Jonathan Chait: "Why Can't Bernie Accept That Democratic Voters Didn't Want Him?"

From the moment he announced his candidacy, Joe Biden led in polls of Democratic primary voters. His lead endured through months of bad press and worse debate performances. He lost his national lead very briefly, after crushing defeats in two overwhelmingly white states — one of them a low-turnout caucus — only to regain it after African-Americans voted for the first time in large numbers, at which point he has led by commanding margins.

The Bernie Sanders movement has mostly accepted the finality of Biden’s victory. What it hasn’t come to terms with is its causes. The Sanders campaign and many of its enthusiasts continue to see Biden’s victory as either a fluke or a plot.

Sanders advisers told the New York Times they believed they had been on the precipice of sweeping to victory on Super Tuesday, until Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden. Ben Tulchin, a Sanders pollster, claimed the candidate was “on the brink of winning until the most unprecedented event in the history of presidential primaries occurred.”

It is hardly unprecedented for the fifth- and sixth-place candidates to drop out of a race after four primaries. Yet Sanders himself has fixated on this decision as evidence of an Establishment conspiracy. Appearing on ABC’s This Week several days later, he described it as “the power of the Establishment to force Amy Klobuchar, who had worked so hard, Pete Buttigieg, who had really worked extremely hard as well, out of the race.”

From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-joe-biden-2020-voters-establishment.html?utm_campaign=nym&utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s1