To help control the spread of the coronavirus, the CDC has recommended that all gatherings of 50 people or more be cancelled or postponed for the next 8 weeks. (In my view this is about a month too late, but better late than never, as they say.)
However, the four states that vote tomorrow—Arizona, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio—have not suspended their primaries. Elections, needless to say, often turn out far more than 50 people at a time, and yet they are still set to go on as planned, despite a lethal pandemic raging throughout the country. One only needs to look at the reports coming out of Italy to see what will happen if we do not practice aggressive quarantine procedures yesterday. This decision by those four states will literally kill people.
Yet it’s not enough to just blame those four states. The Democratic National Committee could order the primaries to be suspended by threat of nullifying their delegate results, yet they haven’t. Joe Biden, the frontrunner, could show some leadership by ordering the elections to be suspended, but he hasn’t. Bernie Sanders has at least suggested that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea, but as a Bernie supporter, he needs to use far more forceful language than this (though without Biden or the DNC on his side, it wouldn’t do much good).
This is an absolute failure of leadership on the part of the Democratic Party and appears to demonstrate that they care more about their supporters’ votes than their lives. Words cannot express how disgusted I am.