Biden looks to pad lead over Sanders

Bernie Sanders went into last week's Super Tuesday primaries poised to break away from the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate pack. A week later, he is fighting to keep his candidacy alive.

That is due to Joe Biden's stunning performance on March 3, when he won 10 of the 14 states holding primaries.

The former vice-president will get another chance to build on his delegate lead this Tuesday as six states go to the polls — Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington state.

Heading into Tuesday, Biden had accumulated 664 pledged delegates, while Sanders had tallied 573.

Michigan, home to the US automobile industry and its powerful unions, has always been coveted by Democratic contenders. A Rust Belt swing state, Michigan also played a crucial role in the 2016 general election, where Donald Trump surprised Hillary Clinton by winning The Great Lakes State, albeit by a little more than 10,000 votes out of over 4.5 million cast.

What also is significant about Michigan is that Sanders, 78, won the state's Democratic primary in 2016 against Clinton, but Biden, 77, this year has opened up a big lead on the US senator from Vermont.

Five polls posted on realclearpolitics.com on Monday showed Biden with substantial double-digit leads in the battle for Michigan's 125 pledged delegates, the most up for grabs in the six states voting Tuesday.

Sanders has been going after Biden for his support of the since revamped North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994, and a 2000 bill that normalized trade with China by granting it most favored nation status.

"If we are going to defeat Trump in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, and in Wisconsin, it will be very hard for a candidate who voted for these disastrous trade agreements," Sanders told an audience in Detroit on Friday.

"We're not looking for a revolution," Biden said at a campaign event Monday in Flint, Michigan, a city whose drinking water in 2014 was found to be contaminated with lead. "What we want to be able to do is trust the water that comes out of the pipes and trust the words that comes out of the mouths."

Much has been made of the similarity of the two major Democratic candidates left standing — both white men in their late 70s. They are vying to challenge another septuagenarian, Trump, who is 73, in November.

Pundits have wondered how an increasingly diverse US population — having elected a black man, Barack Obama, then in his 40s, for two terms starting in 2008, and having witnessed the rise of the women's "me too" movement — can produce a 2020 Democratic field without diversity.

And the last two major Democratic candidates to drop out of the running also are white and in their 70s, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, 78, and US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, 70, who lost the primary in her own state on Super Tuesday.

But what the pundits, pollsters and national media once again are learning — as they did in 2016 — is that Americans are unpredictable voters, and while age, sex and race are factors, they are not the overriding ones. Voters do heavily consider the economy and social stability.

The importance of those two factors has been heightened in recent weeks with a massive selloff in the stock market due to the spread of the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.

While progressive issues, such as free healthcare and college tuition and fewer restrictions on immigration have gotten much attention in the Democratic Party the past couple of years, voters demonstrated last week that they weren't quite ready to fully embrace those positions.

"Democrats, by voting for Biden over Sanders, are coming down on the side of restoring American institutions. They are voting for a revival of those institutions, not a revolution," Juan Williams, a commentator for Fox News, wrote in a piece for The Hill published Monday.

That moderation is being credited for repositioning Biden as the front-runner. Biden also has been helped by significant endorsements by former candidates who last week dropped out of the running: Bloomberg, US Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

This week, he picked up two more key endorsements, that of US Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey on Monday, and US Senator Kamala Harris of California on Sunday. Both were former Democratic presidential candidates, and Harris had famously clashed with Biden over busing to desegregate public schools in the 1970s, at a Democratic debate last year.

The endorsements by the two African American senators also is expected to increase Biden's standing with black voters.

Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, sees the Democratic establishment lining up against him, as it was accused of doing for Clinton in 2016.

"One of the things that I was kind of not surprised by is the power of the establishment to force Amy Klobuchar, who had worked so hard, Pete Buttigieg, who, you know, really worked extremely hard as well, out of the race," Sanders said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

A sign that Biden would bounce back was his easy victory in the South Carolina primary on Feb 29, which was being attributed largely to support from the state's African American voters.

Days before had won the endorsement of US Congressman Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, which many voters cited in exit polls as the reason Biden got their vote.

Biden also consistently reminds voters that he was Obama's vice-president, a nostalgic tactic that resonates with many Democratic voters. Obama, however, has not endorsed Biden so far.

Sanders won the support Sunday of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, himself a onetime presidential candidate.

"With the exception of Native Americans, African Americans are the people who are most behind socially and economically in the United States and our needs are not moderate," Jackson said in a statement. "A people far behind cannot catch up choosing the most moderate path. The most progressive social and economic path gives us the best chance to catch up and Senator Bernie Sanders represents the most progressive path. That's why I choose to endorse him today."

To win the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic convention in July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a candidate needs 1,991 pledged delegates.

Considering Biden's strong support among the Democratic establishment, even if he didn't have enough votes to win on the first ballot, the second ballot would include the votes of 771 superdelegates, many of whom are current and former Democratic politicians and party power brokers, most of whom would be expected to favor Biden.