Biden adds 2 states:
Joe Biden routs Bernie Sanders in Florida and Illinois, where primaries were held despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
Joe Biden easily defeated Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Florida and Illinois primaries on Tuesday, all but extinguishing Sanders’ chances for a comeback on an election day conducted amid a series of cascading disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden, the former vice president, was seen as having a strong advantage over Sanders in a third state, Arizona, but early in the evening he had not yet been declared the winner there. Should Biden sweep the night, he could amass the kind of insurmountable delegate lead that could greatly intensify pressure on Sanders to end his campaign.
The routs in Florida and Illinois represented both a vote of confidence in Biden from most Democrats, and a blunt rejection of Sanders’ candidacy by the kind of large, diverse states he would have needed to capture to broaden his appeal beyond the ideological left.
Sanders, of Vermont, has struggled since his first presidential campaign in 2016 to win over black voters in larger numbers and to persuade voters who do not share his ethos of democratic socialism that he can be trusted to lead the party into the general election.
Biden carried Illinois by a wide margin, keeping intact his winning streak in the large Midwestern primary states, after previously winning in Minnesota and Michigan. And the victory in Florida was a particularly sharp repudiation of Sanders: Many moderate and conservative Hispanic voters in the state had recoiled from his past praise of leftist governments in Latin America, including his admiring remarks about Fidel Castro.
But the day of voting may have been most notable for a state that did not vote: The turmoil caused by the coronavirus upended plans for a primary election in Ohio, where state officials postponed voting in an abrupt maneuver that barely survived lastminute legal scrutiny. Four other states have also taken steps to delay their primary elections until late this spring, with Maryland on Tuesday becoming the latest to push back voting.
In the states that did vote, there were signs that the virus had dampened voter turnout, and that the Democratic presidential campaigns and other party leaders were not engaged on Tuesday in the traditional allout push to drive supporters to the polls. Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told voters on Twitter to “remember your health comes first,” while the Sanders campaign released a statement renouncing the muscular getoutthevote tactics that have defined its operations in other primaries.
It made for an extraordinary day in the country’s electoral history, featuring candidates who could not campaign in public and party officials who were navigating the delicate line between protecting public safety and the civic right to nominate a candidate for the nation’s highest office.