or a few beautiful moments last week, it looked like it might be easy.
Riding a wave of working-class support, Bernie Sanders had swept the Nevada caucuses and surged to the lead in national polls. As Democratic pundits and party leaders panicked, anti-Sanders forces were hopelessly divided between at least three unacceptable candidates: a visibly deteriorating former vice president who had been trounced in the first three contests; an upstart small-town mayor with no appeal to nonwhite voters; and a Republican mega-billionaire, whose eerie “campaign” looked less like a run for public office than an attempted corporate buyout.
Sanders appeared ready to annihilate all three on Super Tuesday, claim a massive delegate lead, and hold a commanding position in the race ahead, even if the so-called “moderates” could finally consolidate around one candidate.
Today, the baseless fabric of this vision has dissolved, leaving only the grim spectacle of Joe Biden, the new Democratic front-runner, ascending the stage in Los Angeles and
confusing his wife with his sister.
There is no use in sugarcoating the scale of last night’s defeat. “Accurate intelligence of the enemy,” as
Perry Anderson has written, “is worth more than bulletins to boost doubtful morale. A resistance that dispenses with consolations is always stronger than one which relies on them.”
In less than seventy-two hours, Sanders has gone from clear favorite to anxious underdog. Once the favorite to win ten or more contests, Sanders claimed just five; once hoping to land knockout blows in Minnesota and Massachusetts, Sanders absorbed haymaker defeats in both states; once hoping to hold a 200-delegate lead after last night’s ballots, he now appears likely to trail Biden by something like 75 delegates, even after all the California results are reported.
The timely withdrawals of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar gave Biden a massive boost in momentum, helping him score blowout victories in Virginia and North Carolina, where polls showed a close race just days before. Elizabeth Warren, who remained in the race despite finishing behind Buttigieg in the first four states, did not give Sanders any countervailing support.
Much about this year’s race has changed from 2016, including Sanders winning massive support from Latino voters. But last night, Biden succeeded in stitching together two essential elements of the coalition that Hillary Clinton used to defeat Sanders four years ago: white, college-educated voters, mostly in affluent suburbs; and black voters in the South. Both of these groups are mostly made up of older people, and Biden, like Clinton, crushed Sanders with voters over age fifty.
Can Sanders fight his way back? Biden’s delegate lead is far from insurmountable. But unless Sanders can change the essential dynamic of the race — unless he can erode the Biden coalition that emerged last night — he will struggle to compete in the states ahead, from Michigan to Florida to New York.
And yet a race that utterly changes complexion in just one seventy-two-hour period can, perhaps, utterly change complexion again. Last night, Biden was riding high on the drama of the last few days: the endorsements from Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and Harry Reid appear to have convinced many Democrats that a vote for Biden was a vote for safety and unity against chaos and division.
But in the weeks ahead, safety and unity will not be on the ballot, the stump, or the debate stage. Instead, voters will have to reckon with Joe Biden himself, whose own obvious vulnerabilities can no longer be obscured by the tangle of a half dozen competing candidates.
Will voters still like what they see? The next few weeks will tell — but amid the wreckage of last night, there were a few reasons to believe that Bernie Sanders can still make an alternative case that many Democrats find persuasive.
Everywhere Bernie’s signature issues were on the ballot last night, they won. Medicare For All — described as “a government plan instead of private insurance” — earned decisive Democratic support in all twelve states where it was polled, from Alabama (51 percent to 43 percent) to Texas (64 to 33 percent). Free public college tuition won even more dominant majorities in all five states it was polled.
Even
“socialism” itself won landslide victories in Texas and California, a comfortable majority in North Carolina, and a plurality in Tennessee. Tens of thousands of Joe Biden Socialists, we learned last night, walk the streets of Houston, Charlotte, and Nashville.
No matter what conservative pundits may say, Democratic voters did not express any overriding fear or concern about Bernie Sanders’s agenda last night. In fact, they endorsed it, overwhelmingly. But in a primary campaign dominated from beginning to end by a desperate Democratic desire to beat Donald Trump, voters expressed a belief — perhaps durable, perhaps fleeting — that Biden is the best candidate to do that job.
Sanders faces a hard road ahead. The post-Nevada mirage has vanished: in retrospect, probably, we should never have let ourselves believe that this could be so easy. It was always going to be a fight.
