Former vice president Joe Biden is having another very good Tuesday night. Building off the momentum from his South Carolina and Super Tuesday wins that firmly cemented him as the Democratic front-runner, Biden turned out another string of wins Tuesday, including in Mississippi, Missouri—and, most importantly, Michigan. “Just over a week ago, many pundits declared that this candidacy was dead. Now we’re very much alive. And although there’s a way to go, it looks like we’re gonna have another good night,” Biden said in a speech Tuesday night. “This campaign is taking off and I believe we’re gonna do well from this point on.”
After earning landslide wins in Mississippi and Missouri that were called soon after the polls closed, Biden pulled off a significant—if not totally surprising—win in Michigan, where he’s so far leading with 53% of the vote to Sanders’ 38%. The midwestern state was the most closely-watched battleground of Tuesday’s votes, both because of its 125 delegates, the largest state haul of the night, and diverse Rust Belt constituency that narrowly handed Trump the presidency in 2016. Though polling had shown Biden in the lead ahead of Tuesday’s vote, supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders hoped he could again pull off a narrow upset victory against Biden, as the senator did in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. But while Michiganders were tepid about Clinton, they were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Biden, eroding Sanders’ margins of support from 2016 and delivering the former vice president an easy win.
Sanders’ loss in Michigan was indicative of yet another disappointing night for the senator, who has seen his early front-runner status quickly slip away as the Democratic establishment coalesces around Biden. (The former V.P. even earned the endorsement of a key non-establishment figure Tuesday night, as former 2020 contender Andrew Yang formally endorsed Biden on CNN.) Sanders still will come out of the night with delegates in states that Biden won—and still could see more favorable results in Washington, North Dakota, or Idaho, where the votes are still being counted and the polls showed potentially closer races. (Sanders won all three states in 2016.) But the Michigan loss is a particular sting for Sanders, who campaigned hard in the state and was relying on its blue-collar constituency. “Michigan is made to order for Bernie,” a top adviser to a former contender told my colleague Chris Smith last week. “Union members, working-class folk, an industrial state, multiple large university campuses. The black voters are younger and less conservative than in the South.” That Sanders still lost the state makes it even more clear that the Vermont senator isn’t just failing to build a broader coalition beyond his young, progressive base—he’s also seeing his former base fall apart when up against a candidate who’s not Hillary Clinton. Voters appear to agree with aspects of Sanders’ platform: One exit poll showed 62% of Mississippi Democrats support Medicare for All, despite giving Biden more than 80% of the vote. But the Democratic electorate seems to be signaling that they don’t want a revolution right now—they just want to beat Trump with the guy who’s seen as the safest bet.
Tuesday’s votes now make the delegate math increasingly more impossible for Sanders, whose campaign saw Michigan as a must-win state for the senator’s path to the nomination. And with upcoming elections in states like Georgia and Florida—where Biden is currently leading in the polls by as many as 40 points—Biden’s string of blowout wins could still be just getting started. As Smith noted last week, there are some East Coast primaries in late April that could prove favorable for Sanders, should the Vermont senator be able to challenge Biden strongly enough in the interim. There are also a few wild card factors that could change things up, namely the coronavirus, whose effect on the two 70-something candidates and their campaigns still remains to be seen. (The virus could, however, negatively impact Sanders, whose campaign heavily relies on the kind of big gatherings that are likely to be canceled in the weeks ahead.) But as it stands now, it looks like Sanders’s chance of having a realistic shot at the nomination could be coming to an end. “Bernie was an inspiration for me, inspired my run, but the math says Joe is our prohibitive nominee,” Yang said Tuesday night. “We need to start bringing the party together, we need to start working on defeating Donald Trump in the fall.”
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