Biden closes in on nomination
WASHINGTON: Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the US presidential race, won seven state primaries and Washington, DC on Tuesday, taking his delegate count to 1,922 and moving closer to the 1,991 needed for the nomination.
With his last serious rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, out of the race, the former US vice-president has had the field all to himself. More than 400 delegates were up for grabs in the primaries on Tuesday, held in the twin shadows of the countrywide protests against racism triggered by the killing of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic that has killed more than 108,000 Americans. Biden won Maryland, Indiana, Montana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and South Dakota, besides the District of Colombia.
New Jersey and Connecticut were also scheduled to hold their primaries on Tuesday, but have postponed to July. Georgia and West Virginia are next, on June 7.
In all, 4,750 delates - including 3,979 pledged delegates and 771 superdelegates (past and former presidents, other elected officials) - will pick the Democratic nominee at the party convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin starting on August 17.
Biden’s nomination is assured despite early talk of a contested convention when Sanders had looked strong.
The South Carolina primaries of February 29 changed the course of the race, setting Biden on the path to the nomination.
Just the formal nomination now stands in the way of Biden in a direct fight against President
Donald Trump in the November 3 election.
The former US vice-president has been beating Trump in polls, and by wide margins. He is ahead of Trump by 8 points in the Realclearpolitics average of all polls (49.3-41.3).
Trump has been faring poorly in polls. After a brief uptick in favourability in early days of the outbreak in the US, his unfavourable numbers have since been climbing as deaths and infections surged and his administration stumbled from one shortage to another, marked by his own pronouncements, such as the suggestion to use household disinfectants to combat the coronavirus.
After being confined at home in Delaware by the virus for weeks, Biden travelled to Philadelphia for a highly anticipated address to the nation in which he delivered a stinging rebuke of the US president’s handling of the civil unrest, and offered, according to his supporters , the kind of leadership and vision that is currently missing.