Joe Biden could lock up the Democratic nomination on Tuesday — not in a technical sense, but a substantive one.
Now that a chaotic, volatile primary with more than two dozen contenders is essentially a two-man race, Tuesday’s round of primaries will test if there is any appetite among Democratic voters for a replay of the drawn-out primary fight between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Some delegates from California and other Super Tuesday primaries have yet to be allocated as states tally final results, but Biden has about 75 more delegates than Sanders. Both candidates are about 30% of the way to the 1,991 pledged delegates needed to secure the nomination on the first ballot.
FiveThirtyEight’s primary forecast now gives Biden an 88% chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates, while Sanders has a 2% chance of doing so.
Holding that trajectory depends on whether Biden can sustain the momentum that started with his blowout victory in South Carolina, which prompted his centrist rivals to drop out of the race and endorse him, leading Biden to victory in 10 Super Tuesday states to Sanders’s four.
Contests in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington on Tuesday account for 352 delegates.
Washington state, which has 89 delegates, is expected to tilt toward Sanders, but the last polls there were conducted weeks before Biden’s resurgence after South Carolina. Biden could close the gap between him and Sanders to make the delegate allocation relatively even. Biden is favored to win in Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, and North Dakota.
Michigan, with 125 delegates, is the biggest battleground on Tuesday.
Sanders won Michigan in an upset in 2016, beating Clinton by 1.4 percentage points. To keep any hope of winning the nomination, Sanders must perform well there and prove that a substantive anti-establishment base is still prominent among the Democratic electorate.
In his first comments to the press after Super Tuesday, Sanders went on the attack against an establishment that “heavily supports” Biden and is “working frantically to defeat us” and complained of “venom” in the “corporate media” directed toward Sanders and his campaign.
Tuesday’s contest is the first test of a two-man race between Sanders and Biden, and it is not clear how effective Sanders’s outsider pitch will be against a well-liked Democratic figure who mounted a stunning comeback in the race after being written off because of poor finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Sanders also hopes that his criticism of Biden’s support for free trade and Sanders’s pro-union position will resonate in Michigan. But United Food and Commercial Workers Union Locals 876 and 951, which represent 51,000 workers in the state, endorsed Biden on Friday.
Losing Michigan and other states on Tuesday would deny Sanders of the momentum he needs to challenge Biden seriously and signal that the Democratic base is ready to move on from Sanders’s anti-establishment crusade, giving him little hope of turning attitudes around in remaining states to catch up to Biden’s lead.
Biden is demonstrating continued centrist and establishment coalescing of support among party leaders and voters. Eight prominent Michigan Democrats jumped on the Biden bandwagon after his Super Tuesday victories: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who gave the Democratic response to President Trump’s State of the Union address last month; Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II, the first black politician to hold that office; and freshman swing-district Reps. Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens, among others.
