Joe and Dr. Jill Biden: a return to decency
The stunning results of this week’s Super Tuesday Democratic presidential primaries indicate that Democratic voters don’t want a revolution. Nor do they want socialism. They don’t want to praise Fidel Castro and his oppressive regime in Cuba. Rather, in voting for Joe Biden in much greater numbers than expected, the voters largely repudiated both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
The red flags for Bernie Sanders were all over the place on Super Tuesday. In Sanders’ home state of Vermont, he only garnered 50.7 percent of the vote. That’s a massive downturn from the 86.1 percent he received in the 2016 Vermont Democratic presidential primary. Sanders also lost next-door Massachusetts to Biden, with only 26.7 percent of the votes compared to 48.7 percent in 2016. Likewise, Sanders lost the Minnesota primary to Biden, a state that Sanders won by over 20 points when it held its caucus in 2016. In fact, Sanders drew a smaller share of voters in all of the Super Tuesday states this year, compared to 2016. Whatever “revolution” he has touted which would supposedly bring out masses of new voters for him simply has not materialized.
Indeed, turnout of younger voters, supposedly a staple of Sanders’ campaign, was down, even while overall voter turnout was much higher in numerous states, such as Colorado, Maine, Minnesota and Utah (all of which, not coincidentally, switched from discriminatory caucuses to less burdensome primaries between 2016 and 2020). Even Latino voter turnout in California, a group that Sanders touts as a strength, supposedly was down from 2008, at a time when the population of such potential voters is increasing.
Super Tuesday voters also repudiated Donald Trump. Although we’re still in the nomination process, many Super Tuesday voters seemed to view the existential issue as defeating Trump. For example, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC stated on-air Tuesday night:
It is a Donald Trump turnout. It is a nationwide fear of Donald Trump remaining in office.
Likewise, according to the New Yorker:
most ordinary Democrats are so eager (desperate might be a better word) to get Trump out of the White House that they would vote for practically anybody whom they adjudge to have the best chance of beating him.
This sentiment helped Joe Biden, who has been running essentially a general election campaign against Trump from the get-go. Mike Bloomberg also has been running great ads against Trump, and Bloomberg just dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. Conversely, the Super Tuesday voters’ anti-Trump efforts hurt Bernie Sanders, who has spent about half his time campaigning against the Democratic Party itself. While the oft-used phrase “return to normalcy” may be too much to expect after four years of Trump in the White House, it’s clear that the majority of voters want a return to decency, rules, and sanity. This bodes well for the Democrats, who value all of these things.
Photo by Michael Stokes, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/xkcPYF
