The South Carolina results prove Biden is back in the game – but the coronavirus crisis is a gift for Bernie Sanders

As the US gears up for Super Tuesday, it’s worth reminding ourselves that ‘electable’ doesn’t always mean ‘establishment’

The former veep’s team campaigned hard in the southern state – and it paid off (AFP/Getty)

The results in South Carolina provide a much-needed win for Joe Biden, who had been depending on his “firewall” of African American voters in southern states after a disappointing show in Nevada, New Hampshire and Iowa. New Hampshire and Iowa he had been able to explain away as white-majority states which didn’t accurately represent the demographics of Democratic voters overall. Nevada, however – a “minority-majority” state, where the biggest and most powerful union had refused to endorse Bernie Sanders – seemed like his to lose. And he did lose it, inasmuch as a former vice president with excellent name recognition and a lot of powerful donors can. This first major triumph will give relief rather than cause for celebration.

Super Tuesday is coming up fast, and there was a very real possibility that Biden would have had to bow out if South Carolina didn’t deliver for him. It’s still unclear whether the big decider states like Texas and California, rich with delegates, will like what he’s selling as much as South Carolinans clearly do. But for now, Biden’s team can take a breath. They campaigned hard in the southern state, and it paid off.

The problem is that Bernie Sanders also passed the 15 per cent line. Biden may have been the clear frontrunner, but to get people to believe his message – that Bernie is unelectable and doesn’t speak to a wide demographic of people, that moderation is key and that a seasoned former vice president is the best man for the moment – he really needed to wipe the floor with Sanders. Instead, it’s clear a healthy percentage of Democratic voters are feeling the Bern.

American elections are not like other countries’ elections. Their presidential system means that there is much more focus on personality, on connection, on the need for a certain je ne sais quoi. Americans are less tribal in their voting habits than Brits and swing voters are a big bloc. In 2016, a lot of former Democratic voters heard Donald Trump saying the establishment didn’t care about them any more and went Republican.

These same people are not all out wearing Maga hats and blaming impeachment on the “fake news media”. A lot of them are quietly uncomfortable with what Trump has done in their name. Traditional, conservative people don’t like the bullying language the president uses and they don’t like the way in which he sometimes behaves as though he has no respect for the office, or for institutions the office relies heavily upon, such as the FBI. Trump was relying on a good economy to convince those people to hold their nose and vote for him again, but now the stock market is plummeting amid coronavirus panic and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is failing to put out working testing kits while the president gesticulates nonchalantly and says he’s confident the virus will “magically go away” come summertime. All of a sudden, voting for Trump actually looks economically risky.

Coronavirus has also made some simple facts about privatised healthcare glaringly obvious. For one thing, health itself is public; no system and no salary can prevent citizens of one country from being swept up in an epidemic. In a world that depends on global travel and global trade, there’s no way a health disaster in one country can be fully isolated from affecting another. Receding from institutions like the UN at such a time is unwise and potentially dangerous.

Additionally, pretending that private healthcare gives a better service and better outcomes than public health systems when the US is the only developed country scrabbling to find workable testing kits at the numbers needed is clearly ridiculous. A health secretary publicly admitting that if and when a vaccine to coronavirus is developed, it might not be affordable to everyday Americans – as Alex Azar did earlier this week – does little to reassure. This crisis was, really, a gift to Bernie Sanders. The way it has played out has made the perfect argument for Medicare-for-All.

The Daily, a podcast made by the New York Times, ran an episode this week featuring a conservative former canvasser for Joe Biden called Dahlia who had switched her support to Bernie Sanders. Her father, a dyed-in-the-wool Biden supporter who felt that he connected with Biden personally, admitted he’d ended up casting an early vote for Sanders in the end as well. Both voters were church-going, politically moderate African Americans – Biden’s target demographic. They said that they felt Biden had lacked energy this time round, and spoke about how a promise to “go back to the way things were” wasn’t inspiring enough to propel someone into the White House: “Looking in the rear-view mirror the entire time – who drives like that?”

Love him or loathe him, Bernie Sanders has a vision for the future of America. He is calling for Medicare-for-All as well as sweeping changes to do with environmental policy and student loans. Like Trump, he isn’t afraid to yell about Wall Street and say that the establishment hate him; he’s even made his own swipes at the media, namely the Washington Post. People disappointed that Trump didn’t actually “drain the swamp” may well be convinced that Bernie has a better chance of doing what he says he will.

In 2016, people didn’t vote for a safe centrist. Assuming that they would was the Democratic Party’s greatest error. They need to be very careful with how they approach 2020 – do they try and win over committed Republicans who are sick of what Trump is doing to the GOP? Or do they try and redirect that groundswell of support Trump commanded towards a candidate like Sanders, who delivers one hell of a good rally? Who is more vulnerable to attack from the current president: a self-declared democratic socialist who refuses to roundly condemn communist regimes but gets people queueing out the door to see him speak for five minutes, or a been-there-done-that member of the political elite who was part of the very administration Trump badmouthed all the way to the Oval Office?

South Carolina is only part of the answer. Super Tuesday will give us more of an idea. But for now, Biden should only be cautiously confident. He’s back in the game – but he’s going to have to change tactics if he doesn’t want to end up consigned to the benches again very soon.