Sanders Is Running for Relevance Now, Not for President

(Bloomberg Opinion) --

Democrats vote on Tuesday in six states, with Democrats Abroad also choosing delegates. As of now, it’s quite possible that former Vice President Joe Biden will win in all of them. He’s heavily favored in Michigan, Missouri and Mississippi, and at worst a toss-up in Washington, Idaho and North Dakota. Three big wins and even three close losses, two in small states, would add plenty to Biden’s delegate lead.

The truth is at this point that unless the polling is entirely wrong — and there’s always that possibility, but there’s no reason to expect it — what’s at stake isn’t whether Biden will be the nominee. It would take some massive unexpected change in the contest to put that in real question, and there’s no obvious place for such a change to emerge from. (By contrast, change of some sort was fairly certain to result from the Feb. 29 South Carolina primary, given that a six- or seven-candidate race wasn’t going to continue.)

No, what’s at stake on Tuesday is whether Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders exits the race — and especially whether his presence will matter.

If Sanders has a great day — let’s say he wins Michigan despite being way down in the polls there, and wins all three toss-ups by decent margins — he’s still going to be a huge long-shot to get the nomination. Once all the ballots are counted in California and the other states that voted last week on Super Tuesday, Biden is likely to lead by over 100 delegates. The FiveThirtyEight forecasting model predicts that he’ll add some 80 delegates to that lead this Tuesday, and giving Sanders every possible edge plus a major polling error in Michigan would still mean that Biden gains a bit. But this week is still likely to be a lot better for Sanders than March 17 (with voting in Biden-friendly Florida, Ohio, Illinois and the more competitive Arizona) and March 24 (when Biden-friendly Georgia votes).

Nothing is ever impossible, but all the state and national polling since Super Tuesday, along with the current delegate count, point to a Biden nomination by a somewhat wider margin than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. If Sanders rallies and beats the polls, then Biden’s margin is likely to be similar to Clinton’s four years ago. Anything better for Sanders is no longer really plausible.

So if Biden does have a good day Tuesday, he’ll essentially lock up the nomination, and probably open up a convincing 400 delegate lead by March 24. Sanders might stay in the race anyway, and he might even continue to run attack ads in the March 17 states and might stay on the attack in the March 15 debate, but it’s not going to matter very much what Sanders does as long as he eventually backs Biden by the July Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, as he’s pledged to do and did for Clinton in 2016.

There’s a long tradition of hopeless factional candidates fighting on when the nomination is wrapped up. Sometimes they even win a primary or two late in the calendar. The Republican culture warrior Pat Buchanan stayed in until the end in 1988. Former (and future) California Governor Jerry Brown not only remained in the 1992 Democratic race but actually won the Connecticut primary after Bill Clinton was a certain nominee. Those challenges have no effect on the general election. If anything, Biden victories over Sanders in most or all of the primaries after Tuesday could sustain his current standing as a winner and as a moderate all spring. I suspect that Sanders would turn away from attacking Biden fairly quickly, going back to mainly advocating his policy positions along with attacks on President Donald Trump.

If it’s Sanders who has a good day on Tuesday, then Democrats will be faced with something closer to a rerun of 2016, with Biden having little danger of losing the nomination but Sanders winning often enough to make seriously contesting it a more justifiable choice. If that happens, then it’s at least possible that Sanders will wind up harming Biden in the general election, and Democrats will very much want Sanders to drop out once the delegate math makes winning impossible.

The conventional wisdom is that Sanders is in it until the end no matter what, since he stayed in until the last primary in 2016 even though he never came close to winning. It’s certainly possible that’s correct. But there’s really no way to know. Sanders may be more concerned about the effects on the general election this time than he was four years ago; he also may have learned from that effort that when the delegate math is against you, there’s really no magic wand that can change it. So I don’t really have any prediction about if, or when, Sanders might drop out. Only that if he doesn’t do better than the polling suggests very soon, it’s just not going to matter very much.

1. Michael Tesler at the Monkey Cage on how the coronavirus could threaten Trump at the ballot box.

2. Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Meredith Conroy on where Senator Elizabeth Warren’s voters will go.

3. Dan Drezner on Trump in a crisis.

4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tyler Cowen with the case for optimism about the U.S. response to the coronavirus.

5. Heather Hurlburt on authoritarianism and the virus.

6. Annie Lowrey on fighting a coronavirus-sparked recession.

7. And Matt Yglesias argues for stimulus and automatic economic stabilizers.

To contact the author of this story: Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.

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