We reported Tuesday morning, before Super Tuesday, that the Democratic presidential primary was “clearly a two-man race, even though Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg [were] still formally running.”
Well, today, after Super Tuesday, we can say with certainty that it is no longer a two-man race: because, for all practical intents and purposes, the race is over. Joe Biden will be the Democratic presidential nominee.
Why? Because Biden won big, prevailing in 10 of the 14 Super Tuesday states. And, in the four states that Biden lost, he nonetheless gained delegates by surpassing the requisite 15 percent threshold.
Consequently, in a result no one anticipated, Biden actually has more delegates now than Sanders: 566 to 501, according to Axios.
Future Primaries. Moreover, between now and March 17, there will be primaries in 10 states, where, for the most part, Biden has the clear advantage. These include delegate-rich Florida (248 delegates), Illinois (148 delegates), and Ohio (153 delegates), all of which vote March 17.
Biden has the advantage in these states because the demographics are clearly in his favor.
Indeed, the voters in Florida, Illinois, and Ohio tend to be older and more traditional Democrats, who strongly favor Biden. These states also have significant numbers of black voters, who, likewise, strongly favor Biden.
Thus NPR’s Juana Summers reports:
In Alabama and Virginia, Biden had the support of about 7 in 10 black voters. In Tennessee and North Carolina, Biden had the support of more than half of black voters.
Biden also outperformed Sanders with black voters in Texas, where they make up about one-fifth of the Democratic primary electorate. Exit polls show Biden had the support of roughly 60 percent of black voters in the state; Sanders had 17 percent.
Indy100’s Sirena Bergman, likewise, reports:
Exit polls show that more than half of voters aged under 45 voted for Sanders, compared to only 17 per cent of them backing Biden. By contrast, those over 45 were drastically more more than twice as likely to vote for Biden than Sanders.
Sanders’ last stand almost certainly will be in Michigan, which votes March 10. Sanders won the state in 2016 by just 1.5 percent over Hillary Clinton, but trails Biden in the latest poll by 6.5 percent. That poll was completed before Super Tuesday; yet, it still shows Biden surging.
As The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein explains:
If Biden wins next week in Michigan, one of Sanders’s most significant victories four years ago, the rationale for the senator’s candidacy could quickly become murky.
Sanders won’t win Michigan, but even if he does, so what? Where does he go from there? Nowhere; that’s where. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last observes:
Over the next two weeks, Biden will win overwhelming victories in Florida and Mississippi. He is likely to win in Ohio, Arizona, Illinois, and Missouri. A week after that, he will win a large victory in Georgia.
As things stand now, no one else has a path to a majority of the delegates, and Biden’s principal rival is a socialist who does not identify as a Democrat, is heading into difficult demographic terrain, and—most importantly—is fading, rather than surging.
Meanwhile, Biden remains the vice president to the most recent Democratic president, a two-termer who remains immensely popular both with the public at large and the Democratic base.
Last is right: Biden, to his credit, has been resilient. He won this race when too many clueless pundits wrote him off. On the other hand, we have to note—as we have noted before—that this was Sanders’ race to lose and lose it he did. How?
By making absolutely no attempt to appeal to anyone beyond his base of young, hardcore secular progressives. As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney observes, this was a real problem for Sanders in South Carolina and other Southern states with large numbers of black voters, who tend to be more temperamentally conservative and religious.
If Sanders were a better politician, with more range and reach, he might have been able to pivot and find common ground with these more traditional people of faith. But the truth is that Sanders is a dour, dull and predictable socialist apparatchik who seldom smiles and rarely shows any wit, humor or humanity.
And so he lost.
Sanders Limited Appeal. That’s why we can say confidently that this primary race is over. Sanders cannot be someone or something that he is not. We’ve seen him now in two presidential campaigns, 2016 and 2020. Democratic primary voters have taken their measure of the man, and they’ve found him wanting.
“Sanders reached 33 percent or more of the vote in just five of the 14 states that voted, including his home state; beyond Vermont, he did not exceed 36 percent, his share in Colorado,” Brownstein notes.
Of course, there is a lot more to say and observe about Super Tuesday and what it means for the future of American politics. We’ll record those observations and explore those issues in future posts.
But certainly, the most significant development thus far is that Super Tuesday determined at last whom the Democrats will nominate as their standard-bearer against Trump, and that standard-bearer is 77-year-old Joe Biden.
Feature photo credit: CBS News via the BBC.