Biden Beat Sanders—But It Won’t Be Easy to Shake Him Off
The former vice president’s coalition is still short on one vital component: young people.
Democratic presidential hopeful and former Vice President Joe Biden arrives onstage with his wife, Jill, and sister, Valerie (right), for a Super Tuesday event in Los Angeles on March 3.
PHOTOGRAPHER: FREDERIC J. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES
Bill Clinton dubbed himself “the Comeback Kid” after experts wrote him off early in the 1992 Democratic primaries. After Tuesday night, Joe Biden can lay claim to the nickname. Left for dead after dreadful finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, the former vice president came storming back to edge Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the delegate lead and narrow the race for the Democratic nomination to a two-man affair. Appearing on stage in Los Angeles, Biden, always prone to overstatement, for once undersold the scale of his victory. “We are very much alive,” he declared.
The emergence of Biden and Sanders presents Democratic voters with a stark choice about how best to take on President Trump in the fall: Pick Biden and follow the moderate path that delivered Democrats huge suburban gains in 2018 and control of the House of Representatives—or tack left to embrace Sanders’s message of generational change.