Sanders stays, so his movement can live on by dragging Biden leftward
From his hometown of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders got up to speak on Wednesday afternoon, after a disappointing night of watching the results from Tuesday’s primaries roll in.
Would he stay or would he go? For now, he stays, determined to fight on and try to drag the Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, to the left, so that even as Sanders’ race effectively peters out, his movement goes on.
Although Sanderssaid he was winning the “ideological debate” against the moderate Biden, and the “generational debate” in terms of older voters pouring to the polls for his rival, he acknowledged he was losing the “electability debate” for the party nomination to fight Donald Trump in the November election.
Sanders said he had spoken to a number of voters who supported his policy proposals but backed Bidenbecause they feared Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist, could not defeat the president.
So as voters waited with bated breath to see if he would quit after crushing defeats in primaries in the last 10 days, he vowed to attend the scheduled debate against Biden in Arizona on Sunday night, effectively confirming his campaign goes on.
The Vermont senator then previewed the issues he will hammer on in the coming days.
“Joe, what are you going to do to end the absurdity of the United States of America being the only major country on Earth where healthcare is not a human right? Are you really going to veto a Medicare for All bill if it is passed in Congress?” Sanders rhetorically asked, referring to his promise of government-provided health insurance for everyone.
Then he added, defiantly: “On Sunday, I very much look forward to the debate in Arizona with my friend Joe Biden,” Sanders said.
The candidate then left the hastily arranged press conference without taking any questions.
It was a diehard move, which may give his fervent supporters solace even as it dismays the Democratic party leadership, which is keen to unite and gear up to face Trump together.
The announcement followed a disheartening night for Sanders in the principal party nominating races on Tuesday night.
Missouri, one of the closest contests of the 2016 election, was called just moments after polls closed in favor of his opponent, Joe Biden, former vice-president to Barack Obama. The same went for Mississippi, where the overwhelmingly African American Democratic vote went for Biden by a landslide on Tuesday, continuing a southern sweep he began in the South Carolina primary and continued through last week’s Super Tuesday contests from Virginia to Texas.
It was the beginning of a bleak night for the senator, his second in as many weeks. Not long after the Missouri result, Biden won Michigan, a battleground state Sanders could not afford to lose.
Sanders now faces a dramatic choice about the future of his candidacy: to continue leading a grinding, uphill battle or to bow to pressure to drop out for the sake of party unity as it faces up to Donald Trump in the November election.
“Prematurely writing him off is about the worst thing that we could do,” Congressman Ro Khanna, one of Sanders’ national co-chairs, said. Sanders “represents the least fortunate, the most vulnerable, and, in certain cases, the most angry about the economic system”.
“We need him to continue to express their voice, their needs and their concerns,” he said.
Sanders was silent about his future on Tuesday night, ceding the moment to Biden who appears to be on an unstoppable march to the nomination after a string of victories.
“This campaign is taking off,” Biden declared in Philadelphia, where he celebrated the night after being forced to cancel an event in Cleveland out of concern over the coronavirus outbreak.
It was a dramatic reversal of fortunes for the rivals, virtually the last two standing after a wild and unpredictable primary season.
Not two weeks ago, Biden’s campaign appeared on the verge of collapse as Sanders became the frontrunner for the party’s nomination. But South Carolina voters revived Biden, setting him up for a string of victories that relegated Sanders to a more familiar position: underdog.
In 2016, when the odds looked longer, Sanders continued his antiestablishment run against Hillary Clinton despite loud calls for him to exit the race.
And last fall he fought on after suffering a heart attack only to rebound, overtake Elizabeth Warren’s lead and, for a time, top the field. Though Biden has solidified his delegate lead over Sanders, he remains far short of the 1,991 pledged party delegates required for an outright victory at the national convention in July, where the party will formally choose a nominee.
The Sanders campaign had once eagerly sought a two-person contest with Biden to clarify their starkly different visions for the country. But four years after his “Feel the Bern” insurgent challenge revived the party’s left wing, the stakes are different. Democratic voters have made clear that their overriding priority is to beat Trump and, over the course of two consequential election nights, have decided that Biden is their safest hope of accomplishing that.
Sanders struggled to make inroads with African American voters, who overwhelmingly backed Biden. Suburban voters who propelled Democrats’