Art Cullen: ‘Sanders must do the right thing and drop out’
This has to end. The coronavirus has ravaged the primary voting process. Turnout was stunted, but Joe Biden won big again Tuesday on mail-in ballots. Ohio’s primary was postponed.
The only way to run an election amid a pandemic is through mail-in ballots, which probably can’t be managed by the June national party deadline. It has to end. Bernie Sanders must drop out and clear the mess. The Trump presidency, and its lies and incompetence, must end. We can barely take another minute. We need competency now.
Biden will need all the help he can get to heal the nation physically and politically, rebuild an economy mired in recession, and restore confidence in our future. He got a great start with the best speech of his career Tuesday. Sanders could do nothing more patriotic than embrace the cause and endorse Biden with a full throat. Biden has won across the country and holds an insurmountable lead with future primaries in doubt because of the pandemic. It’s time to move forward, and start making plans for all-mail balloting for the November general election.
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Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book, Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland
Benjamin Dixon: ‘Voting during a pandemic doesn’t feel fair’
What we are seeing unfold before us is a political establishment so determined to maintain its grip on power that it would insist on holding an election during a pandemic that targets the older voters who showed up to the polls today. The results from today’s election would never be considered legitimate under normal circumstances with poll locations closing with no notification, poll workers not showing up for fear of their lives, and other locations being consolidated which all but ensures that voters in those locations will be gathered in groups larger than the 50 maximum limit suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But here we are, with a party that is so desperate to put the progressive movement down that it would risk the lives of their voters to go to the polls during a national emergency. There will be a rush to “validate” this election, but any reasonable observer engaging in good faith would confess that not postponing the primaries or, at a minimum, extending the primaries and allowing the voter to continue voting by mail constitutes voter suppression.
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Benjamin Dixon is the host of the Benjamin Dixon podcast
Jessa Crispin: ‘Welcome to voting in time of social distancing’
All day, there were reports of primary voting mishaps. Polling places were not open, workers and volunteers did not show up, and there did not seem to be safety precautions in place in several locations to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Talking heads were saying how important it was to continue the primary process, but meanwhile, newspapers and politicians implored the citizenry to STAY HOME. Kind of getting some mixed messages here, guys. I don’t know if Chicago should have forced everyone who showed up to the St Patrick’s Day pub crawls to man the polls, but probably we should have had some sort of Plan B procedure for voting during a national state of emergency.
So basically, why are we doing this? And why are we pretending the results today are real and full?
But even before the pandemic, we saw terrible voting conditions for months. States like Texas closed hundreds of polling stations, making voters wait for hours in line. We saw ballots go uncounted. And that’s bad enough without talking about mass disenfranchisement and the purging of voter registration rolls.
As I watched CNN for the primary results, I saw more outrage about roller-bladers in San Francisco breaking the call for social distancing – I really thought Jake Tapper might break down weeping when a kid walking around what should have been empty streets gave a thumbs up to the camera – than I saw about the difficulties people have had voting today. Then Biden gave some victory speech with all the vim and vigor of a man shuffling to the refrigerator in the middle of the night to see if there’s any pudding left, and I really felt, you know, the healing of the nation or whatever.
I’m worried Sanders supporters will use these voting difficulties only to question the legitimacy of the results. What it should do instead is invigorate the left vote to organize around massive voting reform. Democracy should not be this difficult to participate in.
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Jessa Crispin is a Guardian US columnist. She is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast
Lloyd Green: ‘This primary is over’
On Tuesday, Joe Biden delivered a crushing blow to Bernie Sanders’ already dimming chances. The former vice-president scored imposing wins in Arizona, Florida and Illinois.
Pro tip: turning a race into a referendum on Fidel Castro as Sanders did is a bad idea. In the Sunshine state, Biden’s margin was nearly 40 points. Looking back, the Vermont senator’s 2016 performance was more a function of disdain for Hillary Clinton than his call to revolution.
Biden has built a rainbow coalition that cuts across class. Indeed, the Delaware Democrat captured the votes of white people without college degrees, a prize that eluded Clinton and a bloc Donald Trump calls his own. A global pandemic and a market crash will sorely test the president’s hold.
As for Sanders, his quest has morphed into the quixotic, an exercise in rule or ruin, or all of the above. Reportedly, he will continue to tilt at windmills into late April, waging war in Pennsylvania and New York. But he lost both states four years ago and there is no reason to assume this time will be different.
Biden has now amassed more than 1,000 delegates, more than half way to clinching the nomination. The primary battle is over in all but name. November looms.
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Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Andrew Gawthorpe: ‘We needs to protect electoral legitimacy’
With the race no longer competitive and coronavirus dominating the news, the 2020 Democratic primary has ended not with a bang, but with a whimper – an outcome that was unfathomable only weeks ago, when it seemed we were in for a long and inconclusive contest.
Coronavirus seems to have suppressed turnout. While Biden performed well in Illinois, turnout was down on 2016, probably due to coronavirus fears. The postponement of the
Ohio primary means we have been denied another opportunity to assess Biden’s strength in the Midwest.
Extensive early voting and vote-by-mail options allowed turnout in Florida to actually rise on 2016, which seems to bode well for Democratic enthusiasm in the general election – especially if we assume that turnout would have been even higher without coronavirus fears.
Had the Democratic primary still been competitive going into Tuesday’s contests, serious questions could be raised about the impact of the virus on the results – and given that the answers to these questions rest on such intangibles as why turnout was down, they would be very difficult to answer.
It is vital that the integrity and legitimacy of the November election be maintained even if the coronavirus pandemic is ongoing. Extensive preparations should be made, starting now, to ensure that alternatives to in-person voting exist. A lot rests on what happens on that single day in November – it is imperative that America gets it right.
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Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United State at Leiden University