Biden foils Sanders’ revolution
Democratic nomination slips further out of reach
Two weeks is an eternity in politics. Just ask Bernie Sanders. It was only that long ago he was cruising to the Democrat presidential nomination in the United States, and very possibly the White House.
The prospect of the US becoming a democratic socialist country was real.
But US elections can turn on a dime, and that’s what has happened.
It wasn’t so much what went wrong for Sanders. His rallies are still huge. He has suffered no major scandal.
Instead, it was what went right for Joe Biden. It started when South Carolina voted on February 29, and the state’s black population backed the former Vice-President en masse.
Over the next few days centrist candidates dropped out and united behind Biden, propelling him to victory on Super Tuesday, last Wednesday NZ time. It all happened so quickly Sanders was left reeling.
He responded with a frenzy. On Monday, Sanders achieved the rare feat of appearing on all five major US political chat shows. His campaign fired out negative TV adverts against Biden.
But on Wednesday he was trounced, by more than expected, in the southern states of Mississippi and Missouri.
Then, Sanders lost Michigan, the industrial “rust belt” state he had taken against Hillary Clinton four years earlier.
It was a hammer blow, a potentially fatal one, for the Sanders campaign. Any Democrat running against Donald Trump in November would have to win Michigan.
It showed, once and for all, that Sanders’ “revolution” is not happening, or at least not on the scale he needed it to.
In state after state, so far, there has been no explosion in voter turnout.
There has been no horde of factory workers uniting around the promise of government-funded universal healthcare.
And no flood of millennials raised from their sofas on voting day by the prospect of free college tuition under a Sanders administration.
In Michigan, Sanders did win 82 per cent of voters aged under 30. But there simply weren’t enough of them. They were swept away by a grey tide of over-65s backing Biden.
Sanders failed, in the end, to conquer the apathy of the young.
An additional blow came as anecdotal evidence in Michigan suggested Elizabeth Warren’s supporters had sided with Biden.
Warren, a standard bearer for the Democrats’ progressive wing, dropped out after Super Tuesday.
It would have seemed natural for her to endorse her friend Sanders, but she decided to back no one immediately.
Exit polls also showed that many Democrat voters, including some of Sanders’ own supporters, believe the time has come to unify the party.
Their overwhelming motivation is to defeat Trump, and many appear to have decided that Biden has the best chance.
For Sanders, there is no way to tack his policies to the prevailing wind. They are set in stone.
In a week’s time several other large states vote, including Florida, where he is now 40 points behind Biden in polls.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to see a rationale for him to go on.
His only realistic hope lies in a debate with Biden on Monday.
It will be the first one-on-one encounter between the two men, and Sanders is widely considered the stronger debater.
He will use it to make a final argument that the Democrats should pick a nominee who represents the starkest contrast to Trump.
Sanders will need to not only win the debate, but eviscerate Biden, if the race is to continue.
Exit polls also showed that many Democrat voters, including some of Sanders’ own supporters, believe the time has come to unify the party.