Sanders, Biden up attacks as head-to-head race takes shape
Voters asked to decide who can defeat incumbent
DEARBORN, Mich. – The Democratic presidential primary is down to two major candidates, and it shows.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are spending their first weekend as their party’s last top White House contenders increasingly taking aim at each other. Each wants to show he’s the best choice before six more states – Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington – vote Tuesday.
It reflects the new contours of a race that once featured more than 20 hopefuls. The increasingly bitter matchup could endure for months as Biden and Sanders compete for the right to face President Donald Trump in November.
“We have a two-person race,” Sanders said Saturday in Dearborn, a Detroit suburb with one of the nation’s largest Arab American populations. “And all over this country, people are asking themselves which candidate can best defeat Trump. I have zero doubt in my mind that, together, we are the campaign that can beat Trump.”
Sanders argues that no Democrat will win the presidency “with the same-old, same-old politics of yesteryear.” That’s ironic given that the 78-year-old Sanders is actually a year older than Biden. But the avowed democratic socialist, who has served in Congress since 1991, says he’s bucked the establishment of both parties with decades with unpopular stands that now give him the credibility to lead a political revolution “from the bottom up.”
Sanders is pledging to increase Democratic turnout by drawing to the polls younger voters, minorities and working-class people who tend to vote in lower concentrations than many other Americans. Strong support among Hispanics lifted Sanders to victories in Nevada and California, but Biden trounced him in South Carolina and throughout much of the Deep South on Super Tuesday. Biden especially ran up the score with African Americans.
Sanders has used many of his Michigan stops to hammer Biden for past support of the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that it moved highpaying U.S. jobs to Mexico and China while devastating manufacturing in a state dominated by the auto industry. He’s focused on Biden’s years in the Senate, when Biden backed not only trade agreements and the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but also a ban on using federal funds to pay for abortions. Biden announced this summer that he was reversing his position on that, but
Sanders said that wasn’t enough.
“I think we need a candidate that can be trusted on this issue. I am proud to tell you that I am 100% prochoice,” Sanders said Friday night in Detroit.
Biden saw a surge of donor support after South Carolina and Super Tuesday, and his campaign announced that it was spending $12 million – the largest effort of his campaign – on a six-state ad buy.
He is using two television and digital ads, one promoting his relationship with President Barack Obama, the other a new effort to counter a Sanders attack on Biden’s record on Social Security. It’s a criticism Sanders has used for months, though he hasn’t mentioned it as frequently while campaigning in Michigan.
“Biden will increase Social Security benefits and protect it for generations to come,” a narrator intones in one of the ads, before turning the matter back on Sanders. “Negative ads will only help Donald Trump. It’s time we bring our party together.”