Super Tuesday’s big Biden surge was all about Trump

The scale of former Vice President Joe Biden’s achievement on Super Tuesday was astonishing, but it should not have been surprising. The sprawling Democratic debate had been strangely disconnected from the core question of 2020: Will President Trump serve four more years or not? This was Biden’s question, and it finally landed on the day that mattered most.

Of course, what Biden did was unprecedented. With little time or money, a weak “ground game” and virtually no ads, he marched through the South, won a surprise victory in Texas, and took Minnesota and Massachusetts.

The latter is the home of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but she was pushed into third place by voters who decided that the race was now a binary choice.

There have been hints of this from the beginning. In all the early-voting states, a substantial majority of Democratic voters told pollsters that what mattered most to them were not the issues consuming so much debate time — single-payer health care above all — but ousting Trump.

With the 77-year-old Biden looking less in command than he did when he served with former President Barack Obama, these voters searched desperately for an alternative.

Then states that are not overwhelmingly white be voting. Biden pushed himself into a weak but important second place in Nevada’s caucuses, setting the stage for his South Carolina landslide, thanks to African American voters urged on by Rep. James Clyburn, the powerful veteran congressman. That broke the dam. The searching was over.

Yes, Biden won timely endorsements that got him free media time he desperately needed. But he was powered to victory not by “the Establishment” but by a pragmatic coalition of rank-and-file Democrats who came to life to stop Sanders. They feared the democratic socialist would destroy the party’s chances of defeating Trump, maintaining control of the House of Representatives and winning the U.S. Senate.

Three groups of Democrats were key to this alliance, African Americans above all. On Tuesday, Biden showed South Carolina was no fluke by winning roughly 60% to 70% of black voters across the states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Texas.

The suburban middle class that helped Democrats win one House seat after another in 2018 also massed behind Biden, evident, for example, in his victories in Fairfax and Loudoun counties in Virginia.

And the outcome was a reminder that the Democratic

Party is a coalition of the center and the left — and that the left, while important and growing, is still a minority.

For Biden, the challenge is to avoid playing into Trump’s game of dividing Democrats from the outside. Biden’s core weakness, and it’s big, is with younger voters who backed Sanders in droves. Trump renewed his faux sympathy Wednesday for Sanders, tweeting that he was “crushed” by “The Democrat Establishment.” Expect more efforts to demobilize the young and the left.

Biden hasn’t won yet and needs to hone his debating skills for the Sanders onslaught to come. But the last moderate standing must also pivot quickly to be a party unifier who can work with those to his left.

Sanders, who regularly calls out Trump’s “greed, corruption and lies,” must decide far earlier than in 2016 if his main goal is to defeat the president or to build an opposition movement that has the Democratic Party itself in its sights.