Joseph R. Biden Jr. swept the three states that voted Tuesday: Florida, Illinois and Arizona. Bernie Sanders lost ground badly in the delegate count. And the coronavirus pandemic continued to wreak havoc on the most basic facets of American life, threatening to disrupt if not derail the remaining primary calendar.
With nearly 79 percent of the delegates allocated in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Biden holds a commanding nearly delegate lead over Mr. Sanders – a sum that makes it statistically improbable that Mr. Sanders could ever catch up.
“Is this race over?” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic caucus chairman, asked on Twitter Tuesday night.
In a sign of his diminished standing, Mr. Sanders did not even try to spin the results for the second straight week, choosing to make no public remarks after the states were called.
)
Yet it’s not clear what comes next – for Mr. Sanders or the primary itself.
Georgia was supposed to vote next week, but that primary has been delayed . And given his string of poor performances the pressure for Mr. Sanders to exit the race is likely only to grow, even as the pandemic has frozen traditional campaigning and pushed multiple states to delay their planned elections.
Here are four takeaways from a primary night in three key states for both parties:
Biden is winning almost everywhere – by a lot
It has been only days since Mr. Biden’s low point in the primaries: a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire so embarrassing that he bolted the state before the polls closed and decamped to South Carolina for what looked like a potential last stand.
Now Mr. Biden is routing Mr. Sanders in every region of the country. In Florida, a voter survey showed Mr. Biden winning men and women, white voters and nonwhite voters, those with college degrees and those without – all with more than 79 percent of the vote. The victory was so thorough that Mr. Biden was even leading in Florida among “very liberal” Democrats, a typical Sanders base. He was similarly dominant in Illinois.
In fact, Mr. Biden was leading in every county in Florida – sometimes tripling and quadrupling the vote total of Mr. Sanders, just as the former vice president had swept every county in Michigan, Mississippi and Missouri a week ago.
On Mr. Sanders’s website, just below where he asks visitors to enter their email address, there is a giant banner that reads, “Bernie beats Trump.” But his lopsided losses in Florida and Arizona, a week after Mr. Biden crushed him in the key Midwestern swing state of Michigan, has severely undercut any electability case that Mr. Sanders hoped to make.
The lone remaining source of electoral strength for Mr. Sanders has proved to be younger voters, whom he continued to win over but who comprise only a small share of the electorate.
“The results tonight only confirmed what we knew a week ago – that Joe Biden is the prohibitive favorite to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, ”said Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC devoted to the 205925 race. “It’s critical that Democratic organizations and allies need to be focused on taking on Donald Trump and on not allowing any of the lies he is telling about the likely nominee to take hold.”
Sanders still relishes his megaphone
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings