Former Vice President Joe Biden had another very good night Tuesday, winning the Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho. Sen. Bernie Sanders won North Dakota and currently leads in Washington—but it’s a narrow lead in the state that gave him his biggest delegate win in 2016.
Voter turnout in Michigan was up substantially over 2016, and Biden’s win was strong across the state, including in rural areas Sanders dominated four years ago. Given the importance of Sanders’ Michigan win in 2016 to both his electoral momentum and the narrative about his campaign’s strengths, this is an especially difficult loss—and it, along with some other data points from Tuesday’s vote, once again raises the prospect that a substantial fraction of Sanders’ 2016 vote was against Hillary Clinton rather than for Sanders. Misogyny is an American way of life, after all.
Sanders spent the evening in Vermont and did not address supporters, but campaign press secretary Briahna Joy Gray tweeted that he would be at Sunday’s debate.
At this point, The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, Sanders’ problem is not so much the delegate math of needing to beat Biden by eight percentage points in contests going forward to arrive at the convention with a delegate lead, but the fact that Sanders trails decisively in polls. “It would not be enough for Mr. Sanders if the race suddenly became close in national polls,” Cohn writes. “Mr. Biden, who is on track to emerge from Tuesday’s races with somewhere near a majority of pledged delegates awarded to this point, could plausibly still win an outright pledged delegate majority even if the two candidates split the vote the rest of the way.”
Washington state is still counting votes and may be doing so for some time, but at this writing, The New York Times delegate counter shows Biden with 823 delegates of the 1,991 needed to secure the nomination and Sanders with 663.