What Went Down In The Arizona, Florida And Illinois Primaries

It seems dangerous to have in-person voting with the current COVID-19 situation — hence Ohio’s decision to postpone its election day. One potential solution would be expanding vote-by-mail and pushing back some of these primaries in March so states can set up vote-by-mail systems. That would likely be hard to implement but not impossible.

But I’m skeptical that widespread vote by mail or delaying primaries will happen for a few reasons.

On the GOP side, broad-based vote-by-mail tends to increase the number of people who vote, and we have a lot of evidence that the Republican Party is wary of increasing the size of the electorate. So I doubt there will be a lot of enthusiasm on the conservative side to allow more mail voting now, because that will create a precedent and a system they likely would not want to continue outside of this crisis.

Meanwhile, some center-left, establishment Democrats — now that one of their preferred candidates (Biden) is ahead — view extending the primary season much longer to be at best a waste of time and at worst something that helps Trump. So I think that’s why an effort to rethink today’s primaries was not really a consideration for the Democratic Party.

The first votes in from Chicago’s Cook County show a much closer result there, with Biden leading 49.2-46.5.

Yeah, tonight makes it seem fairly clear that this primary isn’t as competitive as the 2016 Democratic contest. Sanders was able to fight on in 2016 in part because he got some unexpected wins, like in Michigan, and kept it close in mid-March contests like Missouri and Illinois. Then he won Wisconsin in early April and could keep going. I think he might well be able to compete in Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming on April 4 — he did win the party-run event in North Dakota, after all — but is that worth sticking around if he’s going to get beaten badly in the bigger primary contests? I don’t think he’s winning Wisconsin this time around.