Biden seals comeback with victories
REVITALIZED BIDEN BACK ON PATH TO PARTY’S NOD
Democrats have waited three years for a winner to call their own and take on President Donald Trump. On Super Tuesday, Joe Biden laid his claim to becoming their champion.
He won across the Deep South, showing his appeal with black voters at the heart of the party, and claimed victory in Minnesota, a predominantly white Rust Belt state in Trump’s crosshairs this November.
He won the rich, highly educated suburbanites in Virginia and North Carolina who waffled for months over which candidate to support. He also scored an upset in Massachusetts, the home state of one rival and in the backyard of another.
Biden laid claim to Texas — the second-biggest delegate trove — and on Wednesday was awarded Maine.
In politics, you have to win to win. And in the crucial Super Tuesday primaries in 14 U.S. states, Biden did just that, and Democratic voters singularly obsessed with defeating Trump finally began coalescing around their candidate.
There’s still a long road ahead for the former vice president. His chief rival, Sanders, won California — the biggest prize of the entire nominating race — where a runaway victory could give the Vermont senator enough delegates to blunt Biden’s gains on Tuesday.
And the former vice president’s turnaround was made all the more remarkable because of his plunge from front-runner status, bruised and battered by a meandering campaign, lacklustre fundraising and trademark gaffes.
“Just a few days ago the press and the pundits had declared the campaign dead,” Biden told supporters in Los Angeles as Tuesday’s results were being reported. “I’m here to report, we are very much alive.”
Still, the whirlwind three days following Biden’s convincing win in South Carolina — which propelled top rivals like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to back the former vice president — underscored the extent to which Democrats were ready to unite behind anyone ready to take on Trump.
And on Wednesday, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg offered his endorsement of Biden as he ended his bid for the nomination.
The Sanders campaign signalled a two-man race when it released new ads Wednesday critical of Biden and featuring audio of former president Barack Obama praising Sanders.
The eagerness for an alternative to Sanders grew acute after the Vermont senator failed to leverage what only days ago seemed like his race to lose. He had done little to address concerns: that his democratic socialist platform faced a ceiling of support, and that his take-no-prisoners style of campaigning repelled the moderates he would need to claim the nomination and successfully take on Trump.
No candidate may capture a full majority of delegates before July’s convention in Milwaukee, and there will undoubtedly be good nights for Sanders, perhaps as soon as the next round of primaries on March 10. Four of the six states voting then were captured by the Vermont senator in 2016.
Biden will need to step up his fundraising and increase his discipline on the campaign trail, and Sanders will be poised to seize on any missteps by his newly energized rival.
But the calendar includes the so-called Acela primaries on April 28 on Biden’s home turf. Tuesday’s performance puts Biden in position to capture a plurality of votes, and his ties to the Democratic superdelegates who might ultimately decide the contest run decades long.
And the Sanders campaign’s insistence that the party should unite behind the nominee with a delegate plurality — made loudly before Biden’s late surge — would complicate any effort to cause mischief at the convention.
Speaking in Vermont late Tuesday, Sanders told supporters “with absolute confidence we are going to win the Democratic nomination.”
If Tuesday offered a clear winner, it also provided two obvious losers.
Bloomberg, who had hoped a blitz of ad spending would disrupt the primary calendar, instead saw half a billion dollars vaporized by Biden’s momentum. (Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
Elizabeth Warren fared even worse, finishing in third place in her home state of Massachusetts and failing to emerge victorious in any of the first 19 nominating contests.
Warren was meeting Wednesday with aides to reassess the state of her presidential bid, according to a campaign staff member.
A decision by either candidate to remain in the race could increase the odds of a contested convention — a political watershed unseen in almost 70 years.
At least one interested party was rooting Tuesday for a contested convention: Trump’s re-election campaign.
“The results only increase the likelihood that no candidate will have enough delegates for a first ballot victory at their convention, which only means more chaos,” Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said Tuesday.
NO CANDIDATE MAY CAPTURE A FULL MAJORITY OF DELEGATES BEFORE JULY’S CONVENTION IN MILWAUKEE.