Joe Biden vs Bernie Sanders: this whole primary race could legitimately be over by tomorrow

| 10:50 pm EDT March 9, 2020
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To give you an idea of how little Joe Biden trusts his newfound double digit lead in the Michigan primary polls, he’s holding a get out the vote rally in Detroit tonight with headliners Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. Michigan’s polls were wildly off in the 2016 primary race, so they can’t be trusted in the state now. But what if he does win?

Joe Biden is set to have a huge mathematical win tomorrow. The latest polls suggest that he’ll win Missouri by twenty or more points, and that he’ll win Mississippi by an astounding fifty-five points. If Michigan and Washington State both end up being close, then the delegate split will be such that neither state will have much of an impact. The small states that vote tomorrow won’t have much of a mathematical impact no matter how they go, and they may cancel each other out anyway.

But there’s actually winning, and there’s the perception of winning. If Biden wins Missouri and Mississippi in blowouts but loses Michigan and Washington State narrowly, the headlines could end up being that Biden and Sanders split the big states two apiece. This would dishonestly ignore Biden’s huge overall delegate win for the day, but the media loves its narratives. If Sanders wins Michigan and Washington tomorrow, the media could decide to keep propping up his sinking campaign until at least Florida on March 17th.

But if Biden wins Michigan by any margin tomorrow, and wins big in Missouri and Mississippi, this primary race will be effectively over – both from a mathematical and a perceptual standpoint. It won’t matter if Sanders wins Washington. No one, outside his most hardcore supporters, will need to wait until he gets blown out in Florida, before seeing the writing on the wall. This primary race could legitimately be over by tomorrow.