And then there were two. With apologies to Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic presidential race, which once featured more than 20 contestants of some notoriety, is now down to former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The fight for the Democrats’ presidential nomination has essentially returned to where it was for most of 2019 now that real voting has started, with Barack Obama’s two-term vice president and the runner-up from the 2016 primaries battling it out — though the race isn’t nearly as close as it would seem from the delegate math.
In a stunning comeback, Biden has a commanding advantage in this two-way matchup. He may have even sealed the deal with an easy double-digit win in Michigan, where Sanders had gotten his campaign back on track with an upset four years ago. Missouri and Mississippi were called for Biden moments after the polls closed. He finally had momentum, and small state caucuses aside, nowhere looked safe from Biden dominating.
After finishing fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada, Biden tumbled out of first place in the national polls, and his long career in politics appeared finished. “Blood in the water,” read one major national outlet’s headline; “doomed,” said another. Then, Biden rebounded with a decisive victory in South Carolina. A win there was expected — the Palmetto State was Biden’s firewall, after all — but the margin of nearly 30 points was not. Sanders, and even billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, appeared to be gaining on him in South Carolina polling.
Instead, South Carolina began a run of sustained Biden success that extended through the Super Tuesday and Mini Tuesday primaries. He has regained his lead in the national polls, beating Sanders by 16 points, according to CNN and Morning Consult, by 19 points, according to Quinnipiac, and 21 points in the Reuters/Ipsos survey. The RealClearPolitics national polling average has Biden leading Sanders by 18 points, 53.5% to 35.5%.
“Biden had as good a four-day stretch as any presidential candidate ever has had,” said Brad Bannon, a strategist who advises progressive candidates and causes. “After Nevada, he was hanging on by his fingernails, but he turned everything around with his big victory in South Carolina. He has assembled an impressive coalition of African American and moderate white Democratic primary voters, and he did it without hardly any money.” Biden’s “Joe-mentum” hasn’t shown any sign of letting up since.
The former vice president undoubtedly deserves some credit for this stunning turn of events, a political revival that may even exceed John McCain going from having a nearly broke campaign to winning the Republican nomination in 2008 (before losing to Obama and Biden in November). But so does the other candidate in the race. Sanders was ever so briefly the Democratic front-runner himself, despite never having previously run in a general election with a “D” next to his name, and pundits swooned after he won the Nevada caucuses by a landslide nearly as impressive as Biden’s in South Carolina. There were many assertions that it would be difficult for Biden to keep up with Sanders in the delegate hunt.
Then, key Democratic constituencies — mainly African Americans, especially in the South, and the white suburbanites who gave Democrats their House majority in the 2018 midterm elections — recoiled. Democratic voters turned massively against Sanders. Some did so over ideology: Democrats over age 40 weren’t ready to rush headlong into the socialist revolution. Others were primarily concerned with electability and feared the rest of the country would not embrace the socialist label as eagerly as Bernie himself does. The Vermont lawmaker did not do himself any favors with attacks on the Democratic establishment that offended elected Democrats. After enjoying some success rebranding his “democratic” socialism as either Scandinavian welfare statism or a more muscular New Deal liberalism, Sanders began praising the literacy programs of communist despots in Cuba.
Sanders supporters thought this was unfair, with one source stressing to me that these were responses to television interview questions, not some proactive campaign by the candidate to rehabilitate Fidel Castro’s reputation and legacy. Sanders tried in the last Democratic debate before Super Tuesday to argue that some (since vanquished) rivals were closer to China than he ever was. Nevertheless, his praise for Chinese efforts to eliminate extreme poverty — more than had been done by “any country in the history of civilization,” he said — continued. The comments and the (mainly Republican) responses attacking them didn’t bother the young voters and activists flocking to Sanders’s candidacy, but a lot of people are still alive who remember the Cold War, and many of them vote — even in Democratic primaries.
Biden’s support among African Americans in South Carolina had been surprisingly resilient, but in national polls and some state surveys, there were indications that when his campaign started to struggle, some of these voters were beginning to gravitate toward other Democrats. The shift of black voters to Biden and away from Sanders recreated an old problem for the Vermont socialist. In 2016, Sanders’s backing was too limited to white liberals for him to put together a base big enough to beat Hillary Clinton and win the nomination. This time around, Sanders appeared to have diversified his coalition. That was why a majority of “the Squad,” the quartet of left-wing congresswomen led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorsed Sanders, even when Elizabeth Warren was flying high in the polls. Progressive journalist Ryan Grim described Sanders in the Intercept as the “ideal leader of [a] multiracial, working-class movement.”
Sanders has improved with Latinos. They powered his win in Nevada, where he beat Biden among Hispanics, 51% to 13%. He did nearly as well in California, winning 49% percent of Latinos and the statewide contest, beating Biden with this demographic by 27 points. Sanders also led Biden by 13 points among Latinos in Texas, though he was not as lucky in terms of winning the primary.
But many of the Latino-heavy states on the calendar have passed, with Texas a big missed opportunity and Florida less welcoming territory ahead, and Sanders is back to losing the black vote in Southern primaries almost as badly as Republicans tend to lose African Americans to Democrats in the general election. Biden won black voters in Mississippi by more than 70 points, taking African Americans over age 60 with 96% of the vote.
