Joe Biden romps in battleground Florida, delivering damaging blow to Bernie Sanders

Nothing was predictable about the Florida Democratic primary except the results.

As expected, Joe Biden beat Bernie Sanders soundly Tuesday in the nation’s largest swing state, affirming his standing as the clear front-runner in the primary and pulling him closer to the party’s presidential nomination. With results still being tallied, the former vice president was poised to beat the Vermont Senator by nearly 40 points — a crushing blow delivered in one of the biggest prizes left on the primary map.

Biden, who went into Tuesday with a bit less than half the delegates needed to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination on first ballot — and about 150 more than Sanders — amassed huge leads in polls over the last several weeks. And Sanders, who also lost to Hillary Clinton in Florida’s 2016 primary by more than 30 points, repeatedly tripped over comments praising programs implemented by Cuba’s communist government — a sore spot in a state filled with hundreds of thousands of Latin American exiles.

Not even a novel coronavirus outbreak — which canceled an election eve Biden rally in Miami and forced the candidates to campaign by phone and livestream — could throw Biden’s campaign or the hundreds of thousands of Democrats who cast ballots for him.

“Our campaign has had a very good night,” Biden said in a modest victory speech streamed live on his campaign website.

Biden’s performance in Florida comes at a crucial time and place. He’ll win a bulk of the state’s 219 pledged delegates, which should increase pressure on Sanders to drop out amid calls to unify Democrats at a time of national crisis. And he romped in a key general election swing state viewed as a must-win for President Donald Trump — whose campaign announced Tuesday that his guaranteed win in his new home state had put him above the delegate threshold to win the Republican 2020 presidential nomination.

“I’m not surprised by Vice President Biden’s margin he has in Florida,” said state Rep. Shevrin Jones, a Broward Democrat who helped lead Biden’s faith-based campaign in the state. “We need someone who can be the president on day one. That’s what voters are looking for.”

The only thing Tuesday night that appeared to be keeping Biden from routing Sanders in the state was former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s short-lived campaign, which earned him close to double-digit support in South Florida — votes that likely would otherwise have gone to Biden.

And Biden’s winning Tuesday wasn’t limited to Florida. The Associated Press called a significant win for Biden in Illinois, and later he prevailed in Arizona as well. Ohio had been slated to report results as well on Tuesday, with the four states offering up a combined 577 pledged delegates, but Gov. Mike DeWine announced late Monday that his health department was shutting down in-person voting Tuesday over concerns of the spread of coronavirus and would seek to complete its primary later.

Though the other three states continued with their primaries, the global pandemic cast confusion and controversy over voting and left Biden’s supporters to celebrate in near-isolation.

“I’m sitting here on a livestream with Biden supporters around the state but no one’s at a victory party,” said state Rep. Joe Geller, D-Aventura.

Geller said Tuesday’s election was “different than anything any of us have ever been through,” and questioned whether Biden’s numbers would have been even stronger had a coronavirus outbreak not caused Election Day jitters and controversy.

In Florida, hundreds of poll workers chose not to come to their assigned precincts, voters wore masks and Latex gloves to the polls, and voting rights organizations sued the state unsuccessfully on the eve of the election to try to extend the deadline to submit mail ballots.

Total votes cast in Tuesday’s primary topped votes cast in the 2016 primary, but Election Day turnout was down significantly. Voting rights and social justice organizations warned ahead of the election that the relocation of more than 100 polls that had been in senior centers threatened to confuse voters.

“It was depressing,” Matthew Pestorius, a Miami Democrat who voted in a nearly empty precinct Tuesday, tweeted after leaving the polls.

There won’t be another primary contest until at least April 4, after Georgia postponed its March 24 primary and Puerto Rico moved to postpone its primary on March 29. And it’s also unclear when Biden, Sanders or President Donald Trump will be able to resume normal campaign operations, as local, state and federal governments impose increasingly strict rules meant to thwart the spread of coronavirus by limiting social gatherings.

In a Tuesday afternoon memo, Biden’s campaign confidently predicted he would pull closer to the Democratic nomination after Tuesday’s primaries. And the results matched the prediction: Without considering delegates awarded by congressional district, Biden was poised to gain 82 more delegates in Florida than Sanders, according to RealClearPolitics.com.

With his strength growing, Biden’s supporters grew louder in their calls for Sanders to bow out.

Moe Vela, a senior adviser to Biden when he was vice president, said in an interview Tuesday that the ongoing coronvairus outbreak is “absolutely going to adversely impact the campaign,” and said that increases the urgency for Sanders to give up his campaign. “It’s a time to unify so that we’re all working together toward one common goal to get back our country,” said Vela, now an executive at the work-from-home firm TransparentBusiness.

Biden, in his victory speech, extended an olive branch to Sanders, saying he and the senator “may disagree on tactics but we share a common vision.”

And he tried to reassure Sanders’ ardent supporters that he shares their priorities. “I hear you. I know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do,” he said. “Our goal as a campaign and my goal as a candidate for president is to unify this party, then to unify the nation.”

Still, Steve Schale, a veteran Florida Democratic strategist heading the pro-Biden Super PAC Unite the Country, worried that the void left by the postponed primaries and lack of campaigning may encourage Sanders to stay in the race even if the math makes it impossible for him to compete for the nomination.

Coronavirus “potentially just presses pause on the whole thing,” Schale said. “Joe Biden is the only one with a plausible path to a majority of delegates. That’s the only thing that’s certain.”

McClatchy DC reporter Alex Daugherty contributed to this report.