Yet nor can we afford to wallow in despair. Last weekend, Democratic bosses decided almost overnight to place all their chips on Joe Biden; last night, in a frantic lunge for safety, Democratic voters followed their lead.
But in a bare-knuckled battle with Trump, does real safety belong with this candidate, whose name is a synonym for the swamp around Capitol Hill, whose political career is an extended advertisement for
Beltway malfeasance, and whose only real asset — a kind of musty aura of the Obama years — is considerably diminished by his inability to speak in complete sentences?
To make a competitive run at Biden, Sanders must convince voters that he is not just the better choice, he is the safer choice. It’s not an impossible case to make — but after last night, he only has about two weeks to make it.
Bloomberg has dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden
ike Bloomberg took the stage in the early evening on Super Tuesday and made a bold assertion. No matter how the results shook out that night, he told his supporters, “we have done something no one else thought was possible.”
In a sense, he was right: He spent half a billion dollars and the only thing he won outright on Super Tuesday was the territory of American Samoa. He’d spent huge sums of money in states like Virginia and Minnesota, where Joe Biden scarcely had a presence, and gotten trounced by the former vice president. He’d staked his campaign on a commanding Super Tuesday performance and ended the night with a
paltry 44 delegates.
On Wednesday morning, Bloomberg announced he was dropping out of the race, ending one of the most expensive and disastrous presidential campaigns in history.
“Three months ago, I entered the race for president to defeat Donald Trump,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “Today, I am leaving the race for the same reason: to defeat Donald Trump — because it is clear to me that staying in would make achieving that goal more difficult.”
In his statement, Bloomberg said he was endorsing Joe Biden. “I’ve known Joe for a very long time,” Bloomberg said. “I know his decency, his honesty, and his commitment to the issues that are so important to our country — including gun safety, health care, climate change, and good jobs.”
He went on: “I’ve had the chance to work with Joe on those issues over the years, and Joe has fought for working people his whole life. Today I am glad to endorse him — and I will work to make him the next President of the United States.”
Bloomberg’s campaign lasted all of 101 days. It will now enter the pantheon of massively failed presidential campaigns next to Republican Jeb Bush’s 2016 run and Democrat Tom Steyer this election cycle. (Though any presidential campaign that gives the candidate a chance to
dance onstage with Juvenile is a victory of a sort.)
When Bloomberg entered the race back in November, he was seen as a moderate alternative to Biden. His central campaign message was simple: As he put it at a recent Democratic Party dinner, “If you ask what my campaign is about, I am running to defeat Donald Trump.” He poured hundreds of millions of dollars from his $60 billion fortune into his campaign, hiring a staff of 2,500, opening dozens of field offices, and blanketing the airwaves with radio and TV ads. Drawing on his years of philanthropic support for city-level initiatives and public-policy issues including gun safety and the climate crisis, he racked up hundreds of endorsements from the mayors, state legislators, members of Congress, and more.
Having entered the race just months before the opening Iowa caucus, Bloomberg did not compete in the first four Democratic primaries and caucuses. Instead, he staked his campaign on a commanding performance on Super Tuesday. But the question hovered over Bloomberg’s campaign: Would his unprecedented spending translate into votes?
Democratic voters settled that question on Super Tuesday.
The question now is what happens to Bloomberg’s 35-state juggernaut of a presidential operation. To some Democrats, Bloomberg’s money and what he built with it were the main appeals of his candidacy. They imagined how all of those field offices and on-the-ground campaign staffers could lift down-ballot candidates in battleground states and states where governors and U.S. senators were on the ballot. “If you believe in everything the Democratic Party stands for, Bloomberg has that professionalism to be helpful to everyone on the ticket,” Gail Dunham, a North Carolina Democrat and former mayor,
told me. “No one else is able to do that.”
Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s campaign manager, hinted at what might come next for Bloomberg 2020. Last month, Sheekey
told Vanity Fair that a post-Bloomberg Bloomberg campaign would morph into a six-state operation backed by a digital media and TV advertising campaign. “Even if Mike was not to become the nominee, and let’s say tomorrow he wasn’t, this is the one campaign that doesn’t end,” Sheekey said. “In fact, what it grows down to is larger than any other campaign that exists.”
