For the second straight campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will be the runner-up for the Democratic presidential nomination. Over the course of two elections, he has galvanized young liberals and moved the party well to the Left. This time, he even has likely nominee Joe Biden, the supposed “centrist” in the race, talking about free college.
After Biden demolished him in another wave of primaries on Tuesday, Sanders has no plausible path to the nomination. He has lost 20 of the last 26 contests following his victory in Nevada. He already lost winnable states, including Texas, Washington, and Michigan — the latter being the site of a major upset win in 2016. California, the biggest state he was able to claim, is already well behind him.
On Tuesday, Sanders suffered another string of defeats in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona. The slaughter would have been even worse had the Ohio primary gone on as scheduled.
Sanders has actually lost ground since 2016. Not only is he still unable to appeal to black voters, but he’s also doing worse against Biden among middle-class and rural voters than he did against Hillary Clinton four years ago. Despite vows to create new voters, he has not been able to turn out younger Democrats in sufficient enough levels to offset his weaknesses elsewhere.
As of this writing, Sanders is about 300 delegates behind Biden. To win the nomination, he would have to capture 62% of remaining delegates — a tall order considering he has only won 39% of those allocated to date. The margin is likely to be wider once more delegates trickle in from Biden’s Tuesday victories.
In short, Sanders has no plausible path to the nomination.
Most candidates, put in the same position as Sanders, would end their campaigns rather than drag out the primaries for months. Of course, Sanders is no ordinary candidate. He is an ideological crusader. And absent winning, he sees his campaign as a vehicle to carry on his socialist message.
But such a campaign is harder to justify now given that the nation is in the midst of staving off a pandemic, in which guidance on social distancing keeps getting more aggressive. In the latest guidance, health officials are now recommending gatherings of no more than 10 people until at least the end of the month. This, they say, is necessary to slow the spread of the violent disease so our medical system may have a fighting chance to manage the expected surge in patients requiring critical care.
Even Sanders himself questioned the idea of holding primaries while the crisis is ongoing rather than postponing them. “I’m thinking about some of the elderly people sitting behind the desks, registering people, doing all that stuff,” Sanders said. “Does that make a lot of sense? I’m not sure that it does.”
So it’s difficult to see what exactly Sanders is accomplishing at this point by remaining in the race.
His campaigns typically feed on large rallies, but he has not been able to hold them. Sanders isn’t able to mobilize his army of young supporters to knock on doors and is instead having to resort to phones only.
Sanders’s message doesn’t have much chance of getting through a news cycle in which the public is focused on reports about the daily progress of the fight against the coronavirus.
The most recent debate against Biden had to be moved from a live audience to a CNN studio in which lecterns were kept 6 feet apart, and the candidates had to forgo a handshake in favor of an elbow bump. The conversation was dominated by the coronavirus.
So, while we hesitate to tell any candidate when it’s time for them to drop out, the unique public health threat posed by large gatherings should weigh heavily on Sanders as he makes his decision. It’s one thing to run an ideological campaign during normal times or to stay in a winnable race during a public health crisis. But it’s difficult to see how Sanders, with no path to the nomination, urges people to turn out to vote for him at a time when health experts are urging bans on large gatherings.
