Today in the United States it’s Super Tuesday as Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden square up to one another big time
I’m fascinated by American politics, so I’ve been following the contest to select a Democratic Party candidate to run against the Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential election in November. A massive field of candidates has been running but the number has recently fallen very quickly and very substantially with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar pulling out in the last couple of days.
So far we’ve only had four states voting to determine how they will allocate their delegates at the Democratic National Convention. So, up to now, only 155 delegates have been awarded. Today – known as Super Tuesday – no less than 14 states are voting and a massive 1,357 delegates (a third of the total) will be distributed. The two most populous, California and Texas, will take part – the former for the first time on Super Tuesday.
Essentially it is now a contest between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, and former Vice-President Joe Biden, the moderate and establishment choice, although mega-spending billionaire Mike Bloomberg will have his name on the ballot papers for the first time and Elizabeth Warren is still running.
I expect Bernie Sanders to confirm his standing as the front runner, but it will be interesting to see if he can secure a commanding lead or if this is going to be as brutal a battle as Sanders versus Hillary Clinton four years ago.
You can find out what’s at stake in each state that will be voting – the smallest to the largest – with some bonus nuggets of trivia thrown in here.
March 8th, 2020 at 9:48 pm
Hello, Roger what do you think now about Sanders?
March 8th, 2020 at 11:56 pm
Hi, James.
I got it completely wrong about how Sanders would perform on Super Tuesday – but I was far from alone in my expectations.
It looks now as if Biden will win the candidacy but I expect Sanders to stay in the race and give Biden a run for it.
The issue is: whoever wins, will all Democratic activists back the candidate chosen by the Convention?
March 9th, 2020 at 11:29 am
An American friend has commented:
The political situation in the US in my view is steadily deteriorating. The social democrat Bernie Sanders has been actively and transparently sabotaged by his own party (as he was in 2016), now without the benefit of WikiLeaks to expose what the DNC has been up to. Biden is obviously in the early stages of dementia, constantly making up stories about himself, such as having gone to jail in support of Mandela, which the NY Times exposed as a lie. There’s a site, Politifact, that has revealed a long list of other lies and false comments that he’s told.
In his earlier days, Biden lied about being in the top half of his law school class, when in fact he was close to the bottom. He attacked a witness, Anita Hill, you may remember, against the Supreme Court candidate Clarence Thomas, the worst justice in the court’s history, known for never speaking during oral arguments and opposing all sorts of civil rights legislation.
Biden’s support of NAFTA and TPP and the invasion of Iraq makes him no friend of labor. Without the organized sabotage of the Democrats, Bernie is the only one, I believe, who can beat Trump, particularly in the downtrodden labor constituencies in the midwest, where Hillary lost the election in 2016. On the whole, I think we’re looking at 4 more years of Trump, as you’re having to bear under 5 years of Johnson. What an unfortunate parallel.
March 17th, 2020 at 4:40 am
The comment from your American friend is out of touch with reality in the United States of America. The truth is that African-American voters resulting rejected Sanders in favor of buying because the sole reason to live in American right now as to defeat Donald Trump. If you need any more proof that take a look at the results of the Virginia andTexas primaries. Sanders early fail to expand his base and the notion that Sanders is going to be the person who’s going to bring at nonverbal nonvoters his shirt is fiction. The turnout in the US is driven by wanting Trump out and not putting Sanders in.