Now that Super Tuesday is officially over, we have quite a bit of information to unpack. There were some major last-minute dropouts, both expected and unexpected, as well as some surprising results from different states. To say the least, I did not think that the Democratic field was going to thin out this quickly.
Buttigieg was doing surprisingly well with his win in Iowa and his close finish in New Hampshire. However, things quickly turned upside down when he suffered major defeats in both Nevada and South Carolina. I expected Buttigieg to stay in the race past Super Tuesday, considering that this would have been his shot to make a splash and upset Joe Biden’s campaign. After all, Biden’s performance was the antithesis to Buttigieg’s. He performed poorly in both Iowa and New Hampshire but suddenly struck back in South Carolina. I think these votes prior to Super Tuesday made two things brutally clear — first, the Democratic Party is split into moderate and progressive factions, and second, if the moderates continue to internally fight, they will split the vote and guarantee the Democratic nomination for Bernie Sanders.
This forced the rapid consolidation that we saw over the past week. Starting with Buttigieg and Klobuchar on March 1 and 2, the moderate wing of the party recognized the impending disaster and made quick calculations as to what needed to happen. While there is no concrete proof, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that either the Democratic National Committee asked other candidates to drop and support Biden in order to stop Sanders or that Biden made VP and cabinet promises to his rivals. After all, Trump’s best bet at being reelected is if he runs against Sanders. Because Sanders is so far to the left, he has isolated the average American voter. Many people are afraid of his policies, particularly when he invokes socialism. Biden, on the other hand, is seen as a walking gaffe machine, but at least he can carry the moderate voters that Trump needs to win in November.
I believe that this consolidation is what helped Biden to win in states Sanders was predicted to win on Super Tuesday. While Biden was expected to easily win in southern states, his victories in Minnesota, Maine, and Massachusetts were shocking, to say the least. These states gave Biden the edge he needed to really overtake Sanders for the rest of the race for the nomination.
At this point, though, I don’t think the Democrats have a single chance at winning. If Sanders does end up with the nomination, it will be after a long and bloody fight within the Democratic Party. Many Democrats will become disenfranchised and simply stay home. If Biden wins, the progressives supporting Sanders will feel cheated by this past week’s events, especially since the nomination was literally rigged against Sanders back in 2016.
On a positive note for the Democrats, Bloomberg is out. After wasting about $18 million per delegate, he finally realized that the party that bashes billionaires on a regular basis didn’t want him. However, the Democratic Party isn’t opposed to Bloomberg’s wealth accumulation because he has committed to continuing his spending in order to defeat Donald Trump. While in total, Bloomberg spent over half a billion dollars on himself, he is nowhere near done spending. After all, what is a billion dollars to the man who has an estimated net worth of $60 billion?
To say the least, Democrats are not in a good place right now. I would not be surprised to see a Trump victory unless a dark horse candidate appears that can grab the Democratic Party’s attention and pull Trump supporters away from him. But this is all relative. If the economy continues to sink because of the coronavirus, Trump’s winning economic message may go down with him in November.
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