The Memo: Biden subdues Sanders amid virus upheaval

Joe Biden all but snuffed out his rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday, winning big victories in three states and expanding his delegate lead.

But those contests were subsumed by a national and global crisis over the coronavirus. The virus is shaking American society in ways that were unimaginable a month ago. It is well on its way to toppling a previously robust economy.

The febrile atmosphere puts more pressure on Sanders to get out of a Democratic race that he no longer has a plausible prospect of winning. But it also means that the general election, now less than eight months away, is entirely unpredictable — as is the nation’s immediate future.

Tuesday’s primaries would typically have dominated the news cycle, especially given that major states — Florida, Illinois and Arizona — voted.

Ohio had been scheduled to vote as well, but a dispute between a judge and the state’s Republican governor as to whether to proceed in the end meant the primary did not go ahead.

Biden won his biggest victory in the biggest state, Florida, where he was almost 40 points clear of Sanders with 98 percent of precincts reporting as of midnight. 

The demographics of the Sunshine State have long favored Biden. The population skews older, which plays to his strengths, while Sanders’s comments praising some elements of former Cuban President Fidel Castro’s regime played poorly with Florida’s substantial Cuban American community.

Biden was also set for convincing wins in Illinois, where he was more than 20 points ahead with 90 percent of precincts reporting, and Arizona, where several news organizations projected him the winner soon after polls closed at 10 p.m. Eastern.

It will take some time for all the delegates from the primaries to be apportioned, but Biden looks set to increase his lead over Sanders to around 300 pledged delegates.

Mathematically, such an advantage is possible to overcome. Biden has around 1,150 delegates, and 1,991 are required to claim victory on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention, set for Milwaukee in July.

Politically, however, there is no credible route for Sanders to close the gap — especially with the tide running so strongly against him. His performance in Illinois on Tuesday was significantly worse than his showing in the same state against eventual nominee Hillary Clinton four years ago.

Despite the political relevance of the night — Biden now on the cusp of securing an insurmountable delegate lead — the Democratic contests were relegated to a sideshow by the cascade of news relating to the coronavirus.

The acknowledged death toll in the United States from COVID-19 rose above 100 and the total number of confirmed cases topped 6,300.

There is now at least one confirmed case in every state in the union, as well as in the District of Columbia.

At a White House briefing Tuesday morning, President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin held out the strong possibility of the government sending checks directly to most citizens.

Those checks, if they went ahead, would likely be part of an $850 billion stimulus plan that Congress is considering as the economic effects of the virus crisis scythe through the nation. 

The pressure to pass such a package is intense. Mnuchin discussed the possibility that the national unemployment rate could reach 20 percent without government intervention during a meeting with Republican senators on Tuesday, according to a report from Bloomberg.

The current situation has no obvious precedent in most Americans’ lifetimes. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said during media appearances Tuesday that the predicament the nation now faces has more in common with the Great Depression of the 1930s than with the Great Recession of a decade ago.

Trump has had the major pillars of his reelection bid — a strong economy and a historically low unemployment rate — vaporized in a matter of days.

He insisted during Tuesday’s press briefing that the economy “will come back very rapidly” and that the country “can be rolling again” soon enough. But the president also acknowledged that the nation was in a fight against “a real tough enemy” in the coronavirus.

On Tuesday evening, Biden spoke on a video stream from Delaware as the results came in — the new norm in a campaign where traditional rallies are suddenly out of the question.

Biden put himself forward as a potential healer of the nation, asserting that “we will get through this together. That’s how we have always done it.”

For now, however, all is changed. Much of the western world is effectively shuttered. Travel is curtailed. Life in the world’s major cities is strange and muted.

Biden won a traditional, orthodox victory on Tuesday.

But there is nothing traditional or orthodox about the road ahead.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump’s presidency.