If Democrats ever did Feel the Bern, they aren’t feeling it now.
With three convincing victories in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona yesterday, Joe Biden has all but sealed his bid for the Democratic nomination for president.
The former vice president has amassed 58.5 percent of the delegates needed to win the nomination by his party’s convention in July.
Questions now are, how long will the old Stalinist from Vermont stay in the race, and will his communist staffers keep a promise to set cities aflame and attack police if the party sends Biden to do battle against President Trump?
Results
Voters in all three states sent the same message: Sorry Comrade Sanders, we don’t think too much of rebooting the Holodomor in the United States.
Biden’s biggest win was Florida, which is unsurprising given its large Cuban population and Sanders’ imprudent if sincere praise for Cuban mass-murderer Fidel Castro. Apparently, those voters aren’t as enthusiastic as Sanders about Castro’s health and literacy achievements.
Biden won 62 percent of the vote and 136 of the state’s 219 delegates against Sanders’ 23 percent and 48 delegates.
In Illinois, Biden took 93 of the state’s 155 delegates, with 59 percent of the vote. Sanders notched 36 percent and 59 delegates.
Biden’s victory in Arizona wasn’t quite as convincing. He took 37 of the state’s 67 delegates with 43.6 percent of the vote. Sanders won 31.6 percent of the vote and 28 delegates.
Those results, the New York Times reported this morning, have Sanders and his campaign commissars “weighing his next steps.”
And “some Democrats [are] growing increasingly vocal that he should consider exiting the race amid a national health emergency caused by the coronavirus”:
Hours after former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. widened his delegate lead over Mr. Sanders — with resounding victories in Florida, Illinois and Arizona on Tuesday — Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, said the Vermont senator was assessing his options but suggested a decision on how to proceed was not imminent.
“The next primary contest is at least three weeks away,’’ Mr. Shakir said in a statement. “Senator Sanders is going to be having conversations with supporters to assess his campaign. In the immediate term, however, he is focused on the government response to the coronavirus outbreak and ensuring that we take care of working people and the most vulnerable.”
Given his age, Sanders should be more worried about contracting the virus than anything else, but anyway, the Times reported, Representative Don Beyer (D-Va.) had this message for Castro’s No. 1 Fanboy: “Bernie is getting beat by 30 and 40 points, it’s over. This is the adult thing to do — knowing when it is time to disappear.”
And Larry Cohen, a longtime Sanders confidant who is chairman of Our Revolution, the political organization that spun out of the 2016 Sanders campaign, said it was not in Mr. Sanders’s nature to drop out before all the primaries are over, “but the pandemic and the current delegate count could lead to a different outcome.”
“The delegate count speaks for itself,” he said.
That count right now is 1,165 for Biden and 880 for Sanders. Biden needs just 1,991 delegates to secure the Democrat nod before July.
RCP Average
The Real Clear Politics average of voter polls don’t look promising for Sanders.
As of Tuesday, Biden has amassed a 20.9-point lead, 55.7-34.8.
Biden hasn’t lost any of the 15 polls that ended March 2, and has notched stunning margins three voter surveys:
• 29 points in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of March 11-13;
• 27 points in The Hill/Harris X survey of March 8-9;
• 21 points in the Morning Consult of March 11-15.
Another six polls ended in double-digit victories.
Violence Ahead?
The problem for Democrats is what will happen when Sanders loses.
“If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination, or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, f***ing Milwaukee will burn,” campaign torpedo Kyle Jurek told an undercover reporter. “It’ll start in Milwaukee…. When the police push back on that, other cities just f***ing [makes explosion noise].”
Jurek said top Democrats better remember Chicago, 1968: “Remember what happened when McGovern got f***ed?” he asked. “Riots. F***ing people getting beaten by the cops. The cops are gonna be the ones getting f***ing beaten in Milwaukee. They’re gonna call up the National Guard for that s**t. I promise you that.”
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
