Bye bye Bernie: Biden powers through on Super Tuesday
Rejoice! It’s all over… probably… bar some shouting from Bernie, Joe yelling “here’s the deal” quite a bit, some more debating, and then a hell of a lot of states that still have to vote.
Yet the result of Super Tuesday is that moderate, establishment, and traditional Democrats finally have a champion who they now argue has done enough should this ever reach a contested convention. Last night was about Joe Biden’s momentum built around results that went well beyond even the most optimistic polling. Neither man might reach the 1991 delegates to win the nomination outright but so long as Biden retains his lead – he now has 305 to 243 for Sanders – he has the moral argument to be the Democrat nominee.
Barely a week ago, Biden was a man waiting for the axe to fall. A moribund campaign had floundered in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in Nevada… His cash was low, indicative of a man no longer in tune with the modern ways that campaigns organise online. He *would* fail, it was widely predicted, and into his moderate space would surely slip Michael Bloomberg with an ad spend like no other.
But then came James E. Clyburn (“Jim” him to his friends), the influential representative of South Carolina’s 6th district. Clyburn’s endorsement of Biden was the most significant moment of the past twelve months of electioneering. He gave a speech last Wednesday that was emotional and, perhaps, overly sentimental to anybody unaccustomed to that side of American politics. Many tears were shed. Biden was praised. “I know his heart,” said Clyburn. “I know who he is. I know what he is.”
It was strange and to these foreign eyes, not particularly persuasive, yet a quite staggering 61% of Democratic voters would later say that the congressman’s endorsement had been important to their vote. The result was that Biden took the state with a 48.4% share against 19.9% for Bernie Sanders. For Biden, the mood around his campaign changed. Winning made him look like a winner.
What was oddest of all was that even as the victory gave clarity to the race, neither Biden nor his campaign dramatically improved. In a sense, Biden was and is undeserving of his victory and the victories that followed last night. He was shouting a bit more which lent him some much lacking dynamism, even if much of it seemed contrived. Yet clearly that man of good “heart” was all that voters wanted. He was the sentimental choice, whose essential goodness spoke to those values lost in the miasma of Trumpism. Even more vital, he represented the memory of the Obama presidency, which still represents a high-water mark of America’s progressive politics among the black community. This memory will be crucial if any Democratic victory is to be secured in November.
That, really, was the story going into Super Tuesday and why the results have been so staggeringly good for the former Vice President. State after state reported big Sanders leads based on early voting yet votes on the day soon swung results back to Biden. Sanders inability to sweep California starkly defines the limitations of his campaign. With Biden (24%) and possibly even Bloomberg (15.1% at the time of writing but slipping) reaching the 15% to make them eligible for a share of the delegates, Sanders saw his best chance to stretch his early lead disappear.
There is, admittedly, much about this which doesn’t make a great deal of sense when seen from outside. With Trump engaged in a continuing war with science, as his administration attempts to magic away the coronavirus through prayer and media manipulation, one might have thought the quite radical pro-science message of Mike Bloomberg might have cut through more than it did. America might be improved if Biden wins in November and returns politics, domestic and foreign, to something that resembles normality, but one can’t help but wonder what it says of a nation still susceptible to the kind of emotional naivety at the heart of the Biden strategy. What does it say about a progressive party that relies on the spirituality of the Joe Biden backstory and a candidate who speaks openly about his dead son Beau accompanying him on the campaign?
Those might be arguments for another day. In the here and now, there’s some tidying up left to be done. It would be unreasonable for Bloomberg to continue. He picked up a few delegates with second-place finishes here and there but he really needed something more than a win in American Samoa, a territory and not a state and therefore ineligible to vote in the November election. His expensive experiment in modern-day electioneering will come to an end, at least on his behalf. His money could now help Biden solidify the nomination. Sanders might cry foul but his campaign had already said that they wouldn’t accept Bloomberg’s help should they win the nomination. At the very least, Bloomberg will probably turn his energy towards full-time trolling of the president.
If it’s fair to expect Bloomberg to drop out then the same should be said of Elizabeth Warren, for whom Super Tuesday was just another bad Tuesday. She even failed to carry her own state of Massachusetts, coming a lamentable third behind Biden and Sanders with just 21.4%.
Media pundits continue to give her more significance than voters seem to recognise but there remains a toxicity around her campaign that’s attributable to the ongoing war around gender that the media seem unwilling to acknowledge. She appeared on MSNBC after South Carolina, still making unproven claims about Bloomberg. She was challenged by the host, Chris Matthews, asked why she believed the accuser and not the accused.
In this age of heightened identity politics, it was a challenge too far. Matthews, a veteran of US politics, resigned from MSNBC in spectacular fashion on Monday night, walking out of his show within minutes of it starting. His exit was partly about allegations made in a GQ article but also, it’s thought, as a result of the Warren exchange.
Warren might linger a bit longer, believing the hype that still surrounds her campaign, but really the end is now in sight. It’s difficult to believe that Biden won’t surge even more with Bloomberg relinquishing his small but significant portion of the moderate vote.
Sanders, meanwhile, faces the reality that we always suspected was there: that his vote tops out around the thirty per cent mark (perhaps a little higher once Warren’s supporters are added). His last days in this campaign will be spent, like many revolutionaries, awaiting the arrival of that huge demographic of young radicals he seems certain is out there.
Biden is surely now the Democrat’s candidate, an easy short-term choice, something riskier in the medium term. Republicans have already dusted off Rudy Giuliani and are returning to their Burisma narrative. It’s going to be a tough run to the general election, which raises the question: can this new energised Biden last until November? Can Democrats be sure he won’t lapse into the Biden of late 2019?
In fairness, Biden is probably a good gamble. A few things are certain to be different. The next few months will certainly see the re-emergence of Barack Obama and if there’s one thing these past few weeks have shown us it is that the Democrat’s path to success relies on turning out the old Obama coalition. And, really, that’s what this feels like: Biden, for all his qualities, is still working as Obama’s point man. One might normally say that a candidate would need more than that; that they need to prove themselves as worthy of the presidency in their own right. These, however, are not normal times. Common human decency might just be enough.