Bernie Sanders got his butt kicked in the Little Super Tuesday races earlier this week.
As I am typing this on Wednesday afternoon, Biden won four of the six races, Sanders won one, and the State of Washington is still too close to call.
According the website Mullings uses to keep track, as of this afternoon Biden leads in the delegate count 857 to 709. That may not sound like a lot, but with the Democrats' proportional awarding of delegates, it is very, very difficult to make up a 148 delegate deficit.
You know the results from Tuesday night: Biden won the "M" states - Mississippi, Missouri, and Michigan by large numbers. Sanders did not win a single county in any of the three. Biden also won Idaho.
Sanders believed he would have a romp - or at least a clear victory - in Washington State.
He didn't
With a third of the votes yet to be counted, Sanders leads by two-tenths of one percentage point - 32.7% to 32.5 percent which is close enough to award the statewide delegates evenly at 17 each.
That's no way to close a 148-delegate gap.
I actually waited until we heard on Wednesday, what Bernie Sanders was going to do. He can count as well as any pundit, on any panel, on any cable net and so Sanders knows that there is about a zero chance he be the Democratic nominee.
But, he also knows, that once he drops out of the race, he also drops off the radar.
Rather than being covered all day every day by a battalion of cameras, producers, and reporters, he would have to go to the Senate floor every day and join the other former-candidates who have missed months of Senate duty while campaigning.
Bernie Sanders is a Socialist. He can call himself a Democratic-Socialist to try and soften it a little, but his effusive praise of the old Soviet empire - including Cuba - is unabated. He truly believes that the government should determine how much someone should make and how much of that income they should keep.
Is unbridled Capitalism nirvana? No. Of course not. Just because you have a car that can go 125 miles per hour, doesn't mean you should be allowed to drive it that fast anywhere you want. Even a school zone.
I do agree, as a matter of principle, that no one living in America should have to worry about health care. And don't tell me that emergency rooms have to treat anyone who comes in.
That may not be much comfort to a person having a heart attack when the nearest emergency room is 50 miles away.
How to do that? I don't know. I also don't know how to hit a major league slider, but I know it can be done.
Sanders will not stay in this thing forever. Based upon his speech on Wednesday afternoon - when he sounded for all the world like he was announcing his withdrawal from the face - until he didn't, he wants one crack at a one-on-one debate with Joe Biden.
In fact, Sanders recited a list of questions he would be asking Biden on Sunday night, so the former VP has ample time to come up with answers.
The next round of primaries comes on Monday, March 17: Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona. Absent another reversal of fortune it is likely Biden will win at least Ohio and Florida but might well add Illinois to his list of victories. Sanders' best chance of a win is Arizona but the way things have been going for Sanders since he won the Nevada caucuses, we may be up late waiting for the Arizona results,
Assuming I am more-or-less correct, Sanders will be out of this thing by next Wednesday but will leave satisfied he has at least partially set an agenda that more closely suits his political vision.
Meanwhile, Tuesday was another really good night for Joe Biden.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the delegate tracker site that updates automatically,
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