Sanders needs win in Michigan to keep campaign alive

Bernie Sanders has an opportunity to reboot his presidential campaign with a win today in Michigan, but his position is precarious as voters mull picking him or a surging Joe Biden to face Donald Trump in November.

The stakes could hardly be higher: the leftist US senator from Vermont is suddenly on the back foot, after Biden decisively won South Carolina and then several onetime rivals swiftly endorsed the former vice-president.

It could be a watershed moment if Sanders, 78, can reverse his failure to match his strength among white working-class voters that he showed in 2016, when he earned a stunning victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary.

But if the self-described democratic socialist is unable to win the first industrial Midwestern state to vote in the party’s nomination race, and reclaim some momentum he recently lost to Biden, it could signal the end of his chances.

A crucial constituency that helped Trump win traditionally Democratic Michigan — and the presidential election — in 2016 is the state’s disaffected autoworkers.

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer says Biden is the candidate who can win autoworkers back, given the massive intervention in 2008 to help the ailing industry.

“Anyone in or affected by that industry — which is everyone in this state — needs to think about where we are headed and who had our backs, especially during the auto rescue,” Whitmer said.

“That was Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”

In 2016, Sanders resonated with working-class white voters who felt ignored by Washington and establishment Democrats.

But Biden won 10 of the 14 states that voted last Tuesday, including decisive wins in Massachusetts, Maine and Minnesota — three northern states with overwhelmingly white electorates.

Six more states vote today, including Midwestern states Michigan and Missouri.

Both are important, but Sanders needs a win in Michigan, where his 77-year-old opponent leads in most polling, to show he remains viable.

But Sanders’s support among socially conservative rural white voters has dwindled.

He is seeking to boost his backing among unions such as the United Auto Workers, whose members reached a deal with General Motors last year after a deeply divisive strike.

The 2019 closure of a major GM factory also defied Trump’s pledge to bring manufacturing jobs back to the region.

Sanders’s biggest potential delegate haul, California, is already behind him, but he faces unfavourable contests ahead, particularly the delegate behemoth Florida, where Biden is expected to do well, and Ohio.

Truck driver Craig Walker of Dundee, Michigan, said he supported Trump, and that a Sanders nomination could boost the president’s re-election chances because it would be easy to brand Sanders a socialist.

“I still think Trump will win Michigan, but it will really depends on who gets the Democratic nod,” Walker said.

“It’s definitely going to be tight. ”—