It’s embarrassingly clear as Super Tuesday gets underway that the media have made two major miscalculations about the campaign.
One was to write off Joe Biden after his early losses, only to scramble to explain his “resurrection,” as Politico put it, after his smashing South Carolina victory over the weekend.
The other was to underestimate Bernie Sanders, who is now the front-runner, dismissing him as a colorful sideshow who could never expand his passionate base.
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(And maybe the adversarial coverage of Coronavirus, and the rush to cast it as Donald Trump’s Katrina, will eventually qualify as well.)
The pundits have been working overtime to divine whether Biden gets enough of a bounce from his 30-point landslide to be competitive with Sanders in the 14 states that vote today.
There’s no question he gets a boost from Pete Buttigieg dropping out Sunday and Amy Klobuchar exiting the race Monday and endorsing Biden. That creates the impression that more moderate Democrats are coalescing around a single standard-bearer, and the former South Bend mayor decided afterward to join Biden at a Dallas rally to offer his endorsement. But no one really knows how today will play out.
What’s fascinating is that the party created this monstrosity—one-third of the delegates awarded on a single day at the beginning of March—to help the front-runner consolidate support to take on Trump. But now that Sanders is that guy, the party is panicking and trying to stop him.
Gaming this out is like playing nine-dimensional chess. Biden indeed has momentum, but his campaign was broke, leaving him with only a meager air war and ground game in the Tuesday states, as he bet it all on South Carolina. Early voting, especially the 3 million votes cast in California, will blunt the Biden bounce among those who cast ballots when he was flailing. And no one knows whether Mike Bloomberg’s hundreds of millions will enable him to clear the 15 percent threshold needed to win delegates after that one disastrous debate performance.
The Klobuchar withdrawal and endorsement was smart, given that she could never build on her one burst of momentum in New Hampshire, and if Biden wins she would have a shot at being his running mate. The Minnesota senator outlasted many rivals with bigger national profiles, including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand.
The Buttigieg withdrawal should help Biden, assuming he gets most of Mayor Pete’s dwindling share of the vote. And it’s worth noting that this was a shrewd move by a guy who emerged from obscurity to run a remarkable campaign.
Trump, whose sideline is providing color commentary on the Democratic race, tweeted: “Pete Buttigieg is OUT. All of his SuperTuesday votes will go to Sleepy Joe Biden. Great timing. This is the REAL beginning of the Dems taking Bernie out of play - NO NOMINATION, AGAIN!”
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Needless to say, the president would very much like to run against the democratic socialist and is quick to play up any suggestion that Bernie is being robbed.
But Sanders, who has raised a ton of money, could still emerge from today’s voting with a massive haul of delegates. That would make his nomination difficult to block, for all the chatter about denying him at a brokered convention. The pressure will build on Bloomberg, if he has a mediocre day, to bow out as well, though he obviously has the money to stay as long as he wants. Yet the Biden camp may kinda sorta want Elizabeth Warren to stay in and drain votes from Sanders—though that becomes more difficult if she loses Massachusetts today.
On Saturday night, Biden gave a moving speech as he talked about visiting the South Carolina church that was the site of a mass shooting and drawing strength from those grieving after the death of his son Beau.
Yet in doing four Sunday shows the next morning, Biden looked tired and kept repeating the same sound bites, saying people want results and not a revolution, in an obvious allusion to Sanders.
The contrast captured the ups and downs of this 77-year-old candidate, who proved in this campaign that he can get off the canvas but still has a long way to go.
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