Super Tuesday did not go the way Sen. Bernie Sanders hoped it would, leaving his supporters to lash out helplessly at all the people, places, and things they blame for the 2020 candidate’s disappointing showing.
Former Democratic 2020 candidate-turned-Sanders surrogate Marianne Williamson, for example, accused the Democratic Party of staging a “coup” against the Vermont lawmaker.
“[CNN’s] Jake Tapper referred to the ‘resurrection’ of Joe Biden’s campaign,” she said in a since-deleted tweet, referring to the former vice president’s electoral success Tuesday evening. “This was not a resurrection; it was a coup. Russiagate was not a coup. Mueller was not a coup. Impeachment was not a coup. What happened [on Super Tuesday] was a coup. And we will push it back.”
YouTuber and professionally aggrieved person Carlos Maza blamed Sanders’s lackluster numbers on cable news.
“It’s easy to blame [Elizabeth Warren] for this,” he tweeted, “but the bigger culprit is cable news, which treated South Carolina like a major unexpected comeback for Biden and likely had a huge impact on last-minute voters worried about electability.”
Biden is currently projected to come out of Super Tuesday with 670 delegates to Sanders’s 589, according to estimates provided by the New York Times’s Upshot. That is a big turnaround from just a few days ago, back when members of the press predicted Super Tuesday would all but assure Sanders the Democratic nomination.
Because things did not turn out the way they hoped they would, Sanders’s supporters are fuming over what they see as failures of the Democratic Party, the Democratic base, the American electorate in general, and democracy itself.
“The last time Obama quietly picked the nominee and the entire party apparatus instantly fell in line it went so well,” grumbled the Nation’s David Klion.
He added, “But in fairness there were a lot of liabilities last time — Iraq war support, a sketchy international corruption scandal, a demonstrated inability to connect to voters on the ground, decades of regrettable positions and statements — that won’t pose any problem this time.”
Author Matt Stoller focused his ire on the voters themselves, saying, “I saw [Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] win her low turnout primary, but other than that I can’t think of a single win against the Democratic establishment in fifteen years. Democratic voters do what Wall Street wants them to do and they are basically fine with the status quo.”
He added, “This is likely the last primary before we start reckoning with mass death. What is coming will change politics in ways that are hard to imagine.”
Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs added elsewhere of the Democratic Party, “If Biden wins the nomination, it will be a real lesson in how power works.”
“Bernie was on track to win,” he added. “Biden had no campaign, and they all knew it. So a few phone calls were made behind the scenes to Amy, Pete, Beto. Several million was put into a pro-Warren super PAC. Voila!”
He continued, predicting the Democratic establishment will release a “cascade of endorsements, cut deals with Bloomberg and Warren, have everyone turn their fire on Bernie relentlessly including the media orgs, and try to keep Joe Biden from speaking long enough for people to realize some of his marbles are missing.”
Then, there is Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who lamented progressive Democrats’ apparent inability to get their act together.
“Imagine if the progressives consolidated last night like the moderates consolidated,” she said, “who would have won? That’s what we should be analyzing. I feel confident a united progressive movement would have allowed for us to #BuildTogether and win MN and other states we narrowly lost.”
As of this writing, Biden is on track to win 10 Super Tuesday states, including Omar’s state of Minnesota. He currently has 404 delegates to Sanders’s 340 (candidates need 1,991 delegates to win the nomination).
