What Went Down On Super Tuesday

With Biden’s win in Arkansas, we’re now down to only 895 simulations, and Sanders’s majority chances continue to get slimmer.

We’ve talked a lot on this site about Sanders and the way he handles his front-runner status: He is not a person who’s welcoming new voters into his tent necessarily. You’re certainly seeing that in this speech; he’s attacking Biden pretty scathingly. Which makes sense! That’s his main rival. But it’s not a unity tone. Such is 2020!

Sanders is an amazingly consistent messenger in his speeches, and I feel like his approach to messaging is a lot more like what you typically see from Republicans than from Democrats (obviously with very different content). Clear moral messaging. It’s less obvious whether this is a successful strategy for winning a Democratic nomination — we don’t know right now. But I also wonder how the messaging about the political establishment would play out in the general election against Trump, who also makes those claims.