A New Ballgame?

For the last few decades, South Carolina has become the firewall for the political establishment, where they get the election--hijacked by those crazy people in Iowa and New Hampshire--back on course.  It seems they did it again last night, with Joe Biden's huge victory over Bernie Sanders and the rest of the gang.

It is as if the citizens of the Palmetto State were saying "we don't want this to be over." Sanders is still the front runner, but the odds of an easy victory coasting into the convention just got cut down significantly.

The big question is how quickly can the bandwagon effect operate?  Biden's campaign seemed DOA, but now he appears to be the only choice for the anti-Bernie faction.  However, Super Tuesday will be here in no time (because the party wanted to frontload the race to prevent things like Sanders winning).  The two big states are Texas and California--Bernie seems to have the latter, but can Biden take the former? And even if Sanders win a bunch of states, will it be by small amounts, much less than Biden and Bloomberg combined?

Speaking of Bloomberg, he's over, right?  He won't be going away (no one will be going away before Super Tuesday--there isn't time), but his strategy of holding back and stepping in when he's needed--which has never worked--seems to make him an also-ran.  (Though to get that brokered convention we'll need at least three viable candidates.)

At least Bloomie was a mayor once, which gave him some credibility.  Another billionaire, Steyer, figured politics was all about money, and he could buy a victory by taking over the airwaves and telling the Dem voters what they want to hear.  He's gone.

Meanwhile, there are the also-rans who seemed to be in the running not that long ago: Warren, Buttigieg and Klobuchar.  Will they drop out?  How soon?  And where will their votes go? So plenty of action still to come.  But we'll know a lot more about the state of the race in a few days.  And I'm still hoping against hope that there'll be on open convention.