From a 4.9% betting chance to 75% one in just nine days – Biden’s extraordinary change of fortune
And the person he should thank the most is Pete Buttigieg
It was just three days before Super Tuesday that Mayor Pete made the dramatic move that has totally changed the Democratic nomination race and undermined the one who looked as though he was running away with it – Bernie Sanders. Looking back and seeing what happened overnight in the 14 primaries almost everybody totally underestimated the impact.
For until then it appeared as though Bernie Sanders was heading for victory in the nomination race simply because the centrists did not have a unified candidate. There was Pete, Klobuchar and of course Mike Bloomberg who were all pitching for the same centrist votes.
The mood of Democratic voters is that the one thing they most want to happen in November’s presidential election is for Donald Trump to be defeated. There were clear worries about Sanders being the contender but it required the coming together of the centrists for him to be stopped. It was Buttigieg’s March 1st move that enabled that. The following day Amy Klobuchar followed Pete and Joe Biden became the one to stop Sanders.
But I don’t think anybody saw just how big an impact this was going to have and how poorly Sanders was going to perform once there was a clear single alternative to him.
I noted yesterday morning that there are had been almost no polls carried out after Pete and Amy made their moves so we had nothing really to rely on when trying to forecast what was going to happen yesterday. We all thought that Sanders was much stronger than he appeared.
On the face of it there is still a long way to go with only about a third of the total delegates having been agreed. It will be a bold person who will predict now that Biden is going to be sidetracked.
The worry for the former vice president is that he’s going to be subject to intense scrutiny from the White House particularly over his son’s business dealings in Ukraine. There is also the question of Biden’s age which was shown several times over night in his ability to get things mixed up and to forget things. That’s going to be mercilessly exploited by the Trump campaign.