Mid-February feels like a long time ago. At the time Covid-19 was, at least in Britain, a peripheral concern which might — if worst came to worst — lead to restrictions on mass gatherings and international travel. Few expected Britain and large swathes of America to be fully locked down for weeks and months at a time.
Another assumption widely held just two months ago was that Bernie Sanders was set to win the Democratic nomination. As I wrote at the time, following the Nevada caucus in which Sanders triumphed, the campaign of his nearest rival Joe Biden appeared to be “visibly flailing”. Indeed, a Democratic Party voter had made headlines by asking Biden bluntly during an event in Nevada “What the hell is going on with your campaign?” This seemed to capture the prevailing mood.
The answer was, in fact: quite a lot, it just hadn’t fed through into the results yet. Once the nomination process became a one-on-one contest after Super Tuesday, Biden thrashed the Vermont senator, leaving Bernie trailing by 311 delegates. There was no coming back after that and Sanders consequently dropped out of the race for the nomination. In the space of just two months the contest was turned upside down, so that it is Joe Biden who will now take on Donald Trump in November’s election.
So how did Sanders sink so rapidly from the favourite to dropping out of the race altogether?
First, it is worth highlighting where commentators went wrong. We put too much stock in the results coming out of states such as Iowa and Nevada while underestimating just how poorly Sanders would do in delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like Texas and Virginia. Of course, I was not alone in getting it wrong before Joe Bidden “shocked the world” on 3 March.
Leading statician Nate Silver had predicted that Sanders “has by far the best chance of any candidate to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president”; the Guardian’s Richard Wolffe had predicted that “Bernie Sanders is cruising towards the Democratic nomination; while ITV’s Robert Moore had suggested that Bernie “is already the clear favourite to win the Democratic nomination and within ten days he may become unstoppable”.
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