Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “revolution” to bring down the political establishment and turn the nation into a utopian socialist state has been no more a revolution than a failed political insurgency.
On Tuesday, Sanders suffered another series of stinging defeats as the last man standing in final a match-up against former Vice President Joe Biden who is running away with the nomination. After landing big wins in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona, Biden now holds a nearly insurmountable lead in the race to the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch the nomination with 1,153 to Sanders’ 861.
In Arizona where Sanders was expecting to do well given the state’s large Hispanic population who powered his wins in Nevada and California, Sanders still lost to Biden by more than 12 points. In Florida, Sanders did far worse losing by nearly 40 points as many of the state’s hispanic voters were alienated by Sanders’ praise of the authoritarian regimes which they fled.
In the last Democratic debate on Sunday, Sanders did his revolution no favors by refusing to walk back his recent comments touting Cuba’s “literacy program.”
“I think we condemn authoritarianism whether it’s in China, Russia, Cuba or anyplace else,” Sanders said during the CNN prime-time event. “But to simply say that nothing ever done by any of those administrations had a positive impact on their people would, I think, be incorrect.”
The Vermont senator tried and failed to resurrect the left-wing movement that propelled his candidacy four years ago. Sanders ran on the same socialist platform promoting free health care, free education, and free everything that brought the senator the support he carried throughout the primaries against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. In the 2020 election, Sanders had competition from the progressive flag-bearer in Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The country roundly rejected the two senators’ socialist dreams and coalesced around Biden in the run-up to Super Tuesday earlier this month, thwarting their soviet ambitions. This year, Sanders didn’t even come close to emerging triumphantly victorious in the critical midwestern battleground state of Michigan like in 2016 illustrating the weakness of a broad revolution that has since faded.
After making an extraordinary political comeback in South Carolina with an almost 30-point win, Biden’s victory forced rival candidates out of the race. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg threw their support behind Biden. Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who ended his White House bid in October also announced his support for Biden in the run-up to the Super Tuesday primaries that included his own state, where Biden edged out Sanders to capture 111 of the state’s delegates to Sanders’ 100.
The Sanders revolution has been over ever since, where in the absence of other serious competitors, Sanders has fared worse against Biden this year than he did against Clinton four years earlier. At this point, Sanders must win 63 percent of the delegates left in the race while Biden continues to pick up momentum each week, landing closer to becoming the presumptive nominee. Biden only needs less than half of the rest of the delegates in play to go into the summer convention in Milwaukee with the nomination secured.
According to RealClearPolitics’ latest aggregate of nationwide surveys, Sanders has too wide a gap to close down by more than 20 percent.
