The single most definitive day of the primary process is coming to its climax (though the major
battlegrounds lie in the south and west) as I write.
Democrats in 14 states, including delegate-sodden Texas and California, not to mention plucky little
American Samoa, will pick their champion to take on the tangerine kraken in November. A third of all
available delegates are at stake.
But when the counting is done, this Democratic nightmare, far from fizzling out, will more than likely
intensify. The prospect of a fractious brokered convention may, by this evening, have moved from nagging
concern to ghoulish inevitability.
The only probable area of clarification is that the field will contract again, until only the two standard-
bearers of the party’s warring wings survive.
Joe Biden’s renaissance came in the nick of time. On Saturday morning, the gaffemeister was on life
support, with supporters and donors morosely thinking of the end of his candidacy. One startlingly huge
victory in South Carolina later, and the old-timer was reanimated like one of Oliver Sachs’ catatonics in
Awakenings after the injection of L-Dopa.
Since then, the withdrawals and endorsements of rival centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have
slashed his odds. At time of writing he is as an odds-on chance, and shortening by the minute.
This flurry of money has less to do with any confidence that he will win a majority of delegates. He almost
certainly won’t. It relies on the presumption that, once Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren have
withdrawn, he and Sanders will battle it out between them. But with neither winning cleanly.
For Sanders, history prepares to repeat. Four years after party brahmins coalesced around Hillary Clinton as
the electable candidate (hahahaha), the sense of deja vu is oppressive – albeit this stitch-up threatens to be
far more blatant and brutal than the last.
The party’s establishment knows, or thinks it knows, that Sanders cannot beat Trump. Judging by his tweets
on the matter, Trump agrees – and regardless of his ignorance and idiocies, his political antennae are
acute. He wants Sanders in the belief that his “democratic socialism” is a poor fit in the swing states that
will decide a close general election.
What had the makings of a cakewalk for Trump a month ago looks more like
the squeakiest of bum times again
Trump didn’t attempt to force Ukraine’s president into smearing Biden solely for the merriment. He
appreciates that in the pivotal, coin-flip Rust Belt states, his Amtrak-riding, blue-collar authenticity presents
a mortal danger.
Also gauging Sanders as too far left for a centre-right country, the Democratic establishment faces a
gruesome dilemma. At a brokered convention, delegates are freed from the obligation to vote according to
past results. The “superdelegates” and machine politics come into play, and after vicious horse-trading the
convention plumps for whomever it pleases.
In that event, assuming Sanders has a plurality of delegates but no majority, do they deny him the moral and
numerical victory at the huge risk of alienating his followers, and depressing turnout enough to gift Trump a
second term?
But if Sanders is seen as the American Corbyn, might Biden be Hillary 2.0? For what it’s worth (rather less,