The Democratic race is over. Voters have picked Joe Biden
This Democratic race isn’t pining for the fjords. It is no more. It has ceased to be. Its metabolic processes are now history. This is an ex-presidential contest. The only reason the news networks could not call the Florida primary as soon as the votes piled up for Joe Biden was because the state’s panhandle voters were still at the polls. Once those polls closed, the obvious was made official: it was a blowout for Biden.
The last time we heard from Bernie Sanders after losing big in the last round of primaries, he said he wanted to debate the former vice-president head-to-head, one-on-one, to press his case directly and finally.
“While our campaign has won the ideological debate, we are losing the debate over electability,” Sanders said the day after his Super Tuesday defeats. “Donald Trump must be defeated, and I will do everything in my power to make that happen. On Sunday night, in the first one-on-one debate of this campaign, the American people will have the opportunity to see which candidate is best positioned to accomplish that goal.”
Well the American people had that opportunity and they chose Joe Biden. If this is what winning the ideological debate looks like, Sanders should seriously consider debating another topic.
The only topic the American people want to debate is the coronavirus pandemic and the severe recession that looks like the certain outcome of this quasi-national quarantine. Trump’s treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, told Republican senators on Tuesday that unemployment could hit 20% if they didn’t push through a huge economic stimulus as soon as possible.
To put that into context, unemployment peaked at 10% after the financial collapse of 2008. It hit 24.9% in the Great Depression in 1933.
Just one week ago, Bernie Sanders pledged to fight on, at a time when he was losing the delegate count by around 100 attendees of the Democratic convention. Judging from the projected vote counts on Tuesday, that delegate deficit just tripled.
There is no reason for Sanders to stay in this race, no matter how fervent his fans and no matter how passionately he wants to advocate for his policies. He has spent the last four years advocating for those policies, pushing the Democratic party towards his ideas to remarkable effect.
Back in the 2008 election and Barack Obama’s first term, it was unthinkable to propose a public healthcare option: the defeat of Clinton’s healthcare proposals was still too raw, more than a decade after they had failed. Today all the Democratic contenders proposed a public option, and Joe Biden’s healthcare policies are far to the left of Obama’s.
Mission accomplished? Apparently not. Bernie’s advisers say Biden hasn’t done enough to unify the party, or generate voter enthusiasm.
This is not a position supported by the primary results. Biden has won in the south and the north; the east coast and the north-west. When you win Florida by more than 60% of the vote, you’ve pretty much unified the party. When you drive record turnout in the middle of a pandemic – which is frankly a reckless situation from a public health perspective – then you have reasonably generated voter enthusiasm.
By any measure, Biden can feel confident in turning towards the general election and, more importantly, beyond
that: to the historic challenge of pulling this country, and the rest of the world, out of a pandemic and global recession. It’s unlikely that he will agree to another debate with Sanders.
The pandemic is only accelerating the process that was first set in train by South Carolina’s Democrats. State by state, poll by poll, Democrats – and voters in general – are saying that Biden is best placed to handle a crisis, and to unify the country. Those are not small issues at a time of multiple, historic challenges.
Biden himself addressed the nation via live stream from his Delaware home, standing at a podium in front of two American flags. If it was indeed Biden’s home, he has a strange taste in interior styling.
Most of what Biden said was not a victory speech but the words of someone trying to reassure and rally a country being shaken to its core. “Tackling this pandemic is a national emergency akin to fighting a war,” Biden explained. “Yes, this is a moment where we need our leaders to lead. But it’s also a moment where the choices and decisions we make as individuals are going to collectively impact what happens.”
He praised the public officials who allowed the voting to take place while supposedly protecting public health. And he praised Bernie’s young voters for their enthusiasm and commitment, urging them to rally together with his campaign. “I hear you,” he told them. “I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do. Our goal as a campaign, and my goal as a candidate for president is to unify this party and then to unify the nation.”
He may not actually know what those young Sanders voters want – or he may not be prepared to adopt their agenda in full. But he was prepared to strike a patriotic note of national unity. “This is a moment for each of us to see and believe the best in every one of us,” Biden said. “To believe in one another.”
There will surely come a time for another, younger Sanders-like leader to press for a political revolution that overhauls America’s economy and social safety net. If this recession plays out like the last one, voters of all kinds will be hungrier than ever for radical change in four years’ time.
That leader may already be wellknown to American voters: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will have just turned 35 – the constitutional minimum age of a president – by the time of the next presidential election. Bernie’s ideas will live on long after his presidential campaign ends, which it should do within days, if he is serious about wanting the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump.
1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Andrew Gawthorpe: ‘We needs to protect electoral legitimacy’
With the race no longer competitive and coronavirus dominating the news, the 2020 Democratic primary has ended not with a bang, but with a whimper – an outcome that was unfathomable only weeks ago, when it seemed we were in for a long and inconclusive contest.
Coronavirus seems to have suppressed turnout. While Biden performed well in Illinois, turnout was down on 2016, probably due to coronavirus fears. The postponement of the
Ohio primary means we have been denied another opportunity to assess Biden’s strength in the Midwest.
Extensive early voting and vote-bymail options allowed turnout in Florida to actually rise on 2016, which seems to bode well for Democratic enthusiasm in the general election – especially if we assume that turnout would have been even higher without coronavirus fears.
Had the Democratic primary still been competitive going into Tuesday’s contests, serious questions could be raised about the impact of the virus on the results – and given that the answers to these questions rest on such intangibles as why turnout was down, they would be very difficult to answer.
It is vital that the integrity and legitimacy of the November election be maintained even if the coronavirus pandemic is ongoing. Extensive preparations should be made, starting now, to ensure that alternatives to in-person voting exist. A lot rests on what happens on that single day in November – it is imperative that America gets it right.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United State at Leiden University