The Day After the Day After Super Tuesday

As California results continue to come in -- right now Sanders is up 1.25 million votes over Biden in the Golden State with 87% of the precincts reporting -- Super Tuesday is looking more and more like a draw. No wonder The New York Times is spotlighting Biden's big win in Virginia, not to mention dismissing Bernie's idea of increasing the youth vote. All Biden has to run on is his post-South Carolina bounce. But that bounce didn't end the race -- it might not even deliver a delegate advantage -- and there a lot of states yet to vote.

The primary campaign is going to change, and Biden is not in a position to fluidly adapt to that change. Now that it is a two-person race, with Elizabeth Warren paddling away to irrelevance, Sanders is going to start placing attack ads. Biden, with his history of fulsome support for free trade, is a sitting duck in the swing states. Bernie will tag Biden with gutting the manufacturing base of the industrial Midwest. That's the overhand right. Bernie's left jab to the snout will be Biden's role as the senate architect of the disastrous Iraq war.

There is a helpful FiveThirtyThirty roundtable discussion posted this morning (see "Does Sanders Need A New Strategy?"). What is surprising is how bullish, from a mainstream perspective, the participants are regarding Bernie's chances going forward.

Right, we are entering a new phase of the race. The field isn’t as crowded, and to some extent it’s a two-person race now, which will change both Biden’s and Sanders’s strategy. The race can definitely flip again, and I do think Sanders will pivot in some way moving forward. The Obama ad is evidence of this even if its timing felt off.

Biden “won” Super Tuesday, but we’ve still got a ways to go. And Sanders is still very much in this race.

The Sanders campaign got rocked back on its heels Tuesday night. It didn't go down, but it got rocked back. Now it is going to start counterpunching. Now we're going to see the strength of Sanders' organization, the state of its conditioning, the depth of its volunteer commitment. Michigan is the next battleground.

All is not lost. The goal here, as I see it, is not to go silently into the night as Bernie did in 2016. The goal here is to capture the Democratic Party. Absent that, absent winning the nomination, burn the motherfucker to the ground. The presently-configured Democratic Party isn't going to protect the republic from Trump. It didn't protect organized labor from Janus. So why pledge allegiance to a militaristic, plutocratic octopus that is hellbent on plunder?

Bernie needs to fight on as long as possible. Take it all the way to a convention. If it is brokered, let the superdelegates show who they are.