By Brian Hinchion, Staff Reporter
And then there was one. Bernie Sanders announced he would be suspending his presidential campaign in a live stream posted on his twitter account on April 8, leaving former Vice President Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee in this 2020 general election in November. Just five days later on April 13, Sanders joined Biden on a joint live stream on their twitter accounts announcing he would endorse Biden for president, setting off two more high profile endorsements for the former vice president heading towards the end of the primary season. Former President Barack Obama followed suit and endorsed Biden the following day in a recorded message, as well as Massachusetts Senator, Elizabeth Warren the day after, who withdrew her bid for the presidency in March.
The Democratic field had over 20 candidates at some points last year and included governors, senators, house representatives, mayors and even nonpolitically affiliated candidates. During the summer of 2019, California Senator Kamala Harris emerged as the front runner according to a survey conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California that showed democratic voters favored Harris at 19 percent compared to Warren at 15 percent. Warren took the lead in October according to a Quinnipiac poll showing a 29 percent lead among democratic voters to Biden’s 26 percent. Senator Bernie Sanders was the leading candidate as soon as the first ballots were cast in the opening primaries in February of this year. Sanders finished a slight second to Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the Iowa Caucus on Feb. 3 and went on to win the next two states in New Hampshire on Feb. 11, and Nevada on Feb. 22. Biden could only muster a fourth-place finish in Iowa and a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire before starting to gain some traction with a second-place finish in Nevada. But Biden supporters will look to Feb. 19 as a real turning point in this race. That Wednesday, longtime South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn endorsed Biden, and the former vice president went on to win the South Carolina primary by a sizable margin, attaining 72.2% percent of the vote and beating second-place finisher Sanders by a margin of almost 45 percent points. Biden didn’t look back from this point as he trounced Sanders on Super Tuesday winning 10 of the 16 primaries up for grabs and has won 10 out of the last 12 primaries to date.
Biden is destined to be the Democratic presidential nominee this year but if the 2016 election is any template, there are surely more bumps ahead. Biden was recently accused of an alleged 1993 sexual assault, by former senate office employee Tara Reade, on progressive commentator Katie Halper’s podcast. Reade complained of unwanted touching by Biden to her supervisor at the time in 1993 but only recently shed light on more graphic sexual assault allegations. Reade recalled on the podcast delivering a gym bag to Biden in 1993 before he allegedly pinned her up against a wall, kissed her and sexally assaulted her. Biden has weathered allegations of inappropriate touching of acquaintances in the past and addressed those claims on his social media platforms last April.
Throughout the many democratic debates, speeches on the campaign trail and even as recently as an April 17 televised interview with CNN, Biden has struggled to articulate himself, and spoken incoherent sentences, leading many political pundits to question his mental faculties.
Fivethirthyeight.com also points out that Biden and Trump would be the oldest combined presidential nominees when they face off later this year and as morbid and impolite as it sounds, they both are in the age bracket of people most susceptible to the COVID-19 outbreak. Should either of them get sick from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the election would change immediately and drastically.
President Trump is currently in the middle of leading the effort against combating the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Trump was praised by some including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases speaking to ABC News’ “This Week” on April 12, for imposing travel restrictions to and from China on Jan. 31. But he has been criticized for downplaying the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. detailed in an April 9 article by Christian Paz in The Atlantic. Despite Trump’s mixed bag of coverage from the media regarding his coronavirus response he boasts a 44 percent approval rating from fivethirtyeight.com on par with his highest approval rating since his inauguration.
The race to the presidency seems very straightforward today but a lot can change in a short amount of time. It will be interesting to watch those changes unfold and how it affects Biden’s chances of denying President Donald Trump’s re-election bid this November.
