A Not-So-Super Tuesday for Senator Bernie Sanders
Former Vice President Joe Biden won decisively in Michigan on not-so-super Tuesday, along with three other state primaries. Senator Bernie Sanders won Idaho’s 18 delegates and, while we won’t know the final result for a while yet, it’s safe to say the candidates split the take from Washington State.
The direction --if not the final result-- of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is obvious. Voters are choosing “safe choice” Joe Biden.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaHol/status/1237769359923314688?s=20
There is not a consensus about what needs to be done beyond dumping Trump, amplified by the growing corona crisis.
Support for replacing private health insurance with a government plan, for instance, was solid in states won by both candidates. While the devil is in the details, this doesn’t change the fact that voters realize things must change.
Tim Alberta, the Politico writer who was roundly mocked in 2016 for pointing out trends in the Michigan primary favoring then-longshot Donald Trump, crunched the same kinds of numbers for 2020 and came up with a different result:
Biden had a spectacular showing on Tuesday, winning every single county in Michigan and blowing Sanders out in three other states that voted, essentially sealing the nomination by leaving his lone rival no plausible path forward. But the big takeaway from the day’s big prize, Michigan, isn’t that Biden is a spectacular candidate. The big takeaway is that he doesn’t need to be.
Two things happened on Tuesday in Michigan. First, Democratic turnout exploded. Second, Biden performed far better with key demographic groups than Clinton did four years ago. If either one of those things happen in November, Trump will have a difficult time winning the state again. If both things happen, the president can kiss Michigan’s 16 electoral votes goodbye—and with them, more than likely, the electoral votes of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
There goes the White House.
Far-fetched? Hardly. Beating Trump in November does not require an electoral juggernaut. This is because Trump himself, despite his frequent boasts to the contrary, is no electoral juggernaut. The president won the Electoral College in 2016 by a whisker. He carried three states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—by a combined 77,744 votes. Notably, in those states, Clinton won roughly 600,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012. The reason: a failure to mobilize black voters, and dismal performances among both affluent suburbanites and working-class whites.
https://twitter.com/markos/status/1237708222791733252?s=20
The growing political consensus is that Democrats will need to pick a woman as their Vice Presidential candidate. While I like most--if not all--of the names mentioned, I can’t help but feel this smacks of tokenism.
And Daily Kos’ Laura Clawson agrees:
After yet another presidential campaign cycle rife with sexism and misogyny toward women candidates, we’re now supposed to get really excited to chant “we’re number two!” As in, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will choose a woman as his running mate.
To be sure, the first woman vice president would be a major advance after nearly 250 years of presidential and vice-presidential sausage-fest. But four years after Hillary Clinton won the popular vote for the presidency and in the cycle that saw a record number of women—qualified women, inspiring women, talented women—run and be tanked by the aforementioned sexism and misogyny, it would also be a letdown, a consolation prize that offered little consolation.
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https://twitter.com/ThomboyD/status/1237493000604766208?s=20
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