The resurrection of Joe Biden is almost complete: the race is his to lose

The resurrection of Joe Biden is almost complete. In less than a week, the former vice-president has walked out of the tomb of loser candidates into the glorious sunshine of frontrunner greatness.

This is a remarkable turnaround by any measure. It also reflects no change in Biden’s qualities or character, and everything about a party with a singular focus on one factor: kicking Trump out of office.

Super Tuesday’s super wins for Biden change nothing about his flaws as a candidate but they do underscore the strength of his sales pitch to a Trump-weary world.

Biden’s wins also change nothing about Bernie Sanders’ strength as an insurgent critic of the establishment; they may even boost them.

But they most definitely blow a hole in his sales pitch to Democrats: that he can build a vast turnout machine to energize the base of the party to beat Donald Trump.

Whatever Nevada bestowed on Bernie, the south hath taken away. In Las Vegas, Sanders seemed to build a diverse coalition of supporters. But across the south, the bedrock of the party – African American voters in Virginia, the Carolinas and Alabama – made their choice of Biden so clear and loud, the cable networks didn’t wait to count the votes.

Until now, the debate among nervous Democrats has been about whether the party’s superdelegates could take a contested convention away from Sanders. Could the party survive that schism, and would Bernie’s fans reconcile themselves to another nominee?

But after Tuesday, there’s a vastly bigger question to consider. Could the party really nominate a candidate who isn’t competitive among the black voters who delivered such huge victories in the congressional contests in 2018, and the presidential contests of 2012 and 2008?

There is precedent for what we’re witnessing. The last nominee to come back from the dead like this is actually Joe Biden’s friend and former fellow senator in all things foreign relations: John Kerry.

Back in 2004, Democrats were on fire for another progressive Vermont firebrand. Howard Dean was building huge numbers of online donors and seemed to be the only candidate with an energized base to take on a deeply-polarizing president. But when big news broke through – at the time, the capture of Saddam Hussein – the contest flipped on its head. Kerry won in Iowa and never looked back. Within two months, Kerry had sewn the whole thing up.

As the bumper stickers said at the time, Democrats dated Dean but they married Kerry. And the reason for the shift was their desperate desire to beat an incumbent president they loathed. The party wanted to leave as little room for error as possible, even though they knew that Kerry was a flawed frontrunner.

Although we like to think that everything is different about Donald Trump, some things look pretty similar. Bush was hated around the world, seemed to be destroying core American values, and counted on the die-hard support of the conservative media echo chamber. Trump is all that on Viagra.

It looks like Joe Biden is playing a similar role to John Kerry, and there are good reasons why. After all the turmoil of Trump, voters are understandably anxious to return to normal life. The global threat of a botched response to coronavirus underscores the catastrophic effects of an utterly incompetent, but perfectly sociopathic president.

Every single exit poll in the Democratic contests have stressed a single factor: beating Trump. In the states that voted on Tuesday, between 60 and 70% of Democrats said they preferred a candidate who could beat Trump over someone they agreed with on the issues.

This is not a subtle choice, which is just as well, because the Trump campaign has all the subtlety of a jackboot.

That’s why the collapse of Biden’s competition at the center of the party is not surprising. From Pete Buttigieg to Amy Klobuchar, the signs are clear: Democrats will not look favorably on anyone who interferes with their best chance to beat Trump.

What is surprising is the speed of Biden’s turnaround. Just two weeks ago, reliable polling in Virginia suggested the race was tied. The speed and direction of this contest is not good for the Sanders campaign.

Which takes us to the dismal news of the night. If you think Sanders fans were disappointed, you should talk to staffers and consultants propping up Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren. It feels odd to lump them together: one is plainly trying to buy his way to the nomination, the other has tried to wonk her way to it.

However, Bloomberg’s poor showing on Super Tuesday simply reinforced how this contest is no different from all the others that came before it. You can dump a lot of money into the toilet bowl that is TV advertising, but you still can’t ignore the early states and jump straight into Super Tuesday.

Warren’s bad night was arguably worse and far less fair on the merits. Bloomberg just wanted to be relevant; Warren wanted to be right. She trounced the field on policy details and on the debate stage. But she wouldn’t or couldn’t turn her fire on Bernie, to consolidate the left behind a candidate with crossover appeal. So she ended up losing her home state of Massachusetts after running one of the very best campaigns of the cycle – and winning precisely nothing.

Sanders himself declared victory with just two states under his belt, one of which is his home state of Vermont. “When we began this race for the presidency, everyone said it couldn’t be done,” he said in Essex Junction, Vermont. “We are going to win,” he continued as his fans chanted BER-NEE, BER-NEE, “we are going to defeat Trump because we are putting together an unprecedented grassroots multigenerational multiracial movement”.

That movement somehow doesn’t include African Americans in the south.

“You cannot beat Trump with the same old, same old kind of politics,” Sanders said, before attacking Biden for his vote on the war in Iraq. That was a debate from 18 years ago, which is approximately the age of Sanders’ most enthusiastic voters.

By the time Sanders stopped talking, Biden had won another state – Arkansas – to add to another five he had already locked up early on Tuesday.

Never mind that Biden started his victory speech by mistaking his sister for his wife. Or the way two protesters rushed on stage as he began to fire up the crowd.

“For those who’ve been knocked down, counted out and left behind, this is your campaign,” he said. “I’m here to report this campaign is very much alive.”

Biden’s revival after weeks of bad news is his model for the country’s revival after years of Trump news. “We are better than this moment,” Biden shouted. “We are better than this president!”

He was speaking from a teleprompter, and yet he still screwed up plenty of lines. But Biden still landed some zingers, just as he scrapped out several big wins. As he walked off stage, he was declared the winner in Minnesota.

Sanders’ victory in California will be a source of hope for his campaign. But scraping out a slender delegate lead is not the same as a multigenerational, multiracial movement to beat Trump. For now the momentum is with Biden: it’s his race to lose once again.

• Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist