Despite dominating in national polls and head-to-head matchups against President Trump for a year, Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency was discounted as doomed to fail, almost from the start. Sure, he was Barack Obama’s beloved best bro, but suddenly the media decided to notice that Biden was too old, too touchy with women on the campaign trail, and too aggressively unwoke to win the primary. We were told his demise was imminent at every juncture of the race, and yet, save for a blink-and-you-miss-it blip of Elizabeth Warren’s rise and Bernie Sanders final surge at the beginning of voting, Biden reigned supreme.
And after sweeping victories starting with South Carolina and continuing through tonight, Biden all but cemented his victory in the Democratic primary.
That a bumbling septuagenarian who often forgets what state he’s in won the primary has surely shocked plenty in the commentariat. But it shouldn’t have. Biden, for all of his foibles, never lost his support among black voters, the bellwether of Democratic fortunes. As I reminded after Biden’s abysmal showing in the Iowa caucuses:
Dukakis went on to lose 40 states and nearly 8% of the popular vote to George H.W. Bush.
So the victor of the Democratic primary is a candidate who spent the overwhelming majority of the race with a double-digit lead over dozens of candidates and one who dominated the black vote, a determinant of Democratic primaries for 32 years. Biden’s blowout may sound like a surprise in the chaos of the 24-hour news cycle, but given the facts, it makes all the sense in the world. Black voters have been and will continue to be the most influential constituency of the Democratic Party.
