DETROIT — Democrats are skittish Bernie Sanders is going to cling onto his presidential hopes as Joe Biden’s primary victories threaten to dash them.
The Vermont senator’s path to the 2020 Democratic nomination became more difficult to traverse Tuesday as the two-term vice president added more wins to his column, running away with victories in Mississippi, Missouri, and Michigan, the mega-state of the night.
Democrats, such as Lincoln Park Strategies’ Stefan Hankin, fear Sanders won’t concede until he’s exhausted all his options, hurting Biden before he faces President Trump in the general election.
“Sanders does not exactly have a track record of being a team player. I mean, he’s not actually a member of the Democratic Party,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And his supporters, if you haven’t noticed, are slightly zealous about the whole thing.”
Hankin predicted there was likely “going to be some bumps and some ugliness” because “it will take a while” for Biden to amass the majority of delegates, or 1,991, before the Democratic convention this summer in Milwaukee.
“Hopefully, the diehards kind of come to grips with the fact that, as Democrats or progressives or whatever they call themselves, that beating Trump is the main goal here, and they’ll support Biden and get over it,” he said.
Hankin confessed he was “more concerned” than he would like to be about Sanders offering a less than full-throated endorsement of Biden, discouraging voter turnout on the margins like he implicitly did in 2016.
“It then just becomes, like, how much does Bernie want to make this about Bernie and how much does he want to make this about Democrats winning in November?” he said.
Those worries are echoed by Democrats on the ground.
John Case, 68, told the Washington Examiner at Biden’s final Michigan rally in Detroit Monday night he hoped Sanders would throw his political weight behind former President Barack Obama’s No. 2 even if he’s not the nominee.
“I think a lot of his supporters didn’t go and vote. And if that happens this time, shame on all of us,” the Detroit retired executive said, referring to Sanders’s tepid endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, Hilmar Marino, a Sanders fan at his University of Michigan event in Ann Arbor over the weekend, said the senator “should fight until the end.”
“In July, if it’s Biden, we don’t have any other choice. But at least, I think we should fight until the end,” the Ann Arbor pharmacist, 57, repeated.
Following Biden’s sweep of the Super Tuesday map, Sanders has recycled his gripes against the Democratic establishment, complaining of unprecedented “venom” as Democratic heavyweights and the “corporate media” work “frantically to try and defeat” him and his campaign.
He’s provoked criticism for suggesting key Democratic figures “forced” former rivals Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar out of the race. He’s also rattled Democrats across the board by rehashing how the 2020 nominee should be selected.
“And I just want all of you to think about what it would look like to this country if candidate ‘X’ — and I don’t know who candidate ‘X’ would be, it could be me, could be somebody else — goes into the convention in Milwaukee with the most votes, and the party leadership and the insiders and the corporate world said, ‘Oh, yes, people voted for you, you won a number of states, you got more votes than your opponent, but we, the corporate world, the insiders, we don’t think you’re the candidate, and we’re going to select candidate ‘Z,'” he said during a post-Super Tuesday press conference in Vermont.
Left-fringes of Sanders’s liberal base reflect their leader’s recalcitrant attitude.
Clinton accused Sanders supporters of pushing sexist tropes against her in the 2016 cycle, while this year they targeted leaders of Nevada’s Culinary Workers Union for opposing “Medicare for all,” the former mayor of Burlington’s signature policy.
Sanders has distanced himself from the bad apples, calling them jerks and suggesting some of the harassers were only parading as backers.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking in Ann Arbor, told the crowd, “in order for us to win, we have to grow.”
“We must be inclusive, we must bring more people into this movement,” the liberal firebrand said.
Ahead of Tuesday’s results, though, Sanders showed no signs of giving in.
Although prefacing his attacks against Biden with the phrase “he’s a good man,” Sanders this week ramped up his rhetoric against his competitor, hitting him more forcefully over his Social Security, trade, and pro-abortion records.
“What should we do? Anoint the candidate?” he told reporters in Phoenix when quizzed on his tactic.
Democrats in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio will weigh in on the primary next week, deciding how to allocate their combined total of 577 pledged delegates. Ahead of Tuesday’s contests, Biden led Sanders in the delegate count, 624 to the senator’s 556.
