debates were taking their toll. Soon Mr Trump was not the only one lampooning “sleepy Joe”. The party’s
hopes, and votes, started to go to Bernie Sanders; and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth
Warren.
Now things are rather different, yet the same in one crucial respect: there is still the prospect that the party
will not have settled its choice by the time of the convention in Milwaukee. A divided party squabbling at a
divided convention would be a poor launchpad for whoever does have the task of standing up to Mr
Trump’s brutal style of electioneering.
Mr Biden has now taken the lead from Mr Sanders in the number of committed Democratic Party delegates
he will take to the convention in the summer which will select the party’s candidate. His popularity among
African-Americans and older voters has seen to that – and former candidates Mr Buttigieg and Amy
Klobuchar have switched their loyalties to him. Mike Bloomberg’s poor return on the $700m he has
invested in his campaign – a tokenistic win in tiny American Samoa – has persuaded him to find better ways
to spend his money and time. He is also backing Mr Biden now. Senator Elizabeth Warren failed to win
over any state on Super Tuesday, including her home state of Massachusetts.
So now it is Mr Biden who has the “Big Mo” – the momentum that was formerly with Mr Sanders. Mr
Biden’s win in Texas was especially significant, as Mr Sanders was supposed to do well there and it
represents the second-biggest state with 228 convention delegates. Mr Biden won there, along with
Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia.
As things stand, Mr Biden has around 550 delegates and Mr Sanders around 480. Though Mr Biden has
snatched the lead, he is not so overwhelmingly ahead that the result is a foregone conclusion. It will be a
long hot summer for Mr Biden and Mr Sanders as they approach the July convention, slugging it out rally
by rally, speech by speech, and state by state.
The trends suggest that neither man will command the 1,991 delegates required to win the White House
nomination at the convention. The convention would therefore become “brokered” or “contested”, the first
time it has been since the 1950s. After delegate switching, successive rounds of voting, behind-the-scenes
politicking and the possible intervention of so-called super delegates, party apparatchiks will then
determine the winner. It will be an unedifying spectacle, and will dent the Democrats’ image. They have
already handed President Trump a series of easy wins, such as impeachment, and the president continues to
enjoy all the usual advantages of incumbency. Only three incumbent presidents who sought a second
elected term in the past century have been rejected by the voters: Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and
George HW Bush.
President Trump’s ratings are not so impressive that he can assume victory, but then again, it is also
possible that a Sanders or Biden candidacy would be so weak that Mr Trump would not only win the
popular vote (as he did not in 2016) but add to the Republican tally in the Senate. Super Tuesday hasn’t
made the Democrats’ task of achieving unity any easier.