COLUMBIA, S.C. — Joseph R. Biden’s convincing primary win Saturday in South Carolina served to winnow down the field of Democratic presidential contenders, but it also seems to have made a contested convention more likely.
Mr. Biden’s first primary win — he took 48% of the vote — revitalized the former vice president’s moribund campaign, but he’s still far from the Democratic front-runner he was once seen as. That distinction remains with Sen. Bernard Sanders, who despite a distant second-place finish in South Carolina still leads in overall pledged delegates.
Mr. Biden’s showing was enough to knock out two rivals — former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who suspended his campaign Sunday after coming in fourth, and billionaire Tom Steyer, who had invested heavily in South Carolina only to finish third with less than 12% of the vote.
Two other South Carolina also-rans, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, finished in the single digits, but both seemed prepared to carry their long-shot campaigns through this week’s Super Tuesday slate of primaries.
They’ll be joined on the ballot for the first time by billionaire media tycoon Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City mayor is spending hundreds of millions from his own fortune in a last-minute bid to deny the Democratic nomination to Mr. Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist” who, Mr. Bloomberg says, would doom the party to defeat in November.
If the Bloomberg campaign’s Super Tuesday spending blitz cannot wrest the nomination from Mr. Sanders outright, the strategy is to prevent the Vermont senator from reaching the magic number of delegates needed to win — raising the possibility of a brokered convention and opening the door for Mr. Bloomberg or Mr. Biden to step in.
SEE ALSO: Pete Buttigieg suspends 2020 campaign for Democratic nomination
Other party leaders worried about Mr. Sanders’ electability have flocked to Mr. Biden over the last week, with the endorsement of South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn — the highest-ranking black politician in Washington — coming just ahead of Saturday’s vote. Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe followed, announcing his support for Mr. Biden just minutes after polls closed Saturday.
“To those of you who have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign!” Mr. Biden said at his election night party at the University of South Carolina. But analysts still say Mr. Sanders is on track for the best Super Tuesday, riding a wave of support from liberal voters, while Mr. Biden and Mr. Bloomberg are likely to split the more sizable anti-Sanders vote.
FiveThirtyEight, a prognostication site, said Sunday there’s a 59% chance nobody enters the convention with enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot. That would ignite a contested convention for the first time in decades.
Mr. Biden warned Sunday it would be “much tougher” for Democratic candidates to win if Mr. Sanders leads the Democratic ticket.
“I’m not going to presume to tell anyone they should drop out and take on Bernie Sanders,” Mr. Biden said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I think everyone knows that it’s going to be much more difficult to win back the Senate and keep the House if Bernie’s at the top of the ticket, but that’s a judgment for them to make.
Superdelegates want a say
The Sanders squad, meanwhile, has been on a public relations push to try to shape the debate, arguing that if a candidate enters the convention with a clear plurality of delegates, then the party should rally behind them.
“It applies to anybody, it doesn’t just apply to Bernie Sanders,” Sanders senior advisor Jeff Weaver told The Washington Times. “He is not saying if I should have a plurality I should get it, but if you have a plurality you should not get it.”
That is a stark shift from four years ago when Mr. Sanders ran against Hillary Clinton, who was the delegate leader. At that time, Mr. Weaver said delegates should be free to pick the most electable person, even if it wasn’t the top vote-getter.
Now, it’s other Democrats leveling that argument at Mr. Sanders, warning his enthusiastic embrace of democratic socialism will lead to an Election Day slaughter.
The New York Times reported dozens of superdelegates — party leaders who get a vote should the nomination go past a first ballot — say they are open to steering the nomination away from Mr. Sanders if given the chance.
They fear he would cost not only a chance to defeat President Trump, but also erase Democrats’ majority in the House and leave them further behind in the Senate.
Mr. Sanders counters that he’s building a mass movement that can swamp Mr. Trump — and he points to head-to-head polling that shows him beating the president in most cases.
“Take a look at the last 60 national polls that have been done — Bernie beats Trump 56 out of 60 times,” Mr. Sanders said. “Take a look at some of the polls in the battleground states — like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan — Bernie beats Trump.”
Mr. Sanders also has shown an unmatched fundraising prowess, announcing that he raised a whopping $46 million in February.
Tuesday represents the biggest date on the primary calendar, with voters in 14 states and American Samoa heading to the polls, and a third of all pledged delegates at stake.
Polls show Mr. Sanders is the front-runner in eight of the states voting Tuesday — including in California and Texas, where 416 and 228 delegates, respectively, are on the line.
But the party’s proportional allocation rules are working against him those states, with other candidates still able to walk away with delegates as long as they cross certain thresholds of support.
And two of the Super Tuesday states have favorite-son candidates — or daughters, in this case, with Ms. Warren in Massachusetts and Ms. Klobuchar in Minnesota.
Shaun King, a national Sanders surrogate, warned his followers on Twitter that the other candidates in the race are teaming up against Mr. Sanders.
“CNN just reported that @JoeBiden’s campaign has made it clear that they want @AmyKlobuchar to stay in the race through Super Tuesday… just to be sure @BernieSanders doesn’t run away with it in her home state of Minnesota,” Mr. King said.
Within the rules
Non-Sanders voters are divided on what should happen.
Celia Norris, a lifelong Democrat, she’d walk away from the party if Mr. Sanders got a plurality of delegates but was denied the nomination.
“If they use the DNC for powers that are not about the people, not about what the people want that is not going to be my party anymore,” she said. “If your party isn’t about the vote of the people and they are about party politics that is not what people want. That is how we got Trump.”
But Jim Sims, who backed Mr. Trump in 2016 but is looking to return to the Democratic fold this year, said he can’t envision pulling a lever for Mr. Sanders.
“I’d hate to vote for Bernie. I don’t think I’d vote for him,” he said. “I guess I’d look to vote third party.”
Patricia Jordan, who attended a Biden rally in Georgetown last week, said the rules allow for a contested convention to pick someone other than the delegate leader, and superdelegates should be prepared to do that should Mr. Sanders be the front-runner.
“If it were within the rules of the convention then absolutely,” she said.
Her husband David Gunzerath said that’s the point of a contested convention.
“At that point it will be more about people making judgments about who can win, and there will probably be candidates in a better position than Bernie to win a general election,” Mr. Gunzerath said.
But Lucero Mesa, a retired state employee backing Mr. Sanders, said using the rules as a way to get around a Sanders nomination is nothing more than “rigging” the race.
“If he wins the popular vote and he gets the most delegates, how in the world would they [take] it from him?” Mrs. Mesa, 62, said. “So how democratic is the Democratic Party?”
⦁ Valerie Richardson contributed to this report.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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