This week, the coronavirus achieved what five years of other events could not, and made American Presidential politics into a secondary story. In Washington, President Trump tried, without seeming quite convinced of it himself, to provide some assurance that everything would soon be fine, that it was a great time for hand-shaking and stock purchasing, even as his incoming chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was under self-quarantine. The campaign trail was more subdued still. Six states held Democratic primaries on Tuesday, and by the afternoon both remaining contenders, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, had cancelled the rallies they had planned for the evening, to help keep the virus from spreading. While polls were closing, the news came that the next Democratic debate, on Sunday, would be conducted without a live audience, as an anti-contagion measure; it would be just two men nearing eighty arguing in a nearly empty room. Tuesday’s results, once they came, were decisive if not surprising: the former Vice-President won Mississippi, Missouri, and Michigan, and even the progressive stronghold of Washington State, as midnight neared in the East, was too close to call. The dust of the primaries is settling. Unless something extraordinary happens, Biden will be the Democratic nominee.
Ever since Trump announced his candidacy, in the summer of 2015, electoral politics has been a totalizing force in American life, one that has come to define every cultural divide and, in so doing, warped all of them. Politics has for so long now been raucous, terrifying, and uncertain, and, for liberals and progressives, so defined by the urgency of opposing Trump that it is jarring to realize that those hopes will now likely be vested in the quiet candidacy and aging figure of Biden. His rise in the polls has been so sudden, and the cohesion of the Party around him so dramatic, that he has become the presumptive nominee before it has been clear what—beyond the preference for a safer choice—his candidacy might mean. On Monday night, in Detroit, the Vice-President pointed to three Democratic politicians who had just endorsed him—his former rivals Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer—and said, “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country.” But those leaders behind him did not represent a coherent platform, and none of them had much of a relationship with the rising generation behind them, who had invested so much in Sanders’s campaign, and whose radical politics are starkly opposed to Biden’s. It sounded fuzzy. A bridge to what?
In the week since Super Tuesday, one defined by the emotional conclusion of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, Biden and Sanders had circled the country, and each other, without ever quite making contact or changing the race. Needing to win more support from African-American voters, Sanders had prepared a new speech on racial inequity to deliver at a rally in Flint. But, at the last minute, reportedly at the urging of the Princeton professor Cornel West and other African-American advisers, the senator replaced the text with his normal stump speech. Perhaps that was a wise decision—Sanders works best in his familiar groove—but it also meant that the Sanders movement, the defining progressive crusade of a generation, was going down without much of a fight. Around 10:30 P.M. on Tuesday, Sanders’s aides let reporters know that the Vermont senator would not make any kind of address on Tuesday, which is the kind of thing a politician does when he is considering suspending his campaign. If this was the end, then it was a strangely anticlimactic one.
It hadn’t been clear, when the evening started, where Biden would speak; it turned out to be at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, in front of a small audience of staff and press. Victory suits Biden, a born front-runner, who, with some notable exceptions, has shouted less in the past week and has seemed a little more magnanimous. “I want to thank Bernie Sanders and his supporters for their tireless energy, and their passion,” Biden said, late Tuesday night, insisting that, together, the Democratic factions would defeat Trump. There were some promising signs in the vote totals tonight: Biden performed well in some of the blue-collar districts in Michigan that had helped tip the country to Trump. But in Philadelphia the hall, quiet and marble and severe, said as much as the candidate did. During the past few years, Presidential politics has swollen outside its familiar containers, taking place in arenas and on the streets; on the left, the revolutionary urgency that might have taken other forms came to rest, through Sanders and his allies, in electoral politics. Biden’s campaign aims to shift politics back into formal spaces—to reduce its presence in the American psyche, to compartmentalize it again.
Will this work? Biden can be a blunt instrument, and an imperfect vessel for his campaign. Visiting a Detroit assembly plant on Tuesday, he argued with a worker in a yellow safety vest about the Second Amendment and called the man “full of shit.” On the cable networks, the talk was about whether Biden will be able to unify the Party. That may hinge on whether he can recognize, as clearly as Sanders has, the frailties and inequities of American society right now. In Tuesday’s exit polls, the generational divide was stark. Even in Missouri, where Biden won by more than twenty points, Sanders swept younger voters. To the Latino support he’d demonstrated in Nevada last month, Sanders added robust Muslim support in Michigan on Tuesday—his coalition comprises the Americans whose future is most obviously at stake, and who may now have to choose whether to unify behind Biden. In Philadelphia, Biden said, “To all those who have been knocked down, to all those who have been counted out, this is your campaign.” Maybe he was right. In the Presidential race, at least, there are no other real options now.
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Last Stop, Joe Biden - The New Yorker
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