Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
Biden’s sweep may have come too late to do what he needs done: Clear the field of his fellow moderates.
Joe Biden’s blowout victory in last night’s South Carolina primary may not have transformed the race—we won’t know that until Super Tuesday votes are counted. But it did reveal one hitherto unknown (and unknowable) fact: Biden makes a good election-night victory speech.
Before last night, Biden had never won a presidential primary or caucus, though this is his third bid for the White House spanning over 32 years.
In an emotionally effective and affecting talk that highlighted his clearest points of contrast with President Trump—his decency and his empathy—Biden identified himself with all the losers who’ve come back, and repeatedly suggested, without mentioning Bernie Sanders by name, that a Biden presidential campaign is more likely to sweep in a Democratic Senate and preserve a Democratic House than a Sanders campaign could. He labeled Sanders’s pledges as unrealizable, and closed by talking about how the time he’d spent with the relatives of those killed in the Charleston church murders had helped him get over the then-recent death of his son Beau.
For once, Joe didn’t stumble and Joe didn’t shout. Though he promised that a Biden presidency would herald a restoration of civic peace that Republicans will never agree to no matter who the next Democratic president may be, it was by far his best performance from the podium, just as the day had been his best performance at the polls. When the counting was done, Biden had won 48 percent of the vote to second-place finisher Sanders’s 20 percent.
For all that, Biden’s sweep may have come too late to do what he needs done: Clear the field of his fellow center-left or centrist candidates. Last night, Tom Steyer, who finished a distant third after spending more than $20 million in the state, dropped out, thereby removing a source of confusion for Democratic voters who wanted desperately to vote for a billionaire but couldn’t decide which one. After Super Tuesday, there will likely be no way for Amy Klobuchar to proceed; whether Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg decide to soldier on may depend on whether Biden can perform credibly in Tuesday’s contests. While several Southern states vote on Tuesday and have the demographics to give Biden a boost, in California, where millions have already voted and polls show Sanders pulling away and Elizabeth Warren running second, it’s probably too late for Biden to stage more than an incremental comeback.
If his fellow mods do clear the lane for Joe, however, he’ll have a shot (a long one, to be sure) as the race moves later in March to such key Midwestern states as Michigan and Illinois. We shouldn’t assume, though, that Sanders couldn’t win in those states even if the race narrowed to Bernie and Joe.
Midwestern states are home to a sizable white working class, and even as Biden was running away with South Carolina, Sanders carried that state’s white working-class vote by 31 percent to 25 percent. Indeed, one of reasons Sanders leads Trump in the swing states of the once-industrial Midwest is that he polls better than his Democratic rivals in this key demographic, which is overrepresented in such states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
It’s also not clear that Biden’s huge margin among South Carolina’s black voters, who gave the former vice president 61 percent of their vote yesterday to runner-up Sanders’s 16 percent, will hold in the more politically cosmopolitan black communities in those swing states. The presence of predominantly black unions and progressive organizations in such cities as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee—institutions that barely exist in South Carolina—suggests that the spread between Biden and Sanders when those cities vote in the upcoming primaries might be substantially different from what we saw yesterday.
According to the networks’ exit poll, South Carolina’s primary voters were evenly split between moderates and conservatives (50 percent) and liberals (49 percent)—about what you’d expect in an old-line Southern state. Despite this tilt, which places the state’s Democratic electorate to the right of its counterparts in other regions of the country, on some fundamental policy issues, that electorate tilted left. Asked to assess America’s economic system, only 8 percent said it was working well, 36 percent said it needed minor changes, and a clear majority (53 percent) said it needed a “complete overhaul.” Similarly, by a 48 percent to 46 percent margin, South Carolina voters preferred a Medicare for All system to one that preserves private insurance. Even in a state where Democrats don’t appear to be moving left, appearances can deceive. On economic issues, at least, they’ve moved well to the left.
Which brings us to Elizabeth Warren, who ran a distant fifth last night, pulling down just 7 percent of the vote. If the moderate lane winnows down just to Biden, there may be a case for Warren’s staying in the race, for it’s the Massachusetts senator, not Biden, who occupies the center of the new and improved-by-virtue-of-moving-left Democratic Party. On the other hand, she probably won’t have the funds to persist much beyond Tuesday, and she’d likely incur the wrath of the Sanders forces if she did.
In any event, we finally know what it takes for Joe Biden to give a good speech: winning.
