GO, JOE RABBIT!
Pete, Amy hop on Biden bandwagon as moderates seek to thwart Bernie on Super Tuesday
Rivals no more, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg united behind Joe Biden’s presidential bid on Monday as the Democratic Party’s moderate wing scrambled to boost the former vice president just hours before voting began across a series of high-stakes Super Tuesday states. The remaining candidates include Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg and Tulsi Gabbard.
Klobuchar formally suspended her campaign and endorsed Biden on Monday, a day after Buttigieg announced his formal exit.
Both Klobuchar and Buttigieg, who had been Biden’s chief competition for their party’s pool of more moderate voters over the last year, declared their public support for Biden Monday evening at a rally in Dallas.
“I’m looking for a leader, I’m looking for a president, who will draw out what’s best in each of us,” Buttigieg said. “We have found that leader in vice president, soon-to-be president, Joe Biden.”
Klobuchar, introducing Biden at the rally, told the boisterous crowd: “If we spend the next four months dividing our party and going at each other, we will spend the next four year watching Donald Trump tear apart our country . ... We need to unite our party and our country.”
“America, you gave me this incredible year … the best is yet to come,” she said. “Tomorrow is Super Tuesday … what I want all of you to do is vote for Joe, vote for decency, dignity, vote for a heart for our country.”
The urgency of the moment reflected deep concerns from the Democratic establishment that Sanders, a polarizing progressive, was positioned to seize a significant delegate lead when 14 states, one U.S. territory and Democrats abroad vote on Tuesday.
The states that vote on Tuesday, led by California and Texas, offer almost 10 times as many delegates in a single day than have been awarded over the first month.
Klobuchar and Buttigieg become the second and third Democrats to abandon their presidential bids since Biden scored a resounding victory in South Carolina, his first of the roller-coaster 2020 nomination fight.
A shrinking group of other Democrats vowed to press on, potentially toward a contested convention.
Former President Barack Obama weighed into the race, nudging Buttigieg to consider maximizing the impact of his endorsement. That sounded like a subtle push for Biden, even as the most closely watched Democratic voter in 2020 officially stayed on the sidelines.
All in all, it means the race to decide who will take on President Trump has been completely transformed in just 48 hours since Biden won a crushing victory powered by black voters in the South Carolina primary.
The nomination dogfight now looks more and more like a one-on-one scrap between Biden and Sanders. Billionaire Bloomberg, who has already poured $600 million into his campaign, and Warren are likely left scrambling to prove they still belong in the race. “The safest thing is probably just to think of the nomination as a tossup between Sanders and Biden now,” polling guru Nate Silver wrote on Twitter.
With 1,357 Democratic delegates on the line, voters in California, Texas and 12
other states will decide who they want to face off in a do-or-die contest with Trump in November.
It’s the biggest chunk of delegates ever picked on one day of any presidential primary campaign.
The Super Tuesday showdown comes at a pivotal moment of the race, with stakes that couldn’t be higher for millions of Democrats looking for a liberal champion to knock Trump out of the White House.
The Democratic field has narrowed dramatically in a flash, making the record pack of two dozen candidates seem like a distant political memory.
Taken together, the moves amount to a lightning-quick realignment of the campaign math for Super Tuesday and beyond.
Biden stands to benefit handsomely because Buttigieg and Klobuchar were fighting him for the same moderate voters. He will likely grab an even more overwhelming majority of black voters with billionaire Tom Steyer bowing out.
Biden hopes to sweep seven states in the Deep South that vote Tuesday, including vote-rich North Carolina, Alabama and Virginia.
It leaves Biden as far and away the most potent candidate in the eyes of party leaders, who are nervous about the prospect of Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, taking on Trump.
The rapid strengthening of Biden leaves Bloomberg with a particularly uphill challenge. The billionaire exmayor jumped into the race because he believed Biden and others could not unite the mainstream of the party and take on Trump.
If he flops on Super Tuesday, Bloomberg will start hearing calls to emulate Mayor Pete and Klobuchar by heading for the exit.
Warren has struggled so far to win support in the early states. But the only woman left in the race insists that she plans to soldier on to the Democratic National Convention in the summer.
For Sanders, the sudden shifts upended expectations that he might blow the primary race wide open with big wins in several states that favor his progressive movement, especially California.
He ran up huge margins among Latinos and young voters of all races in Nevada and other early voting states. Flush with cash, the rumpled lefty has spent years building a nationwide grassroots campaign that gives him a giant advantage over Biden and other remaining rivals.
With Klobuchar bowing out, Sanders will be a heavy favorite to take her home state of Minnesota, along with Colorado and Utah. He’s also favored to edge Warren on her own home turf of Massachusetts as well as his own state of Vermont.