There is some evidence in the exit polling in states such as South Carolina that some black voters thought Sanders was repudiating parts of Obama’s legacy, including Obamacare, the first African American president’s biggest legislative accomplishment. About 60% of Mississippi Democrats said they wanted to return to Obama’s policies, more than four-fifths of whom voted for Biden. Sanders was also rumored to have considered a primary challenge against Obama in 2012. Why not vote for Obama’s No. 2 instead? Biden may have done better in assembling a multiracial centrist coalition than Sanders did in forming a diverse, progressive, working-class one.
If that holds, Biden will likely be the Democratic nominee. That doesn’t mean the former vice president doesn’t have any remaining problems. “After a big Super Tuesday and endorsements by Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar, Biden is now the front-runner, but voters and the media like to build up a candidate, then turn around and knock him down,” said Bannon, the Democratic consultant. “So, there will still be lots of twists and turns on the road to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee.”
It’s possible Democrats are underestimating Biden’s electoral liabilities after having finally given serious thought to Sanders’s. He is old, and it shows on the campaign trail. He is more given to verbal slips than Sanders, and even more prone to them than he has been over the course of a particularly gaffe-prone career. President Trump has been hammering him as a doddering figurehead who will let radical leftists govern the country while he languishes in “a home” somewhere. The playbook Trump used against Clinton — running against the Iraq War vote, the 1994 crime bill, and support for various trade deals, alongside an overall narrative of D.C. insiderism and family corruption — is at least as applicable to Biden. Against Sanders, some of these dogs won’t hunt, and Trump will have to justify his failure to keep his more populist campaign promises to the Upper Midwestern voters who may decide this election, just as they did in 2016.
What Biden offers is normalcy, a safe return to pre-Trump political norms, a break from the loudness of the past four years. Democrats who are supporting him are betting “Sleepy Joe” may in fact be what the country wants and needs after the endless din and tumult of Trump. Biden could more easily make the general election a referendum on Trump — the president’s tweets, his temperament, his handling of the coronavirus, his various scandals — while Trump versus Sanders would surely be a binary choice in which voters could decide to reject the more radical changes Sanders is proposing.
The largest challenge Biden may face is how to beat Sanders without alienating his supporters, some of whom, like the Vermont lawmaker himself, are more committed progressives than Democrats. After feeling cheated by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee in 2016, they stayed home, voted third-party, and even cast ballots for Trump in numbers sufficient to help turn the Rust Belt red. These voters will be sensitive to any similar perceived mistreatment this time around, and some are already sensing it.
“This race has been pretty unpredictable so far, so take this all with a grain of salt, but it seems like Biden should be in a good position to get more delegates than Sanders moving forward and going into the convention with a strong plurality at a minimum,” said Stefan Hankin, a Democratic strategist. “The question is how nasty do the Sanders campaign and supporters get over the next few weeks. If the goal is to win in November, everyone will put their swords away and stick to the positive arguments of why your candidate should be the nominee. I expect the Biden campaign to act this way. The question is, will the Sanders campaign?”
So far, there is nothing like the DNC interventions against Sanders teased in the WikiLeaks email dumps of 2016. We haven’t seen any reports of debate questions getting leaked to the Biden campaign, for example. And Biden is better suited to be the “Not Bernie” candidate than other contenders who aspired to the mantle. Biden might clearly defeat Sanders at the ballot box through the primary process, while former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s entire strategy was based on besting Sanders at a contested convention in Milwaukee — something guaranteed to look like the Democratic establishment quelling a progressive insurgency or pilfering the nomination from the lead vote-getter.
The problem for Biden is that Sanders supporters already see the Democratic establishment as quashing their insurgency. And in a manner of speaking, that’s true: The consolidation of centrist support around Biden in just a few short days after South Carolina did not happen entirely organically. Except in the absence of any evidence of a corrupt bargain, which no one is even seriously alleging, this is all normal politics. The most pragmatic Democrats decided to unite around the candidate they thought best positioned to win. Candidates more sympathetic to Biden’s approach than to Sanders’s found themselves with no viable path to the nomination but enough remaining support to siphon votes away from Biden.
That basic political reality seems like a more apt explanation for the conveniently timed Biden endorsements from Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Bloomberg than any conspiracy. On the eve of Mini Tuesday, they were joined by Kamala Harris. As the returns from Michigan rolled in, Andrew Yang also endorsed Biden. Still, it shows what Biden is up against as he seeks to unify the party.
What Sanders wanted to do through policy, Biden will seek to accomplish by temperament, personality, and cultural solidarity. As the Week‘s Damon Linker pointed out on Twitter, Michigan Democrats did not have the same distaste for Biden that cost Clinton the state in the primary four years ago. Biden hopes this will remain true in the general election against Trump.
On his third attempt at capturing his party’s presidential nomination, Biden is closer than ever before. At the moment, it is difficult to see how he will be denied, even if the same flaws that hobbled him before, this time magnified by age and an even speedier news cycle, manifest themselves in the campaign.
In a race against an aging socialist, at a moment when Trump is being widely criticized for his handling of the coronavirus, Biden looks like the safe choice for Democrats who are voting scared. These Democrats may be right that the country is ready to turn to the most elderly of elder statesmen in a time of trouble. Or an unpredictable presidential campaign that has brought Biden back from the political dead to the brink of the Democratic nomination could still have a few more surprises in store for us all.
W. James Antle III is the editor of the American Conservative.
