Sanders Lives On

Just weeks ago, the political commentariat had virtually ceded the Democratic presidential nomination to Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders seemed poised to sweep the Super Tuesday states, and end once and for all the presidential aspirations of former vice president Joe Biden. 

That’s not how it turned out. Prior to Super Tuesday, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Peter Buttigieg dropped out of the Democratic race and endorsed Biden. Klobuchar made the shrewd calculation that as a candidate for the Democratic nomination she had no chance of becoming president. But as Biden’s running mate, her chances of becoming president — should Biden be elected and then become incapacitated, by no means a far-fetched possibility — are not bad. 

In the end, Sanders captured only California of the major states being contested on Super Tuesday, and after subsequent losses in Missouri and Michigan, he has no plausible path toward the nomination. 

But that does not mean the Sanders impact will end with the crash and burn of his campaign. Once formerly taboo ideas become part of the mainstream conversation, they are legitimized. We witnessed that with respect to single-gender “marriage.” What began as an apparent outlier, with judicially imposed recognition of such unions by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, became within little more than a decade a legislative groundswell that culminated in the Supreme Court turning single-gender marriage into a constitutional right.