Washington: The Democratic Party’s best chance to stop Bernie Sanders from winning its presidential nomination comes on Super Tuesday, but his two top challengers — a newly buoyant Joe Biden and a beleaguered Michael Bloomberg — both face huge obstacles to doing so.
Sanders is heavily favoured to come out of Super Tuesday with a slew of delegates and perhaps an insurmountable lead, despite deep worry in establishment Democratic circles that he would lose to President Donald Trump.
So if the nominee is going to be anyone but Sanders, Democrats in the 14 states voting in the single-biggest day of balloting need to choose an alternative.
“Well, I think it’s no secret that the establishment is getting very nervous, whether it is the corporate wing of the Democratic Party or the political leadership. And the argument that we can’t beat Trump is absolutely wrong,” Sanders told reporters in Los Angeles.
The race is Sanders’s to lose. Polls show him leading by nearly 20 points in delegate-rich California, where his calls to tax the wealthy, raise the minimum wage and provide cradle-to-grave government programmes have won over voters in areas with the most income inequality.
California and Texas both have large Hispanic populations — a demographic Sanders won in Nevada nine days ago.
“We’re really happy with where we stand on Super Tuesday, we’re really happy with the state of the race,” he said. “We go in with a pledged delegate lead. We go in with fund-raising that allows us to sustain the campaign we need to run to win,” Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders’s deputy campaign manager, told reporters on Sunday.
How does Buttigieg’s exit impact the race?
Without Buttigieg, Tuesday now has five competitive candidates — and the bigger the field, the better it is for Sanders.
Super Tuesday awards 1,344 delegates overall — most of the 1,991 needed to clinch the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, with 415 coming out of California alone, where Sanders leads. He could put himself almost out of reach if he gets the lion’s share of the day’s spoils and others carve up the rest.
There are other big delegate hauls out there, including an April 28 primary day that includes New York state, but Tuesday’s is the biggest.
“Fragmentation is a big problem,” said David Price, a North Carolina congressman who has endorsed Biden. “It’s about having so many candidates who are dividing the vote. It’s a problem going into Super Tuesday but I certainly hope that coming out of Super Tuesday we can see a path forward where not all those candidates remain in the race and we can begin to focus on fewer contenders.”
What are Biden’s chances?
With his commanding win in South Carolina on Saturday, many party leaders rallied to Biden’s side with well-timed endorsements. But he is low on cash, his Super Tuesday operation is negligible and the sprawling map negates his strongest asset: A folksy one-on-one appeal.
His 29-point margin over Sanders on Saturday gives him a shot of momentum. On Sunday, he said that he had raised $5 million in the 24 hours around the South Carolina primary. “I can win in places where I don’t think Bernie can win in a general election,” Biden said on ABC’s ‘This Week’.
Besides North Carolina, Biden’s other strongholds are likely to be in other Super Tuesday states with large African-American populations, like Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama, where he hopes voters reward him for being a loyal vice president to Barack Obama for two terms.
Bloomberg on shaky turf
Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who has risen to the top tier through the force of more than $538 million in advertising has defied new calls to drop out.
Bloomberg has bet his whole candidacy on Super Tuesday, the first time he will face voters. A pair of shaky debate performances and fresh scrutiny of his record on minorities and women has tarnished his persona as the competent alternative to a president he calls dangerously incompetent.
Bloomberg entered the race late, on November 24, and attempted to do something never before tried, skipping the first four contests to focus on Super Tuesday.
He began to rise in national and state polls in the midst of his advertising barrage, as Democrats cast about for a candidate to stop Sanders and saw the billionaire Bloomberg as someone who could match Trump dollar for dollar or even outspend him, as he is self-funding his campaign.
Bloomberg has invested heavily in delegate-poor states largely overlooked by others, like Arkansas and Oklahoma.
“We’ll see what happens, but I’m optimistic. All I can say is this: We have to stop talking and start doing,” he said on Sunday.
What about the rest?
Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar all won delegates in early contests, but were boxed out in South Carolina.
Unless Warren or Klobuchar can mount an improbable upset win on Tuesday, their continued presence in the race only helps Sanders, by diffusing the anti-Sanders delegates.
Warren briefly enjoyed front-runner status last fall, but has collected only a handful of delegates in the early contests.
She’s largely looking past Super Tuesday to next week’s March 10 contest, when six states, including Michigan and Washington state, vote, though she faces the prospect of a humiliating loss to Sanders in her home state of Massachusetts on Tuesday.
Klobuchar, in particular, will be pressed to step aside, even though she probably will carry her home state of Minnesota.
What happens if no one gets 1,991 delegates?
If no candidate gets the 1,991 delegates needed to win on the first convention ballot, an also-ran could be transformed into a compromise nominee.
Worst case, a candidate with a tranche of delegates could have the opportunity to play kingmaker at a brokered convention by throwing their delegates behind the nominee.
While there hasn’t been a brokered convention since 1952, the size of the Democratic field makes such a scenario plausible.
It could allow anyone holding delegates to parlay them into a Cabinet post or even the vice presidency.
All those candidates want to know what cards they’re holding before they decide to fold.
