Biden looking to extend lead over Sanders

The former US vice-president Joe Biden gets the chance to build on the lead he holds over the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in six electoral races on Tuesday.

Heading into Tuesday's elections in Idaho, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and Washington state Biden had accumulated 664 pledged delegates and Sanders 573, with 102 remaining to be allocated after polls in 14 states last Tuesday.

Sanders had gone into Super Tuesday on March 3 as favorite to steal a march on his rival to gain the party's nomination at its national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in July, but Biden's surprisingly strong performance last week means the senator will need a solid performance to keep his candidacy alive.

Michigan, home to the US automobile industry and its powerful unions, has always been coveted by Democratic contenders. It played a crucial role in the general election in 2016 when Donald Trump surprised Hillary Clinton by winning its Electoral College votes by a little more than 10,000 votes out of more than 4.5 million cast.

Sanders, 78, won the state's Democratic primary against Clinton in 2016, but Biden, 77, has opened up a big lead on him.

Five polls posted on realclearpolitics.com on Monday showed Biden with double-digit leads in the battle for Michigan's 125 pledged delegates, the most up for grabs in the six states voting on Tuesday.

Sanders has assailed Biden for his support of the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 and a bill in 2000 that normalized trade with China by granting it most-favored nation status.

"If we are going to defeat Trump in Michigan, in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin it will be very hard for a candidate who voted for these disastrous trade agreements," Sanders told a rally in Detroit on Friday.

"We're not looking for a revolution," Biden said at a campaign event on Monday in Flint, Michigan, a city whose drinking water in 2014 was found to be contaminated with lead.

"What we want to be able to do is trust the water that comes out of the pipes and trust the words that comes out of the mouths."

Much has been made of the fact that the two remaining candidates with any real prospect of winning the Democratic presidential nomination are both white men in their late 70s. The person they are seeking to replace is another white man in his 70s, Trump.

Pundits have pondered over how an increasingly diverse US population－having elected a black man, Barack Obama, then in his 40s, for two terms starting in 2008, and having witnessed the rise of the Me Too movement－can produce a 2020 Democratic field devoid of diversity.

The last two major Democratic candidates to drop out of the running are also white and in their 70s, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, 78, and US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, 70, who lost the primary in her own state on Super Tuesday.

As always in US elections, the economy and social stability are playing a key role now, underlined by the massive sell-off in the stock market in the wake of the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Progressive issues such as free universal healthcare and college tuition and freer immigration have had a lot of attention in the Democratic Party in recent months, but voting for the moderate Biden last week suggested that most voters are uneasy about what are seen as radical solutions.

'Revival of institutions'

"Democrats, by voting for Biden over Sanders, are coming down on the side of restoring American institutions," Juan Williams, a commentator for Fox News, wrote in a piece for The Hill published on Monday.

"They are voting for a revival of those institutions, not a revolution."

Biden has been given a fillip by the endorsements of candidates who dropped out of the running last week: Bloomberg, US Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg.

In the past few days Biden has also gained the endorsements of two more former candidates, US Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and US Senator Kamala Harris of California. In a televised debate between Democratic presidential candidates last year Harris, whose father was Jamaican and mother Tamil Indian, clashed with Biden over busing to desegregate public schools in the 1970s.

Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, has accused the Democratic establishment of ganging up on him, as it was accused of doing for Clinton in 2016.