Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders navigated an awkward coronavirus pandemic climate during Wisconsin’s Tuesday primary, the nominating first contest since states across the country instituted shelter-in-place orders.
Official results from the primary will not be known until April 13, due to a U.S. district court ruling that said clerks cannot report results until the deadline for absentee ballots to be received, but the contest is unlikely to change the trajectory of the Democratic presidential race. Biden, who is likely to win the Democratic presidential nomination and has a delegate lead of more than 300, led Sanders by 28 points in a Marquette University poll of likely Wisconsin Democratic voters at the end of the month.
Wisconsin’s move to hold a primary despite the coronavirus crisis put the former vice president and the Vermont senator in a strange position. More than a dozen other states have postponed their primary elections due to the pandemic, and the last Democratic presidential primary contests were three weeks ago.
Last week, Sanders called for Wisconsin to delay its election, warning that having voters wait in line and interact with poll workers, who are largely over 60 years old, would unnecessarily put public health at risk. But Biden declined to do so.
“That’s for the Wisconsin courts and folks to decide,” Biden said. “A convention having tens of thousands of people in one arena is very different than having people walk into a polling booth with accurate spacing with 6 to 10 feet apart, one at a time going in, and having the machines scrubbed down.”
Biden faced backlash from left-wing rivals for his comments, and he largely ignored Wisconsin’s primary during the day on Tuesday, failing to tweet about it. Sanders tweeted to encourage absentee voters to drop off their ballots and declared that his campaign would not participate in traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.
While the primary does not have a huge impact on the Democratic presidential race — the state accounts for 94 nominating delegates — the election is a test of how voting can, and should, work during the coronavirus public health crisis.
Those who did not request an absentee ballot by April 3 could vote in physical polling locations, the number of which was largely reduced due to the pandemic. In Milwaukee, the number of poll sites was reduced from 180 locations to five. Voters donned face masks in long lines, and some expressed their frustration that the primary went on with handmade signs.
Photo of the day, of voters in Milwaukee https://t.co/iSYFnCxxXy pic.twitter.com/R7U0KWnr0z
— David Freedlander (@freedlander) April 7, 2020
Government officials in Wisconsin got in a nasty partisan fight over whether or not to move the primary or change its structure. In addition to the Democratic presidential primary, local elections will be decided Tuesday. A state Supreme Court seat is on the ballot, as well.
Republican lawmakers blocked Democratic Gov. Tony Evers from moving the state’s primary or moving it to fully vote-by-mail. When the governor on Monday tried a last-ditch effort to delay the primary to June 9 via executive order, the state Supreme Court blocked him from doing so. A U.S. Supreme Court decision late Monday further restricted the governor’s attempts to loosen voting requirements, saying that absentee ballots must be postmarked by April 7 in order to count rather than that they must simply be received before the April 13 deadline.
