A brokered convention is the worst nightmare for the Democrats – but we are likely heading for one

The prospect of a fractious convention is moving from a nagging concern to a ghoulish inevitability, writes Matthew Norman

If Sanders is seen as the American Corbyn, might Biden be Hillary 2.0? (Getty)

Anti-Trumpists looking to Super Tuesday to becalm and clarify this “Wacky Race” for the Democratic Party nomination process are advised to lower expectations.

The single most definitive day of the primary process is coming to its climax (though the major battlegrounds lie in the south and west) as I write.

Democrats in 14 states, including delegate-sodden Texas and California, not to mention plucky little American Samoa, will pick their champion to take on the tangerine kraken in November. A third of all available delegates are at stake.

But when the counting is done, this Democratic nightmare, far from fizzling out, will more than likely intensify. The prospect of a fractious brokered convention may, by Wednesday evening, have moved from nagging concern to ghoulish inevitability.

The only probable area of clarification is that the field will contract again, until only the two standard-bearers of the party’s warring wings survive.

Joe Biden’s renaissance came in the nick of time. On Saturday morning, the gaffemeister was on life support, with supporters and donors morosely thinking of the end of his candidacy.

One startlingly huge victory in South Carolina later, and the old-timer was reanimated like one of Oliver Sachs’ catatonics in Awakenings after the injection of L-Dopa.

Since then, the withdrawals and endorsements of rival centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have slashed his odds. At time of writing he is as an odds-on chance, and shortening by the minute.

This flurry of money has less to do with any confidence that he will win a majority of delegates. He almost certainly won’t. It relies on the presumption that, once Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren have withdrawn, he and Sanders will battle it out between them. But with neither winning cleanly.

For Sanders, history prepares to repeat. Four years after party brahmins coalesced around Hillary Clinton as the electable candidate (hahahaha), the sense of deja vu is oppressive – albeit this stitch-up threatens to be far more blatant and brutal than the last.

The party’s establishment knows, or thinks it knows, that Sanders cannot beat Trump. Judging by his tweets on the matter, Trump agrees – and regardless of his ignorance and idiocies, his political antennae are acute.

He wants Sanders in the belief that his “democratic socialism” is a poor fit in the swing states that will decide a close general election.

Trump didn’t attempt to force Ukraine’s president into smearing Biden solely for the merriment. He appreciates that in the pivotal, coin-flip Rust Belt states, his Amtrak-riding, blue-collar authenticity presents a mortal danger.

Also gauging Sanders as too far left for a centre-right country, the Democratic establishment faces a gruesome dilemma.

At a brokered convention, delegates are freed from the obligation to vote according to past results. The “superdelegates” and machine politics come into play, and after vicious horse-trading the convention plumps for whomever it pleases.

In that event, assuming Sanders has a plurality of delegates but no majority, do they deny him the moral and numerical victory at the huge risk of alienating his followers, and depressing turnout enough to gift Trump a second term?

But if Sanders is seen as the American Corbyn, might Biden be Hillary 2.0? For what it’s worth (rather less, as always, than zero), I doubt that. His Obama-related appeal to black voters, charm and relatability would probably overcompensate for any enthusiasm deficit among radical Democrats in the decisive clutch of swing states.

But there’s no guarantee of that. There is no guarantee of anything. The closest to a certainty in this scenario is that the immediate fate of the US, and the planet, would rest in the hands of Bernie Sanders.

What had the makings of a cakewalk for Trump a month ago looks more like the squeakiest of bum times again. In 2000, 2004 and 2016, a few tens of thousands of votes spread across several states (or a few hundred votes in Florida) gave us George W Bush, twice, and Trump.

If 2020 franks that form, as the viral stock market volatility and surging prospect of recession suggest, the result could turn on how Sanders reacts to what he would justly view as an unforgivably anti-democratic establishment putsch.

If he sulks in his tent like Achilles with cardiac stents, and reduces turnout by even one or two per cent, that could be fatal for Biden.

If he rises above the overpowering sense of grievance, and campaigns passionately for Biden as the anti-Trump, he might rid the planet of a unique abomination.

It is too easy to preach glibly about duty when it comes at someone else’s expense. You can glance at our own political history from the safety of a keyboard, and rail at Gordon Brown, for instance, for not steering history towards a better path by accepting his electoral limitations and graciously standing aside for someone else.

Even so, should Sanders reach the convention with a plurality and be denied, his duty would be crystal clear. It would be to negotiate with Biden for as much of his own platform he can get adopted; hug him half to death on the stage; and hit the campaign trail the next morning begging his heartbroken supporters to lick their wounds. Then turn to the small matter of surgically resecting an endlessly aggressive tumour from the Oval Office in November.