Joe Biden racked up three more big primary wins Tuesday, but Bernie Sanders refused to concede despite having no path to the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
After polls closed in Arizona, Illinois, and Florida, roughly half of the delegates up for grabs this cycle were allocated. And the Vermont senator’s ability to amass the 1,991 delegates needed for the right to challenge President Trump in the general election looks practically impossible unless the trajectory of the race turns 180 degrees.
Biden’s campaign, in an internal memo circulated Tuesday morning, said “it would take a drastic, historically incomparable swing” for “Sanders to win more delegates than Biden today or to close the delegate differential.”
A Sanders spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s inquiry regarding the second-time candidate’s plans, and he won’t make a statement Tuesday night after giving a 25-minute address on the coronavirus earlier in the evening.
The former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, told ABC News last week that he wasn’t “a masochist who wants to stay in a race that can’t be won.”
“But right now, that’s a little bit premature,” said Sanders, who didn’t bow out of contention after a heart attack last October and was surprisingly critical of Biden during last weekend’s first one-on-one debate with him.
Though the mathematics are against Sanders, his flagging bid continued to experience success in metrics other than its delegate count as he struggled to grow his base. He received more than 1.3 million donations this month, for a total of 10 million since he announced his candidacy last February, he raised $2 million since Sunday, and his last three digital events drummed up 5.3 million views. He also staffed up in states hosting contests later in the calendar, such as New York and Pennsylvania, where Biden has strong ties.
University of Southern California political scientist Christian Grose said he wouldn’t be surprised if Sanders refused to quit given he didn’t in 2016, despite the friendlier dynamic between himself and Biden as opposed to that with former rival Hillary Clinton. However, he added that Biden’s strong polling against Trump in battleground states may change Sanders’s calculus.
“A long and protracted battle that Biden is mathematically assured of winning could hurt Biden and help Trump. Especially if Bernie Sanders supporters dig in for Bernie and are harder for Biden to mobilize to vote in November,” he said.
Though Biden has embraced more liberal platforms such as free public college for students from low-income families, Grose believes Sanders still wanted to assert influence on the movement he created and the Democratic Party more broadly. It’s an incentive echoed by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a political action committee that endorsed Elizabeth Warren and implored its membership to back Sanders to avoid “prematurely coronating Biden” when the Massachusetts senator dropped out after Super Tuesday on March 3.
“It may be hard for him to give up the limelight that has allowed for many of his issues and policy positions to break through into the national discussion,” Grose said.
Brookings Institute’s Darrell West agreed that Sanders was running to push his agenda, but he predicted the senator would be confronted by “diminished interest” now that Biden is the presumptive nominee.
“Democrats want to beat Trump and will rally around Biden. They aren’t going to get distracted by Sanders no matter how long he stays in the race. With the economy sliding into recession, Democrats believe they have a good chance to beat Trump,” he said.
Before Tuesday’s primaries, Biden, a two-term vice president, had 871 pledged delegates to Sanders’s 719. Arizona, Illinois, and Florida offered the competitors their share of 441 delegates.
