Salahuddin Haider
DIFFICULTIES are many. A hostile Congress, bent on impeachment, and Senate a divided house, the sudden withdrawal from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Super Tuesday results, Donald Trump for quite a large number of analysts remains a hot runner for Presidency’s repeat term this November.
Facts and figures gathered from America media Elizabeth’s run was defined by an avalanche of policy plans that aimed to pull the Democratic Party to the left and appealed to enough voters to make her briefly a front-runner last fall, but that proved unable to translate excitement from elite progressives into backing from the party’s more working-class and diverse base.
She exited on Thursday after her avalanche of progressive policy proposals, which briefly elevated her to front-runner status last fall, failed to attract a broader political coalition in a Democratic Party increasingly, if not singularly, focused on defeating President Trump. Her departure means that a Democratic field that began as the most diverse in American history — and included six women — is now essentially down to two white men: former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders.
Ms. Warren said that from the start, she had been told there were only two true lanes in the 2020 contest: a liberal one dominated by Mr Sanders, 78, and a moderate one led by Mr Biden, 77. Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in states where he didn’t campaign. He won in states where he didn’t have offices. He won in states where he was overwhelmingly outspent in advertising. He won in states where rivals had a better organization. ‘They don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing!’ the former vice president roared in an energetic Los Angeles speech that capped the most consequential day yet in the 2020 primary.
The results of Super Tuesday clarified the race: It is now a two-man contest The results, from Maine to California, clarified the reality of the race going forward: For the moment, It is now a two-man contest between Mr Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders. They were on pace to win the lion’s share of Super Tuesday’s delegates. Mr Biden won big across the South — Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas — and made surprise incursions in the Northeast, beating Senator Elizabeth Warren on her turf of Massachusetts and even wresting some delegates from Mr Sanders in his home state of Vermont, where four years ago Mr Sanders pulled off a clean sweep.
Mr Biden’s rise coincided with the collapse of Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who spent a half-billion dollars and came away with just one outright victory — in American Samoa. Mr Bloomberg announced he was suspending his campaign early Wednesday and endorsed Mr Biden. But if Mr Biden was the big story, Mr Sanders carried the biggest prize and trove of delegates, California, which The Associated Press called just after polls closed. The disparate political coalitions the two septuagenarian politicians have assembled suggest a long and protracted fight ahead.
On Mr Biden’s own website, his ‘find a field office’ page featured only eight offices in the 14 states that voted on Tuesday. (An aide said the total was actually nine.) But if black voters in South Carolina first fueled Mr Biden’s recovery over the weekend, they propelled many of his margins on Tuesday. In Alabama, where black voters made up just under half the electorate, he thumped Mr Sanders among them by more than 60 percentage points, handing him a delegate landslide.
He won black voters by more than 50 percentage points in Virginia, and by more than 40 points in Texas — a large enough margin to compensate for Mr Sanders’s winning margins among white and Hispanic voters, according to the exit polls. Buoying Mr Biden’s case against Mr Sanders is that some of his bigger victories came in states where turnout surged — Texas and Virginia — despite the Vermont senator’s assertion that a tide of younger voters and an expanded electorate would power his ‘revolution.’
