difference in Iowa, where 239,000 votes were cast in the 2008 caucuses (a record turnout).

There are a lot of barriers built into our political system to make sure that a candidate like Sanders cannot make it to the presidency. He is proposing economic and institutional reforms that will redistribute income and even some political power to the majority, more than anything since the New Deal: breaking up the big banks, increasing the income and bargaining power of labor, taxes on Wall Street and the rich, campaign finance reform, and even reform of the most important and often unaccountable economic policy-making body in the country: the Federal Reserve. But some of the barriers to a candidate of this type have been breaking down. Sanders was able to raise $73 million dollars in 2015, with average donations of just $27 and without corporate money. And the Internet and social media provides both an alternative, non-monopolizable means of communication and also some limited check on the major media.

In response to Sanders' challenge, Clinton has moved considerably leftward on a number of economic issues. Political satirist Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker summed it up last April in one of his typical spoofs titled "Hillary expected to adopt all of Sanders' positions by noon." This week she proposed a 4 percent surcharge on incomes over $5 million. She also advocated expanding the coverage, and increasing the rate, of the estate tax, and closing some loopholes for rich taxpayers.

On Monday, Vice President Joe Biden praised Sanders for his "deep and real" yearning, "credibility," and "authenticity" on the issue of reducing income inequality; while saying, "It's relatively new for Hillary to talk about that." These sentiments have been bubbling up from the party base: If two candidates say that they are going to stand up to the corporations and billionaires that have pushed inequality to levels not seen for a century, and one is getting millions of dollars from them while the other gets nothing, this is something that voters are going to take into account.

David Axelrod, who was Obama's chief campaign strategist and then senior advisor when he was president, criticized Chelsea Clinton this week for her attacks on Bernie Sanders, saying that they were "not honest."

The statements from Biden and Axelrod indicate that Clinton's support at high levels, not only at the base, could also be eroding as her polling numbers slip.

Ironically, for all the rigged rules and concentration of income and power that Sanders rails against - and these are huge and have increased enormously since 1980 - he actually has a serious shot at the top job. There are a number of historically specific events that led to this possibility, and it is not necessarily something that happens more than once or twice in 80 years. But it's for real.  Anyone who thinks that such things are not possible needs to rethink their understanding of the United States political system.

- Mark Weisbrot  [http://www.cepr.net/index.php/mark-weisbrot/] is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. and president of Just Foreign Policy [http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/]. He is also the author of the new book "Failed: What the 'Experts' Got Wrong About the Global Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2015).

(This article was published on January 14, 2016 by Al Jazeera America [http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/democratic-presidential-primary-gets-real.html].)