Sanders Fails to Cut into Biden’s Lead

Heading into Sunday night’s Democratic Debate, Bernie Sanders needed to upstage Joe Biden, who is currently in the lead in the now two-man race for the Democratic nomination. Despite a rocky early start to the primaries, Biden has both the national momentum and delegate count lead to put him on an all but certain path to win the nomination.

The race has come down to a contest between progressive ideals and pragmatic realism as embodied by Sanders and Biden. On the debate stage, the two candidates leaned into their polarized identities wholeheartedly. Biden framed his appeal over Sanders with a simple statement during the debate: “People want results, not a revolution.”

Though Sanders had an early edge with victories in New Hampshire and Nevada, the primary calculus completely changed after Biden swept South Carolina. Once the frontrunner, Sanders now needs to find a way to make inroads into Biden’s majority support among the Democratic party. The debate, the final before the Florida, Arizona, Illinois and Ohio primaries, was Sanders’ last chance to win over voters in those states with his progressive agenda.

Sanders likely did not pull off that needed upset on Sunday night, according to FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos polling. There was minimal change in who likely Democratic voters plan to vote for in pre- and post-debate polling. After the debate, 66% said they plan to vote for Biden and 37% plan to vote for Sanders.

Biden was also judged to have had the better performance of the two candidates. FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos polling shows that 61% of debate watchers thought that Biden had the best debate performance while just 28% thought Sanders did.

Twitter analysis showed less of a disparity between the two candidates. According to the Ipsos Democratic Debate live Twitter tracker, net sentiment about both Sanders and Biden was negative, though feelings on the Twitterverse trended marginally more positive for Sanders than they did for Biden. Biden got the most attention on the social media platform, garnering the vast majority of Twitter mentions.

The one real “Twitter moment” of the night came when Biden committed to picking a woman as his running mate if he were to win the nomination. For his part, Sanders said he would “likely” pick a woman as his running mate. After that, sentiment about both of the candidates jumped several points towards positive and hovered there for the rest of the night.

Beyond winning over voters, Sanders was also trying to push Biden more to the left on key issues during the debate. As Sanders pointed out, a sizeable minority of potential Democratic voters do in fact embrace the “revolution,” posing a problem for how to welcome those voters into the fold come the general election should Biden win the nomination.

As the two candidates sparred in a closed television studio behind podiums spaced the recommended six feet apart to minimize any possible risk of contagion, reminders of the coronavirus were omnipresent.

On social media, the coronavirus also took up more of the nation’s bandwidth relative to the Democratic Debate: on March 15, there were approximately 195,000 mentions of the coronavirus on Facebook and Twitter and 30,000 mentions of the Democratic Debate, according to the Ipsos Biosurveillance Atlas. In many parts of the country, the dialogue on social media was almost entirely focused on the coronavirus, with no or limited mention of the debate.

With Biden ascendant, Sanders’ chances of repositioning himself in the lead seem to be vanishingly small. Speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN after the debate, Sanders acknowledged that in order for his campaign to remain viable, he will need Americans who have historically been disengaged from the political process to turn up to the polls in record numbers.