The race for the Democratic presidential nominee is over. Stick a fork in Bernie Sanders he’s done. For the third Tuesday in a row Joe Biden dominated the polls soo thoroughly that it’s easy to forget that less than a month ago it looked like his campaign was on life support.
In Illinois he won by 24 points, in Arizona he won by 12 and in Florida he won by a mind boggling 39 points. These victories all but end Sanders’ presidential ambitions but like many questionable sporting records, they should come with an asterisk. Barry Bonds, Juventus and Joe Biden, have more in common than you think.
Biden’s victory was expected, he has been the anointed one for the last two weeks but the problem with Tuesday’s primaries were the fact that they were held at all.
At 11 PM on Monday night Ohio Governor Mike DeWine the state would not hold its primary on Tuesday in order to "avoid the imminent threat with a high probability of widespread exposure to COVID-19 with a significant risk of substantial harm to a large number of the people in the general population, including the elderly and people with weakened immune systems and chronic medical conditions."
Simply put it was the right decision to make. As millions around the country have been advised to stay at home and not gather is crowds of over 10 (yes you read that right 10) hundreds of thousands of voters lined up to vote in the most meaningless primaries in modern history.
That’s not right. It wasn’t meaningless, it was devoid of context. It was as if those people lined up in an alternate universe where the civic duty of voting was greater than the need to maintain public health and safety. But the burden should not fall on the voters. It isn’t their fault, they were following the guidance of State and party leaders and one can unequivocally say they got it wrong.
If you thought Iowa and a crashing app was the worst that it could get for the Democratic party well then wait till the fallout from Tuesday’s primaries. The fallout will not be as vocal and visible as the Iowa debacle, but it will probably have a much deeper and lasting impact on the party, its electorate and health of the population at large in the US.
By irresponsibly sending hundreds of thousands of people to the polls on Tuesday Democratic and State level officials essentially said that the COVID-19 outbreak isn’t as bad as you think. At a time when the White House has sent mixed messages about how to deal with the crisis it was largely left up to individual States to act like the adults in the room. Ohio stood up and did just that, as did three other states that decided to reschedule their primaries.
The suspicion remains that the party was in a hurry to finish things off so that they could finally start coalescing around Biden.
With the prolonged fear of what a presidential election could look like under the threat of Coronavirus one could forgive the Democratic party for trying to settle on a candidate as soon as possible.
But many are not so sure. And not just Sanders supporters.
If settling on a candidate means potentially putting the lives of millions at risk by asking them to come out en masse and vote, then there is a fair argument to be made that that was not the right call.
Ditto if settling on a candidate means creating widespread confusion about social and health related behavior during a global pandemic.
Ditto if settling on a candidate means disenfranchising voters.
At the end of the day the party got it was wanted, Biden is the presumptive nominee.
But it is a fair question to ask: at what cost?
Nader Rahman is a freelance journalist based in New York
