Joe Biden comfortably won the Democratic Mississippi primary over Bernie Sanders as the pair vie for the 2020 presidential nomination.
Biden trounced Sanders 80.8% support and 24-plus delegates to 15.1%, with 32% of precincts reporting, a predictable result according to polls and the two-term vice president’s performance in other Southern Democratic contests.
Recommended Stories
Sanders, the Vermont senator, had hoped for a respectable showing in Mississippi thanks to his popularity among young, black Democrats. But Biden’s enduring appeal to older black Democrats, evidenced in South Carolina and his sweep of the Southern Super Tuesday states, forced Sanders to recalculate his delegate math and campaign strategy to keep a path open to become the party’s next standard-bearer.
At the last minute, Sanders, 78, scrapped a Mississippi swing in favor of investing time and resources in Michigan. Chokwe Lumumba, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, was scheduled to stump with the senator in his hometown but instead traveled to appear alongside him in Detroit.
Meanwhile, Biden seemed right at home in Mississippi over the weekend.
“If I am the comeback kid, and I’m not there yet — but if I am the comeback kid, it’s because of one reason: The African American community all across the country,” Biden told Jackson’s New Hope Baptist Church on Sunday.
The 2020 primary outcome continues Sanders losing streak in Mississippi. He was walloped in 2016 by then-Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, who garnered 82.47% of the vote to his 16.62%.
This cycle, Mississippi offers candidates the opportunity to pick up their share of 41 pledged delegates. A total of 1,991 is necessary to win the Democratic nomination.
Before the March 10 multistate contest, Biden, 77, led the delegate race heading into the Democratic National Convention this summer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Delaware’s 36-year senator had 635 delegates to Sanders’s 558.
